This is the twenty fourth edition of The Voice In Your Head Is Mine. The date is November 24th, 2020. If you're receiving this email and have no idea what's going on, well, fuck. I guess I blew it. Or maybe you blew it. Either way, you're here and this is Zac Thompson's weekly newsletter.
Writing this during the early hours of Tuesday morning. I’ve spent the last few weeks catching up with distant friends and planning out my next year of work. Despite most of the world feeling like it’s on fire, I feel like I’ve been afforded the time to take stock of things. All too often, I feel like I’m rushing into the final months of the year with a big “who gives a shit” attitude just trying to get everything done and going completely insane in the process. Or maybe I’m just getting PTSD from last year…
Anyway, things are good and moving along. There’s less clutter this year than most others, more opportunity to focus on the work that I find vital. Somehow 2020 ended up being one of the busiest years of my life and it doesn’t appear like things will be slowing down any time soon.
We need to stop treating comics as precious collectables.
Forgive me, but this train of thought was inspired by a recent episode of How To With John Wilson about covering furniture. This is less about writing craft and more about specific things that I think are holding back comics. So skip over this section if you’re not here for comics bullshit!
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the North American comic book market prioritizes a certain tried and true way of doing business. It’s defined by the $3.99 single issue floppy. The point is to make your single issue sales as flashy as possible, with a massive marketing push for a very small direct market of comic book shops, and then a full blown abandonment of the material once it hits a collected format (wherein it becomes available to bookstores, and chain retailers). Don’t believe me? Look at any modern comic book publisher on social media right now and try to find anything directed to the book market. I’ll wait.
This method of distribution and marketing is essentially a holdover from the big boom of 90’s comics and hasn’t been disrupted by most major players in the space (perhaps TKO being the one exception). It seems the entire system is built around protecting comics as these weird collectables that should be bagged, boarded, and locked away in long boxes after being carefully read. Precious items that must be guarded and carefully cataloged so we can all show off our big collections to one another.
But the truth of comics is really much different than the very small speciality market. One need only look at the work of Raina Telgemeier or Dav Pilkey to see that comics are fucking exploding right now. Young folx are reading more comics than ever. And if we’re ever going to grow readership, the old way of doing things needs to be dismantled. We need to stop catering comic books to an aging audience that’s shrinking by the month. Instead we need to be thinking about new ways of doing things. New formats, new types of stories, new creators, and a much larger emphasis on the long game in the book market.
I believe the blame of this hold fast and hold steady approach to treating comics as precious collectables lies squarely on the shoulders of Marvel and DC Comics. There is a clear indication within these publishers to toe the line of churning out things that are perfectly safe without any real teeth or deviation from what has worked countless times in the past. What started out as inspiring, rebel-rousing heros have become mostly insipid corporate IP that lacks any real personality/forward momentum for fear of shocking long time fans.
I’m a proponent of blowing up the old way of doing things. Right now, DC Comics (to their credit) is championing many new and diverse versions of their classic superhero roster. They are dismantling the classic ideals of what these heroes could or should be. Marvel, on the other hand, is slow to adopt this approach. It seems like all the momentum of the last few years where new characters and new ideas were introduced at fever pitch (the introduction of Kamala Khan, Miles Morales, or Jane Foster’s Thor - to name a few) has been replaced by a “more of the same” approach in an effort to court back readers from the 1990’s boom. Which, ya know, isn’t a really great approach. There are definitely some bright glimmers of hope within the X-Men line, or the Immortal Hulk series. But for the most part - there doesn’t seem to be much of an editorial vision.
And I guess that’s what I’m scratching at. We need to want more for comics. I want publishers to push the medium and embrace new and insane ways of telling stories in this weird medium that combines the best qualities of prose and visual storytelling. Where we stop trying to preserve the old ways of doing things for fear of pissing off a select few and start actively trying to court new audiences and embrace new ways of doing business.
I’ve made it a personal mission to make the comics I write more experimental and I’m fighting on the back end with companies to try new and different formats to get stories to readers. It’s an uphill battle but it’s one we need to start fighting now. Because I really believe comics are not getting to everyone who wants to be reading them. We’re limiting our own potential by only looking to the past.
NO ONE’S ROSE
Speaking of, NO ONE’S ROSE - the complete series is now available wherever comics and books are sold. A solar punk, sci-fi series about two siblings fighting to save what's left of a climate ravaged world.
This book was such a joy to write with Emily, we channeled our fears and our hopes around climate change into an adventure we wished we could have read as teens. It was brought to life by the incredible talents of Alberto J. Alburquerque and Raul Angulo who built a vibrant and green world that is beyond gorgeous. It’s all lettered by the incredible Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou who adds a level of dynamism to every spoken word and every caption.
I’m so damn proud of this story and can’t wait for people to read it all in one volume. Please head to bookshop.org to order a copy from your local indie bookstore! I’m sure they could use the business!
Here’s some of my favorite art from the series:
RING
Over the last two weeks, I read Koji Suzuki’s original RING novel. Written in 1991, this weird horror novel served inspiration for the Ringu and Ring franchises in Japan and North America. The novel’s setup is similar to that of either film but deviates quite significantly in many ways. This version of the story concerns, Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter & uncle to a young girl who dies under mysterious circumstances and decides to launch his own personal investigation.
So you still get the whole haunted tape thing and a dissection of a purely modern horror idea about how we consume media and how it consumes us. At first, the opening chapters are moody and evocative. The details of the tape are different and (in my opinion) more interesting. The mystery around the tape is also more sprawling and complicated. There’s more of a history given to how and why it was made, which all proves very interesting and unsettling.
But ultimately, I think I prefer either film version to this. The novel was written during the height of Japan’s “lost generation” and features a lot of off hand misogyny and a flippant appraisal of sexual violence. It’s also dealing with some incredibly delicate subject matter when it comes to Sadako (the girl on the tape) that it really ends up mishandling in the final few chapters. I can understand why it was impactful during its release in the early ‘90’s but I can’t recommend this one, folks. You’re better off just watching the movie (which is something I don’t often find myself saying).
Halt and Catch Fire
So I’m late to the party and finally watching AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire and I’m sincerely in love with it. The series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980’s and the growth of the internet in the early 1990’s. Every character is inherently broken and incredibly interesting, bordering on absolutely insane. The series has a fantastic relationship to time where a month or several weeks can separate two subsequent episodes.
It’s both a deep character study and a look at the cut throat mindset that has dominated the tech industry for over thirty years. It’s experimental and weird, the soundtrack is unbelievable and the cast is absolutely perfect. Lee Pace, Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy are all putting on a masterclass in character development.
Every season of the show is on Netflix right now and it has my highest possible recommendation. There are many formal tricks on display in this show that I haven’t seen in television before and after binging two full seasons it remains completely unpredictable. It’s a shame so many people slept on it as it rivals the highs of AMC’s Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul at every turn.
Tiny Scabs
I really enjoyed Harold Bloom’s recent piece on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness for the New Yorker. Required reading if you love the book.
This week’s playlist is a longer one:
Until next week
Another week has slipped through the cracks. The year is almost over, now. Keep your head up, find ways to connect with the people you love, wear a mask and wash your hands. We’re getting through the worst of this, one day after another.
As always, make time and space for yourself. Don’t be afraid to establish healthy boundaries with those who attempt to push you outside your comfort zone.
Z