OLD DEVILS 1-2 are coming to Kickstarter on September 24, 3pm ET

You can help by subscribing to the pre-launch page!

Hello, friends. It’s been a while! Or maybe this is the first time you’re hearing from me. I’ve done a few markets and conventions—most notably the 2nd Annual Cod Con back in May, and so the list has grown a bit.

First, let’s get some business out of the way: Following the fulfillment of a successful crowdfunding campaign last year, OLD DEVILS is returning to Kickstarter with a new second book on Wednesday, September 24 at 3pm ET! This campaign will only last 666 hours, and if you go to the prelaunch page now and hit “Notify Me,” You’ll get access to special tiers only available to folks in my network, including cheaper rates, special swag, and exclusive delivery options.

If you missed the first issue, it will also be available in the campaign, and I’ll also be doing some peek-under-the-hood comparisons of my script and artist J. Schiek’s pages on social media and in the next edition of the newsletter.

To recap: In Old Devils #1, Jade St. Claire, a Boston rock venue promoter who had previously filmed a disastrous occult investigation reality show pilot, was recruited by her former “mentor,” Dr. Randall Shaw to investigate the strange deaths of young mothers in the rural Dakotas. Meanwhile, a burned, imp-like creature has been mauling folks in the same area, and a charismatic and attractive man is seen making the rounds in a North Dakota roadhouse, taking special interest in a woman who fits a very similar demographic to the other women Dr. Randall has identified as possible murder victims.

In #2, Jade heads to North Dakota and finds the man in question, connecting him, and the burned creature, to the dead girls. How does she do it? How will she get away? There’s only one way to find out! Hit that “Notify Me” button and back the book at launch!

Making exposition more interesting—a lesson from X-Factor (2024) by Robert Quinn & Mark Russell

I have a tendency to be a dialogue-heavy writer, and this Marvel team gave a masterclass on keeping that interesting.

I was reading the finale of Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Adam Gorham’s Hellhunters, an absolute blast of a miniseries that teamed Ghost Rider, Wolverine, and a juvenile Bucky Barnes in an occult-riddled World War II setting. It was a joy of a final issue—nothing that you’ll rank among the greatest-of-all-time, but a fun, worthwhile read. It was action-packed. Virtually no dialogue. Something visually stimulating with every page turn. Just good comics.

This reenforced an awareness in my own work that I’ve struggled with since the very beginning. I love exposition. I love dialogue, narrative, chatter. I like having these people talk. There is, of course, a serious problem with this in comic books—conversations are boring to look at.

This became evident to me after by very first comic book—Nightmare Man. While artist Matt Rowe did what he could with the script I gave him, and I still think it’s a pretty darn good book, the fact is that Nightmare Man is almost entirely built around a conversation between two humanoids in a coffee shop.

To address this problem, I did a lot of layering dialogue in caption form over depictions of things that were being described. This is a very common and much more visually interesting approach than just having two talking heads. When done well, it can create juxtaposition and give readers more than the sum of the parts. Usually, though, it creates redundancies in text and visuals that comics are hardwired to avoid.

Still, at the end of the day, I gave artist Matt Rowe a 24 page script, in which 16 pages were virtually motionless dialogue. He played with some angles, but was broadly speaking respectful of my writing, and so Nightmare Man is, to me, a pretty good little horror story that doesn’t use the medium as well as it could have.

Why am I explaining all this about my feelings about a comic I wrote five years ago? Excellent question! It’s because I still fall into this trap a lot, and right after I finished Hellhunters and was acutely aware of the problem, I cracked open X-Factor #1 by artist Robert Quinn and writer Mark Russell.

This extra-long first issue was great—a light-hearted but still very serious take on social media, privatized military and security, and American divisiveness through the lens of post-Krakoan mutant struggle. This is the kind of story that X-books always feel strongest doing. But there was something else about it that stuck out—there was almost no traditional “action” in the book. And I didn’t care at all.

I was totally invested in the social and political struggles presented in X-Factor #1. I almost felt as if the few “fight scenes” were distracting me from what I wanted more of—this weird reality where there was a mutant military team sanctioned by the US government but also a private product that was being sold on social media. So I kept reading.

X-Factor 2 gave me more of what I wanted. More back-stabbing, more intrigue, more… dialogue. It was as if Russell and Quinn had cracked the code—if you want a comic of talking heads, the best way to deliver that is to have them walk around a bit and use extreme angles.

I am not suggesting that Quinn and Russell invented this, but it’s such a good example! They’ve taken the control of point-of-view that makes comics such a fun visual medium and combined it with an almost Aaron Sorkin-esque “walk them around in a circle to give them action where there is no action” strategy. It made every page different and interesting, while still having a majority of pages in each issue—about two-thirds—dedicated almost entirely to expositional conversation.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Mark Russell is an excellent writer with a knack for capturing current events and unique tone of voice in his characters. But I thought that his editors must have been concerned. A new series of a legacy team that’s mostly veiled political commentary without the “BAMs” and “POWs” that are historically comics’ bread and butter? So I asked him, and he was kind enough to respond.

“Nobody expressed any concern about the relative lack of action,” he said. And my philosophy has always been that a little action goes a long way. People, in my experience, don’t really read comics for action so much as for the characters and the story, so I think that, when in doubt, it’s better to have characters talking to each other and to be advancing the plot than it is to have double pages spreads and battle scenes.”

If that was the goal, for me, it was “mission accomplished.” But it certainly didn’t seem to hurt that Robert Quinn was the one to translate the vision onto the page. “I would tell [Quinn] who needed to be in the panel and what they needed to be doing,” Russell said. “But in terms of the ‘camera work’ and how he composed a panel, that was all him.”

Miscellany

Other stuff that’s catching my attention these days.

1.

While I’ve been banging away at the keys (and scratching the paper), I’ve developed an affinity for a new tracking system called “Bullet Journaling.” I’d seen reference to it on multiple occasions, but for some reason—I think the design of The Bullet Journal Method book, which I somehow read as visually both bro-y and woo-woo—I didn’t give it any thought. A like-minded (that is to say, equally scatterbrained) comics creator I know named Bud Sullivan (look for his Durk & Nokle comics soon!) sat me down at a financial district picnic table and walked me through how it worked. It’s modular rather than linear, which is helpful for me because I have trouble doing things in a straight line, so I gave it a shot. I have to say, it’s really helping me keep my shit in order.

You can use any notebook for it. I know Bud uses cheap ones, but I’m a sucker so I use these with the dotted paper. Big fan. Would recommend.

2.

I’ve been listening to this new record by a Cincinnati-based band called Lung. I got fed them via the algorithm after listening to a Screaming Females record, and was immediately reminded of mix between old Dresden Dolls and mathy indie screamo. Pleasantly underproduced and stripped down (only two members), it’s a good listen.

3.

I started making Kombucha at home. An old friend who moved to Montreal a few years ago does it a lot, and I’ve found it to be a nice way to stay connected with him and make something that makes everyone judge me. Blueberry has made second fermentations too sweet, but I’ve very much enjoyed the results of using ginger. Incidentally, SCOBYs feel much less gross than they look.

4.

Have you seen a transparent OLED yet? We are using them for a museum installation I’m working on, and these things are crazy! They’re super expensive now, but when this technology gets cheaper, it’s going to completely transform the way glass is used in displays at museums and in stores.

5.

If you’re worried about AI, I recommend reading this piece about how it seems to some engineers that it’s peaking and they’re freaking out about it. They might be wrong, but we should take any good news we can get these days—however fleeting.

That’s all for now. Goodbye from Boston’s southernmost corner!