Welcome to The Voice In Your Head Is Mine. The date is August 10th, 2021 and this is Zac Thompson's newsletter.
Good morning from the red sands of Prince Edward Island… it has been a while. As you may of noticed, I’ve been absent for about two months. This wasn’t exactly my intention but things got a little hectic this summer. My partner and I have just moved across the country. This would prove challenging under normal circumstances but gets even trickier during a global pandemic. Needless to say we’ve now fully relocated to PEI and things are approaching some semblance of normal here.
I won’t bore you with the details but PEI is the smallest province in Canada and it’s also where I was born and grew up. My family isn’t from the island, per say, and back in the ‘80s they didn’t really want to relocate here. Circumstances changed and I’m glad they did. I love this little weird island and all its insane idiosyncrasies. So for the foreseeable future this is where I’m at. With it comes a lot of beaches, a timezone change, and a brand new set of responsibilities that come with home ownership (weeeee). I now have a lawn and I’m going to fully rewild the sucker, put in all native plants and start a few gardens - I intend to document everything and I hope y’all will join me.
Leaving Vancouver was a little bittersweet. The city and the pacific northwest was very good to me. It changed my personality in a variety of ways that are too long to list. It also hardened me in a lot of ways that were absolutely necessary. I’m leaving behind a lot of lifelong friends to effectively start over. Like most big changes - it comes with a mix of good and bad.
Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we. Here’s a handy table of contents:
Rethinking the work/life balance.
Cassandra Khaw’s excellent horror novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth.
Why you should pre-order Ka-Zar: Lord of the Savage Land.
Zank on Cinema: The Plague Dogs, Woodstock 99.
A playlist to get through the week.
Rethinking the work/life balance.
I’ve been lucky this year. Yes, I’ve worked my ass off but I’ve created a set of circumstances for myself where I get to be a little more selective with the types of projects that I pursue and how much time those things occupy. You see, I’m not really the type of writer that’s obsessed with making some indelible mark on the history of the medium. I really just want to have a nice life while also getting to do a job I love. I want to tell stories that I see as important and necessary. It’s honestly that simple for me.
This isn’t to say I don’t love to work or take my writing seriously. Both things are true but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to create a life that loves me back. Historically I’ve been pretty terrible at taking evenings and weekends off (I’m a freelancer after all). It’s not often that your hobby becomes your full time job. When that happens - you can’t help but feel incredibly fortunate but it leaves you with this longing to find some kind of new escape. Suddenly the thing you used to do just for you becomes something you share with thousands of strangers.
So going forward I’m going to spend more time intentionally away from writing. Using my hands out in the garden to spend time doing something constructive and connective that isn’t on the page. It’s an effort to make more space for myself in the world outside of comics and writing that I can get passionate about without having to really worry about if I’m doing enough, if I’m trying hard enough, or if I’m doing things right. It’s a space to fail, experiment, and make mistakes. Which is some of the methodology I use in my writing anyway.
The pandemic really made it clear that under current circumstances we’re expected to work all-the-time regardless of our mental health or the fact that the world is on fire. A lot of that intense pressure is what led to leaving Vancouver. I didn’t want to have to fight tooth and nail just to exist. I wanted to create space for myself where I could take time off, where I could be out in nature within 5 minutes, where I could have a lawn that I could just waste time in. I know these things are incredible privileges and I don’t take that lightly. But all this is to say - it’s important to make space for yourself away from productivity or pressure. Just space to breath, to exist.
It took a lot of grinding to get here and to be honest I wouldn’t change that for a thing. But, to any hobbyist writers reading this that eventually want to make writing their full time job: give yourself space to have a fulfilling life outside of your craft.
Creativity and your craft is a lifelong journey. It’s never over but it will consume you if you let it. Trust me when I say, you don’t have to continually burnout for something you love. You don’t have to suffer for your art.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth
The good folks at Tor: Nightfire sent me an arc of Cassandra Khaw’s excellent horror novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth. I sat down the other morning with the intention to read a chapter with my coffee and actually finished the whole thing.
The novella follows a group of friends who decide to organize a wedding in an abandoned Heian-era mansion, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.
What ensues is a deeply horrifying story of parasitic relationships told through razor sharp prose and incredibly modern characters. There’s so much restraint in the imagery that the horror just chilled me to my core. The prose stopped me dead a few times with the effectiveness of evocations and how real the characters felt. It feels like a modern Hill House in every sense of the word. It’s out in October and I really recommend you don’t miss it.
Ka-Zar: Lord of the Savage Land
Orders for Ka-Zar: Lord of the Savage Land #1 close on August 16th and it would be really swell if you contacted your local comic shop and pre-ordered a copy. This book is incredibly near and dear to me. It’s the first chance I’ve had as a creator to effectively reinvent a legacy character at Marvel. And I mean fully reinvent.
For the uninitiated, Ka-Zar is basically Marvel’s version of Tarzan. He lives in a hidden pre-historic world called The Savage Land. Both the character and the setting have got a lot of use in the 1970’s and ‘80’s before falling into the backdrop of many stories. I was asked to come in and reimagine both the setting and the character to reflect the modern era.
I can’t get into much detail (for a variety of reasons) but I wanted to take a minute to talk about why I think this book is special. I’ve made it no secret that Jeff Lemire’s run on Animal Man is one of the biggest inspirations on my own writing. This was an opportunity to do something similar but in a completely different universe.
Ka-Zar is a legacy character with a ton of potential but he’s never really amounted to more than a Tarzan pastiche. I wanted to create an epic that has the scope of something like Kong: Skull Island where we truly traverse the entirety of Marvel’s Savage Land. Where we explore new biomes filled with all kinds of native flora and fauna. Where we give a voice to the creatures living in these places and really turn the Savage Land into a character unto itself. I also wanted to ensure that the book looks at this hidden (dying) world in the context of the current climate crisis. What does it mean to literally be on the edge of a different historical age and how are those living there being forced to adapt as the environment changes.
Ka-Zar himself is getting a new powerset akin to Animal Man. He can tap into any living creature in the Savage Land. But its unreliable and changing him in ways he doesn’t fully understand. Evolution is a bitch.
Beneath the big bombastic superhero operatics - it’s also about what it means to be the steward of land that doesn’t belong to you. There’s painfully human drama at the heart of the book that really examines a generational divide when it comes to protecting the environment. I really think the book has it all.
I’ve been given license to do something that amounts to my own version of the coveted Swamp Thing Anatomy Lesson albeit in a way that feels more Cronenbergian and modern. The series touches on everything from colonialism to technological evolution and I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished. If you’ve been digging what I’m up to in my creator-owned work like Lonely Receiver and I Breathed A Body this is the closest logical extension of that work but reflected through the lens of superheroics.
It’s easily my favorite thing I’ve ever written and I’m urging you to support the book. Series artist German Garcia and colorist Matheus Lopes are doing career best work. You really need to see the interiors to believe what we’ve pulled off. It’s honestly stunning.
So please, pre-order! Show Marvel you want big reimaginings of legacy characters, show them you want new types of stories that build new characters, worlds, and technology. If you support this book there’s no telling what we could do in the future.
Zank on Cinema
What I’m watching lately.
THE PLAGUE DOGS - Martin Rosen’s follow up to Watership Down follows two dogs who escape from a experimental lab facility and try to find peace. It’s currently streaming on the Criterion channel. This movie is a harrowing look at the life of a captured animal. The two dogs at the center of the film are deeply empathetic characters who don’t fully understand their plight but yearn to live despite all odds. Unlike Watership Down this is not a kids movie and doesn’t pull its punches. The result is a film that asks tough questions about how we lord over animals and will really pull at your heartstrings. It’s beautifully animated and utterly gorgeous to look at. At only 80 minutes - it’s well worth your time. But it’ll leave you devastated. If you dig Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 - you can’t miss this.
WOODSTOCK ‘99 - If you, like me, don’t know anything about Woodstock ‘99 then I highly recommend the new HBO doc. It’s a deep dive into the (literal) shit show of a festival that breaks down each day of the music festival with a palpable sense of dread mounting in the background. It features a lot of great archival footage of the event along with some really telling interviews. It all culminates in message that seems more apt in 2021 than ever.
Tiny Scabs
Just a playlist this week.
Goodbye
Some people are content with wasting their precious time on endless distractions but not you. Go out there and do something incredible this week.
Until then, I’ll be here.
Z - 08/10/21
Awesome stuff man! I hadn't even heard about this KA-ZAR book but I love when the big 2 allows creators to pluck characters from relative obscurity and breath new life into them. I'll have to add this book to my list for sure!
The bit at the top is what I really appreciated in this one. I've spent years trying to figure out how to write, and even more time staring at a blank page. I would rather sit in front of that blank page for eternity than do anything else because I want to be a writer and that is what it takes, right?
But lately, I've actually taken the time to back away from things and enjoy my days. I have taken my time management into account and silenced a vast majority of the distractions I had bombarding my senses so that "I never miss anything."
And what I have found is that it works. It works so much better than focusing on the craft all of the time. I started exercising daily, managing my schedule and scheduling the things that matter to me. And to my surprise and no one else's, I've accomplished more than I ever did before.
I write in the morning, I edit in the afternoon, and I spend the evening with my family. And enjoy the little things in between. Small pieces of ideas and content float around in my head while I'm focused on other tasks, but I just write the strong ones down and keep going, or I just let them float around and develop until they are ready for writing.
But I don't rush to 'write out an idea' as I did before, ignoring everything around me because 'this is the big idea that is going to make it all worth it.' Creativity comes in bursts, but I find that channeling a good environment and schedule allows me to be creative when the time is right.
I feel more fulfilled in life when I take time for the small things and back away from the craft occasionally. Makes me that much more grateful and diligent with the time I have to sit down and write. This is the way, Mr. Thompson.
Thanks for sharing! 🙌🍻🔥
Totally stoked to hear your on Kazar Zac! I’m a huge Kazar fan of old, but the character never really evolved into what he could have been, much of this is due to the continuous changes made by the bullpen. The art and those wrap around covers are amazing though! I look forward to checking it out, and I’ll most definitely check out the novella you mentioned! Sounds like my kind of work! Look forward to catching up, and glad to hear your doing well! Mad Respect!