So at the surprise of probably everyone - especially me - DAY 2 hit a thousand subscribers last week, a considerable sight more than the no one I expected would read this.

But if you’re a new or old subscriber, a very sincere thank you as you watch me fumble through success, failure, and everything in between in this very weird year I’ve been extremely grateful to have. So to celebrate this thousand follower landmark, I’m going to… do the exact same thing I’ve been doing – write about something I have no idea if anyone is interested in.

But since this is a column about writers and writing, I thought it’d be useful to… someone(?) to read about the writing mistakes I used to most commonly make. Or at least, I hope I used to most commonly make them. I hope I still don’t. Because whenever I find myself making the same mistake over and over, I write up a reminder not to do it on a card and stick it up on the wall of my office. I’ve come to call them my “Hey! Stupid!” cards. And these particular cards have been up on my wall for years, so I would hope by now I’ve internalized them enough to at least move on to new mistakes.

Now at this point, I should throw in a disclaimer. A line I think about a lot is one Steve Kloves wrote in the screenplay to the Curtis Hanson movie “Wonder Boys” based on the Michael Chabon novel. I believe Kloves added this monologue which didn’t come from the novel. And the monologue starts, “Nobody teaches a writer anything. You just tell them what you know.” When it comes to writing, whenever I find myself in a position that feels like teaching, I feel uncomfortable. I’m not an authority. I’m still trying to figure this out too. I’ve been doing this long enough to think I’ve picked some things up, but all I can say is that a certain number of things work for me. But I know writers who I consider better than me who read this column, and they might disagree with me on some topics. And they’ll probably convince I’m wrong about certain points if I let them. So consider this some things that work for me, and hey, maybe it’ll work for you too if you get stuck on the same things I (hopefully) used to.

OK, that’s the disclaimer. Here are my “Hey! Stupid!” cards.

I’m a huge Aaron Sorkin fan, and one of the things I’ve learned from him is that any scene (and thereby story) can be atomized into three basic parts:

1. What your protagonist wants

2. What’s in your protagonist’s way

3. The stakes of them getting / not getting what they want

As an editor, I’ve come to realize that 80% of the time when a scene isn’t working, the writer (me) doesn’t have a ready answer to one of those three questions. It’s a problem so common that when writer friends are stuck on stories, I’ve helped them get over blocks without even hearing what the story problem is. I’ll just ask them, well, do you know what your character wants in that scene? And 4 times out of 5, the writer will pause before going, “oh, when you put it that way, I think I know what to do next.” A character’s wants is the drive shaft to the story. It pushes the story forward with more efficiency and helps your audience understand who your character is. In ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, Dinah Lance is introduced as a character who’d do anything to protect her ailing father, and from that want you get a sense of her values, nobility, resilience, self-sacrifice, and struggle.

This is an expansion on the last card. Sometimes I’ll know what my protagonist wants, but I don’t really understand what’s in their way. Which is to say, what all the other characters in the scene want. As a result, the conflict feels forced. Or worse, unearned. Oftentimes, I find myself writing my idea of a scene as opposed to the scene itself. That is, I’ll be writing a version of a scene I’ve seen a hundred times before - like a person fighting with their family, and I’ll trot out all the cliched things people fight about when they’re fighting with their family in movies and TV, and it’ll feel false. That’s usually because I haven’t stepped through the unique things each of the characters in my scene actually want and how it conflicts with what my protagonist wants. Once I figure that out, I’ll get that person fighting with the family scene, but it’ll have more energy and feel more real, because it’s attuned to the unique conditions of my story as opposed to me stealing from other people’s stories.

The difference between comics and film / TV is something that endlessly fascinates me. One of those differences is that you can make really great comics featuring passive protagonists. Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra springs to mind as do many classic Vertigo books, where the protagonists travel through America, come across a new town and get into trouble there. In those books, the protagonist is often reactive. That’s tougher with live action, though, where typically a good performance compels an actor to make a choice, which means their character needs to want something. It’s really hard for a character to be interesting in live action serial fiction while remaining passive. In horror movies, protagonists are passive for a while before they get active (usually around the back half of the story), but in a serialized story, after too long at staying passive, I, at least, find I want the protagonist to just do something already. Having my lead drive the scene means they want something and are going about doing it - even if it’s the wrong thing - and gives me a sense of who the character is. A lot of developing writers will write protagonists who don’t know what they want and seem to watch the story go by around them, and as a result, the protagonists come across as cyphers or the least interesting characters in their own story. And of course, just because you can get away with passive characters in comics doesn’t mean there’s not a more interesting version of them when they become active.

This is a derivation from something Robert McKee teaches where he says “ammunition, not exposition.”

Christopher Nolan recently said something about the fundamental flaw of amateur film critics is assuming just because they can recognize a storytelling technique, that means the storytelling technique doesn’t work. I feel the same way sometimes when critics talk about exposition, picking it as something that taints a story. But I find drama can be exposition with emotional stakes. “Mrs. Lanningham died at the corner of 8^th and Potomac,” sound like exposition if you don’t know Mrs. Lanningham is the secretary and close confidant of a President facing a scandal and thinking about not running for re-election, in which case the statement becomes very dramatic indeed. (Again, I’m a big Aaron Sorkin fan.)

But you build lore through exposition, and frequently in mysteries, as I’ve been writing lately, those big drawing room scenes where a detective figures out the mystery (that I love reading) can read like exposition if you haven’t fully set up the emotional stakes of your story - how important this information is to both the characters and thereby the readers.

Sometimes while writing serialized genre, you can caught up on the cool beats that happen every issue, the payoff to things you’ve set up, the emotional character moments, and you can forget – or at least I can forget – you don’t actually have a story until you can answer some basic questions – what’s the central conflict of that issue? What does our main character want? What’s in their way? What are the stakes? What’s their relationship to what they want at the beginning of the issue and what’s their relationship to it at the end?

When I can’t answer that last question, that’s when I realize I don’t have a story. They’re just a bunch of scenes concatenated together.

Anyway, there are other cards I keep at my work desk, specifically cards I use when having to keep track of writing multiple books at once. (I keep 3 cards handy for each book I write that helps orient me when I have to shift from project to project.) I thought I’d write about them too here, but it seems I’m already hitting my word count, and I figured I’d share the ones I use for ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW once I’m done with our opening storyarc, since I think for stuff like that, actual examples help, so I think we’ll leave things here as a to be continued as I find out if this is the kind of thing people really want to read here…

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

CAPTAIN COMICS (SEPT 4, 4 - 6 PM)

BOISE COMICS ARTS FESTIVAL (SEPT 5 – 6)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 5 (SEPT 16)

BALTIMORE COMIC-CON (SEPT 25 - 27)

NEW YORK COMIC CON (OCT. 8 - 11)

INSPIRATION READING:

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I launched DAY TWO on the same day the two biggest jobs in my career were announced – ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW (where faithful readers have watched me wrestle with my own incredulity at the book’s wonderfully enthusiastic response) and EXQUISITE CORPSES: LONE GUNMAN, a spin-off of the James Tynion – Michael Walsh created EXQUISITE CORPSES mega-hit which I was also one of the writers on. So it feels surreal to finally be able to talk about the other book DAY 2 was meant to talk about: LONE GUNMAN.

And since there may be people reading this who only know me for ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW…

EXQUISITE CORPES is the biggest original IP comic series of the year, conceived by James Tynion and Michael Walsh. The idea is America is secretly ruled by the Thirteen richest families in America (so so far, it’s a documentary…), who every five years on Halloween, hold a contest – Each family selects a serial killer and lets them loose in a battle royale set in a small, closed-off town. The family represented by the surviving serial killer rules the country for the next five years. The story is told from the perspective of the town citizens trying to survive this sadistic night of bloodshed.

The idea is novel enough, but the way James and Michael decided to tell the story is even more novel – and exciting. He decided to run the book like a TV writers’ room. After coming up with the idea and writing the script for the first issue, he drafted his Corpse Crew - a team of writers to break the story the way one would a TV show. There was me, ABSOLUTE CATWOMAN writer Che Grayson, one of my favorite cartoonists Tyler Boss (PHANTOM OF THE OPERA), and multi-Eisner-winning colorist and terrifying horror writer in her own right – Jordie Bellaire (REDLANDS). We all got together for a long weekend in Buffalo, broke the story and proceeded to write 2 issues each. I’ve grown to consider the entire Corpse Crew my favorite people in comics and will make a beeline to them at any party I’m at.

I say this as often as I possibly can, but I love working with the Tiny Onion crew. Everyone knows that James Tynion is a fantastic writer, but I think much fewer are aware that he also has tremendous taste in people, and that goes not just for the creative teams behind the books, but for the editors Eric Harburn, Steve Foxe, and Greg Lockard, and Tiny Onion folks like Jazzlyn Stone, Harley Salbacka, Courtney Menard and more behind-the-scenes folks.

Part of the fun too was that it was such a new experiment for comics that none of us knew how people would respond. Fortunately, it was thunderously. So much so, it’s led to 3 spin-off series – RASCAL RANDY by Tyler Boss & Dylan Burnett (in stores now!), FOX MASK KILLER by Che Grayson & Adam Gorham (in stores next month!), and now… LONE GUNMAN by me & Alberto Ponticelli in stores November 4^th.

It’s a special honor for me, because we’ve referred to LONE GUNMAN internally as EXQUISITE CORPSES Season 1.5, where we follow the survivors of the first series and setting up some of the pieces for season 2, which we’ll all be getting together to break shortly. It picks up two years after EXQUISITE CORPSES ended, so fans who’ve grown attached to the survivors can see how they’ve tried to move on, even as they’re forced to investigate the sordid history of the Lone Gunman killer and the many murderers who’ve had to wear that mask. If any readers of the book wanted to know more about the Thirteen’s history and how they secretly shaped America, you’ll get more of it in this series. I love working for Tiny Onion so much I think I’ve done more world building and original character creation on this than anything I’ve ever worked on.

But for anyone who hasn’t read the book, I’m even more excited for what I hope the story presents – my take on one of my favorite sub-genres of horror – the final girl archetype – following the survivors of the thirteen most brutal serial killers of all time, as they fall down a rabbit hole compelling them to discover how the forces behind those killers secretly shaped their world.

Working on EXQUISITE CORPSES got me thinking in the direction that would eventually lead to my take on ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, so I’m delighted to take my hiatus between arcs of that book to tell a very different story about serial killers and billionaires, one that asks how the victims of their callous actions recover and retaliate in a world where we’re all traumatized by the callous actions of billionaires. I get to do it with my dear, friend Alberto Ponticelli, who I edited on the DC / Vertigo series UNKNOWN SOLDIER by him & writer Joshua Dysart, a book I’m intensely proud of. Also, a book If Destruction be Our Lot writer Matthew Rosenberg told me he was such a huge fan of, our sales spiked around the store he worked at because he was so committed to hand-selling them. Alberto’s a powerhouse, with so many gears at his disposal, but I can’t wait for Jordie Bellaire to color him. I’ve been staring at some samples she’s done of issue 1 all day. Topped off with the letters of Becca Carey, and I can’t get over how great this book is going to look.

The book comes out in November, the month after ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 6 comes out and then goes on its 2-month hiatus, so this will be the place to be if you’re looking for more serial killers and billionaires - albeit, coming at it from a different direction, although still very much me. Because for me, it’s a story that explores the stuff ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW can’t. If for not other reason, then because this book is rated M, and I am really taking advantage of that.

LONE GUNMAN has been something I’ve been excited and nervous about all year. Tiny Onion was extremely generous to take characters the entire Corpse Crew helped craft and whose lives we’ve all grown really attached to, and let me chart the next chapter of their story. It’s something I’m deeply honored by and really don’t take lightly.

I hope you’re around to let me know how I do. The final cut-off date for LONE GUNMAN is October 12, and if you haven’t read EXQUISITE CORPSES, you really do need to check out one of the biggest hits of the year. I love being able to say that since I only wrote a fraction of the book, EXQUISITE CORPSES being one of those rare treats where I can say I’m both a contributor and a fan of.

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

KNOWHERE COMICS & GAMES (San Marcos, CA; SEPT 22; 6 - 8 pm)

FANEXPO CANADA (AUG 27 – 29) (with ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW artist Rafael Albuquerque!)

CAPE & COWL CON (Oakland, CA; AUG 30)

BOISE COMICS ARTS FESTIVAL (SEPT 4 – 6)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 5 (SEPT 16)

INSPIRATION READING:

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Which makes this a perfect time to write a chapter I’ve been thinking about for a while. Roughly once a month, someone asks me how to break into creator-owned comics: How do I pitch a comic? What does a pitch look like? Where should I pitch to?

So I figured this week, I’d write down my thoughts on that. If for no other reason, so that I can just forward this along to people who ask as opposed to having the same conversation over and over again. Because whenever I talk to one of those people, I start the conversation with one question:

What’s more important to you – getting the most readers for your book or owning the IP?

Because that question usually breaks down the two different groups looking to get into creator-owned comics, and neither is necessarily wrong. People who prioritize a larger audience want the most people possible reading their comics. People who want to own the IP are generally looking to have their comics cross media. Can you have both? Sure, if there’s an audience for your work in comics. And if you’re not sure you have one, then chances are you probably don’t. Which usually means, you need to decide between one of those two options.

Most places that let you own the IP also require you to know how to make a comic – Image, Comixology and Kickstarter are the first places that come to mind. That means pitching a book with an artist attached. If you don’t know how to make a comic, then you need a place with an editor that can take you through the process and introduce you to an artist, and those places tend to be creator-share, where you co-own the IP along with the publisher. There are a few exceptions to this classification, but you generally have to hunt them down.

I’ve written both types of pitches, so I figure I’d share what mine look like. The first I’ve talked about before. It’s the pitch for my comics mini-series / graphic novel INFIDEL published at Image Comics, although this might be the first time I’m presenting the pitch in the exact format I did when I pitched the book to Image. Since INFIDEL was the first comic series I’ve ever published, I assembled a team and put together a 15-page pitch document of the book, led by the cover sheet:

Looking back, it’s interesting to hear myself talk about the book before the ubiquitous popularity of horror in indy comics. At the time, I remembered realizing how passionate horror fans were and believed they would follow good horror anyway. It seems I was right. Below is the 15-page proposal that made up “INFIDEL proposal.pdf.”

If you’re curious, you can check out the book to see how faithful it is to the pitch.

The second type of creator-owned pitch is one where you don’t have an artist attached. I’ve only written one of those for a book I did named MAN'S BEST for Boom! Studios. I typically describe it as Homeward Bound in space.

I pitched the book to Boom!, mostly because I wanted to work with editor Eric Harburn and thought he’d have an interesting on who should draw it. He certainly did, reaching out to recent Eisner winner Jesse Lonergan, and now I’m dying to work with Jesse again.

Anyway, here’s the pitch to MAN’S BEST. It always embarrasses me slightly to look back at old pitch documents, since I usually find ways to simplify and streamline concepts as I write. That’s certainly the case for this book, as a lot of elements would change during the course of writing the story.

Looking at these documents now, one thing I’m most surprised by is how I don’t include a paragraph about the audience in my pitches, even though I have them clearly envisioned when I’m putting a pitch together. INFIDEL was meant for horror fans, and at the time, audiences that might be looking for books with more protagonists from different backgrounds. MAN’S BEST was a book for pet enthusiasts as well as space opera fans. From my background as an editor, I learned stating up front what a book’s audience is helps your publisher know who they should be targeting the book to, which makes it easier for them to picture them actually selling it. As an editor, I remember privately wincing whenever I heard a writer describe their book as “weird,” since too often that became a euphemism for “yeah, I don’t know who’d read this book either.”

In any event, if you’re a reader looking to pitch a book for the first time, hope this was some help. And if not, maybe the next chapter will be (whatever it might be about…)

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

FANEXPO CHICAGO (AUG 14 – 16)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 4 (AUG 19)

FANEXPO CANADA (AUG 27 – 29) (with ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW artist Rafael Albuquerque!)

CAPE & COWL CON (AUG 30)

BOISE COMICS ARTS FESTIVAL (SEPT 4 – 6)

INSPIRATION READING:

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So I was going to say this is new for me, but really, what about DAY 2 isn’t?

Usually, though, while I mostly write these chapters a day or three in advance, I have an idea of what I’m talking about a week or so in advance. But this has been a busy week. I’m writing this while my San Diego Comic Con is just starting, and it looks like a very packed SDCC indeed. And then the week before was a signing tour around the Los Angeles area with my ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW creative partner, artist Rafael Albuquerque. Which, of course, started the day we announced that the book was extended to 12 issues, and I couldn’t be more thrilled and excited about it. And it was great to actually be with Rafa when the news broke, as we talked about story ideas and the best way to stage scenes as we drove around the general (and moderately outside) Los Angeles area for store signings. It’s honestly the best way to make comics. There’s times I think when people hit the end of issue 6, they’ll go, oh, of course they needed another arc. While other times, I think they’ll go oh, the story ends so naturally here, maybe there shouldn’t be more. And the fact that I can’t tell which way people will feel makes me think that’s a good thing.

But as a result of all that, I don’t have anything pre-planned to write about, so I just thought I’d write about what’s been on my mind for the past couple weeks. And I have to admit, I’m not sure confessing this is particularly smart of me, which is why I’ve considered a few times if I should scrap this chapter and start over. I worry it’ll double-down on the perception that I’m a hopeless neurotic that can never be happy (probably true), but I also feel like part of what DAY 2 has come to promise is what it’s like to be at the center of the biggest launch of your career, and for me, it’s gotten me thinking a lot about the idea of success — which has gotten me thinking about a story a friend told me...

A good friend of mine is an Assistant Director on movie and TV sets, working on a lot of shows you’ve probably heard of. I caught up with him recently, and he mentioned that the lead actor on his current show had become a nightmare to work with. Which surprised me because I had spoken to him just a year ago, and he mentioned that same actor was a delight. Did my friend have any idea what made him change so much?

As it turns out, he did. Because my friend had also worked with Charlie Cox on the Daredevil Netflix show. Cox, apparently, is a wonderfully nice guy. Almost 20 years ago, while he was just in his early 20s, he was cast as the lead actor in a movie called Stardust. He co-starred with Claire Danes at the height of her movie star-dom. The movie was directed by Matthew Vaughan who would go on to direct Kick-Ass, but at the time had just directed Layer Cake, which had made him a director to watch. It was an adaptation of a hit Neil Gaiman illustrated illustrated novel drawn by Charles Vess. It even had a rare appearance by Michelle Pfieiffer who hadn’t been seen in movies much during that time. You couldn’t ask for better bonafides. It was poised to be a huge success, and it would have made the relatively unknown Charlie Cox a movie star.

Except it didn’t. It was considered a box office disappointment, and Cox ended up spending the next 20 years as a great actor who’d be in things here and there but never a star, until he started getting traction in a recurring role on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire which would lead to a star turn in Daredevil. All of which to say is that Cox has a unique perspective on success. And what he told my friend was, when you’re on a hit – even if you’re the leading man – you realize how little it actually has to do with you. The work you’re doing isn’t that much better than the work you’ve been doing after all. You simply gave the right (very good) performance at the right time. And you realize that while you may be an integral part of the success, the success itself is actually completely out of your control. And that… makes you realize how small you are. As a result, two things can happen to an actor, they can either get super humble and grateful, because they realize it all can end at any second, or they can swing completely the other way and become a diva, as they act irrationally to control something that can’t be controlled because it can end at any second.

I’ve been thinking about that Charlie Cox story a lot lately. I titled Chapter 8 “Riding the Whirlwind,” but I almost titled it “So I Think We’re a Hit?” I didn’t because I honestly wasn’t sure if we were one. I’m still not, even with stories like the graphic at the top of this chapter. Sure, we launched to an impressive print run of over 300 K copies that sold out a week before we went on sale, but we could have cratered the next month, and now we’ve done well enough that DC has extended us another 6 issues, but the question remained… if we were in fact a hit, at what point, would I know? At what point would it stop feeling like the sales couldn’t instantly disappear at any second? When does it stop feeling like a fluke?

But the lesson of Cox’s story, I think, is maybe it always feels like a fluke. Because it is. Hits are flukes. And while I do believe talent and hard work and craft can help position you for multiple flukes, the actual business of making a hit is just hoping for a fluke to occur, and hope you’ve positioned yourself in a way to enjoy it (and perhaps even weather it?) the best you can while it’s happening. Because I honestly don’t know if ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW is a hit, but based on the reaction of other people, I’ve come to believe it has hit-ish qualities. And as proud as I am of the book, it’s not that much better than my other work. It’s just simply the right story at the right time, hopefully well told, and certainly gorgeous looking.

Now, I really hope me admitting all this in public doesn’t make it seem like I take the success for granted or am not extremely grateful for it, or not proud of the work me, Rafa, Maiolo, Jeff and the rest of the team has done. Because I honestly can’t wait for you all to see what we have in store for the back 6. I’m so excited about all of it. I also really hope I’m not coming across cocky or conceited, or that I’m saying woe is me about any of this. Because that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I feel very, very lucky and grateful to have this perspective.

But It’s such an interesting anti-intuitive feeling to potentially realize - that the bigger the hit something is, in turn, the smaller it can make you feel. And that’s why, whenever someone congratulates me on how well the book is doing or asks me how I’m doing now that the book seems to be doing well — well, these are the thoughts that go off in my head like a shotgun as I consider how much of it I want to share before ultimately deciding to just say - from the bottom of my heart:

Thank you.

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON (JUL 23 – 26)

FANEXPO CHICAGO (AUG 14 - 16)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 4 (AUG 19)

FANEXPO TORONTO (AUG 27 - 29)

CAPE & COWL CON (AUG 30)

FANEXPO BALTIMORE (SEPT 25 - 27)

INSPIRATION READING:

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So it’s been a couple slow weeks around here as I try to stay ahead of my deadlines in anticipation for San Diego Comic Con and spending time with ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW artist Rafael Albuquerque leading up to it.

I did get a chance to hang out with a bunch of other Absolute writers, though, as part of an Absolute show on WhatNot – which I will hopefully one day soon understand what all those words mean strung together in that order – but the important thing to me is that proceeds benefited the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, BINC, and it gave me time to hang out with some other Absolute writers. And the thing I feel most grateful for was the chance to talk to them and learn that if you care about your work, the anxiety of living up to expectations never really goes away, you just learn to manage it. And the really interesting thing to me is that even when you get used to some level of it, there’s always the next challenge to wrap your head (and nerves) around, and part of your growth is hopefully that there’s always the next challenge. Of course, now that I write that all out, it feels like something I always knew, but I’ve talked a lot about my imposter syndrome on Day 2, and I suppose part of this journey I’m on is re-learning some lessons as you’re in the center of the storm.

But it did make me reflect and think about the question I probably get asked about the most by aspiring writers…. How do you break into comics in the first place? And for a lot of people that question comes down to if I’m breaking into comics, how do I find an artist?

And that brings us to the latest installment of our non-regular feature…

HOW TO BREAK INTO COMICS - FINDING AN ARTIST

I tell this story a lot at conventions, and it occurred to me I should write it down so it can be of use to more people. A question I hear a lot from aspiring comic book writers is how do you break into the industry?

And there’s two basic ways to do that. The most straighforward is write up a short 2 – 4 page pitch document and send it to editors at different publishers, while pointing them to your other credits to prove you’re a reliable, professional writer and hope those editors are convinced by that package. From there, they’ll pair you with an artist and work with you to make your comic.

But what if you’re just starting out? What if you don’t have any other published credits because you just want to make comics and this is your first one? What do you do then?

Well, the best answer I’ve heard to that question is the story of Julio Anta. Julio wrote, amongst other things, HOME with art by Anna Wieszczyk, published by Image Comics and THIS LAND IS OUR LAND: A BLUE BEETLE STORY with art by Jacoby Salcedo published by DC Comics.

Julio has figured out what’s easily the smartest way to break into comics I’ve ever heard.

You see, there was a time when the best way to break into comics was to go to a convention, then hang out and meet artists until you strike a chord with one. And then if they’re trustworthy and talented enough, you convince them to draw and co-create your comic. Eventually, you take that comic and shop it around to publishers to prove to them you can make a comic and have those editors take a chance on you to either publish your next book or hire you to write something they want.

But Julio figured out how to break in during the pandemic without ever leaving his house.

See, he would write these 2 – 6 page stories and pay comics artists online to draw them. Since they were so short, paying those artists wouldn’t break his bank. And when they were done, he’d post those comics on his webpage. And yeah, sure, like every indy publisher, you deal with flakes, but eventually, Julio had enough to eventually make up a CV. That was something he could point other artists to convince them to work with him.

Eventually, he had enough to convince Anna Wieszczyk to draw the first 8 pages of HOME and shop that pitch around to publishers. I was very flattered to learn he based that pitch around the 16-page pitch format I included at the end of the trade paperback collection of my first Image book INFIDEL, which you can find here.

Maybe that helped HOME to be eventually published by Image Comics, and from there, Julio became a published comic book writer. And then from there, he used that book to get work at Marvel and DC, eventually leading Julio to write the aforementioned original graphic novel, THIS LAND IS OUR LAND: A BLUE BEETLE STORY with art by Jacoby Salcedo and sell the Middle Grade graphic novel SPEAK UP, SANTIAGO with artist Gabi Mendez, the first book in their Bull Hill graphic novel series, published by Random House.

To this day, I haven’t heard of a breaking in story as smart as Julio’s, and in my opinion, it serves as the clinic of how everyone looking into breaking into comics should do it.

If you want to hear that from Julio’s own words (and see how badly I mangled the details), I was lucky enough to talk to him about it on a podcast sponsored by the excellent independent bookstore here in Los Angeles, Skylight Books. You can find it below, with the pertinent part starting around 13:50. But honestly, just listen to the whole thing, because it’s always great listening to Julio speak:

Julio’s become a friend during this big comics journey, and I have a feeling I embarrass him by how often I talk about him, but the truth is, this is just the smartest way I’ve ever heard to break into the industry. Now, having said that, it definitely isn’t easy. Honestly, I’m not sure anything in comics is. But it’s a place to work very closely and intimately to get your vision directly to an audience, and for all those reasons, it’s why so many people who work in comics fiercely love doing it despite its troubles and travails.

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 3 (JUL 15)

GOLDEN APPLE COMICS - West Hollywood - signing (JUL 15; 11 am - 1 pm) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

COLLECTORS PARADISE (North Hollywood) signing (JUL 15; 5 - 7 pm) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

ARSENAL COMICS & GAMES (Ventura) signing (JUL 18; 11 am - 1 pm) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

COMIC BUG (Manhattan Beach) signing (JUL 18; 4.30 - 6.30 pm) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON (JUL 23 - 26; my crude panel schedule below; check out my IG in the coming days for my signing schedule)

INSPIRATION READING:

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Every time I finish a chapter, I think the same thing: Does anyone really care about any of this?

Fortunately, I’ve met a steady stream of people grateful they’re reading DAY 2, which makes me feel better about this whole little experiment. But last chapter, when I listed a bunch of things I could have written about, some of you had the same specific response – they wanted to know more about how cons and signings have changed for me after the popular launch of ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW.

But before I get into that, only one solitary person asked to see what I got when I went $1 bin shopping at HeroesCon, and because like any true comics nerd, I love sharing my comic book hauls, that’s all the excuse I need. Of the two days I was at HeroesCon, I managed to steal about an hour and forty-five minutes to shop for $1 books, and the below is what I found. It’s mostly holes in runs / stories I want. Or in the case where it’s a whole story arc or first issue, things I’ve heard about for ages, but haven’t gotten around to reading.

OK, enough indulgences. On to the topic at hand…

What I first started signing at stores and conventions, my goal was to get people in and out as quickly as possible. I was mortified if I found a line waiting for me, because it felt the longer they waited, the more I was wasting their time from doing something better. After all, these people not only waited in a line for x amount of time but some traveled specifically for this. It took an embarrassingly long amount of time for me to realize, hey, maybe if they took all that time to drive over and wait in a line for a signature, maybe they want a longer interaction not a shorter one. Maybe that - in fact - more than the signature is why they came.

So after that, I shifted and started talking more with people who came for signings. I’ve always been interested in how people have heard about my books, and this felt like a great way to find out.

That changed with ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, though.

I’d find that out during my first big signing at Midtown Comics in NYC. There was a long line around the block and one of the clerks kindly asked, hey, there’s a storm coming and would you mind not talking so much to people, so they don’t all get rained on? (He said this much more politely by the way, but in my head that’s how I heard it). That would kick off a long series of signings where people’s whole roles were set up to KEEP. THE. LINE. MOVING. And now I find myself trying to strike the balance between helping people do their jobs and keep that line moving while not making it seem like I’m brushing people off.

Because at the bigger shows or stores, it’s now non-stop signature lines. My booth / table is no longer a place where friends can stop by, say hi, and hang out. And I’ve gone from feeling grateful to seeing friends show up to feeling guilty they came all this way for a minute long interaction. Part of the thing I’ve grown to like about signings ended up going away in the interest to make sure everyone got what they came out to get.

That’s why I’ve come to really like the smaller shows. Where I can actually talk to the people reading my stuff the way I used to. So the trick I assumed was balancing the big shows with the small shows. I did a small charity show in Trenton because it was a good cause and with that in mind. Of course, on the other hand, I’ve now just come back from a 2-week signing tour that took me to 5 states in 10 days over 2 coasts and good lord, did it do a number on my appetite and digestion.

And while every con is an opportunity to get to know another professional better (I got to become much closer with Stephen Platt in Philadelphia and Dan Panosian in Washington State despite the fact we all live here in Los Angeles), there’s something about being away from your routine and the people you regularly share your life with, that makes things undeniably lonely. That said, there is also the instinct to make the most of the whole experience while it lasts.

But somewhere amidst all the signings, I’ve had a recent thought. I’ve slowly started wondering if stories and art actually have audiences and consumers anymore… That maybe it’s a mistake to think of stories that way. Because I think today’s stories and art might have communities that grow around stories and art instead now. And the choice a writer or artist has to make is what kind of steward they want to be of that community if they seek to grow it. Because every community has its own unspoken rules of conduct, and those who truly enjoy a community will fight to protect it. But those same people will feel betrayed if they feel that invisible contract has been broken.

That’s why I find signings at conventions - and the commerce that has grown up around it - such an interesting aspect of comics.

A lot’s been said about wage stagnation in comics, but I’m actually surprised no one’s bothered to break down the numbers. A comics writer working today makes roughly the same amount as a writer working 20 years ago. I know this because I was an editor 20 years ago during the aughts, and my comic writing page rate today - which is the same as most of my comic writing peers - is the same rate I paid writers with that same experience back when I was an editor.

But then you factor in the math, and a simple google search can tell you that inflation has led the purchasing power of the dollar to drop 44% from what it was in those 20 years. Also, during the end of the aughts / beginning of the teens, comic book issues went from 22 pages to 20 pages, making it a 9% reduction in the amount a writer can make through a comic script. Throw all that math together, and a comic book writer working today makes less than 50% of what they made 20 years ago. While the math doesn’t break down quite as neatly for comic book artists, I feel pretty confident it’s comparable. And while it’s tempting to blame this or that company, I’m confident most employees are most likely underpaid for the amount of work they do as well. It’s unfortunately just what happens when you have an industry without a union to fight for workers up and down the line.

But what’s absorbed the slow attrition to comic book wages has been the multiple ancillary ways to make money off comics now. Much more than ever before. There’s royalties, of course, and different companies have different thresholds for when and if they kick in. Creator owned deals can lead to movie / TV option money. There’s also merch deals for creator-owned books. Paid substack subscriptions. Patreons. Kickstarters. And of course, charging to sign at conventions. But that’s its own gentle eco-system. Charge too aggressively and you risk fracturing the sense of community you have with your fans. Don’t charge, and you cut off this organic mechanism that’s developed to off-set wage reduction.

As a result, I’ve been fascinated watching different creators make up their own combinations of when to charge fans for things and when they shouldn’t. One free signature? Three? Five? Do I charge in stores (the logic has always been store signings are free to encourage stores to order more of your book)? What about these new hybrids where large stores are practically having their own cons? It all seems to vary widely amongst professionals, but what’s the system where everyone makes out the best - from pro to retailer to fan?

It’s a world I’ve suddenly been thrust into at top speed with this book, and I’ve listened to different creators’ and retailers’ takes as I try to figure out what the right solution is for me. I have a feeling I’ll probably end up trying out a wide variety of contradicting options before figuring out something I actually feel comfortable with - and hopefully disappointing nobody along the way.

He said just as he realizes the next section goes is his signing calendar for July…

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 3 (JUL 15)

GOLDEN APPLE COMICS (West Hollywood) signing (JUL 15) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

COLLECTORS PARADISE (North Hollywood) signing (JUL 15) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

ARSENAL COMICS & GAMES (Ventura) signing (JUL 18) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

COMIC BUG (Manhattan Beach) signing (JUL 18) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON (JUL 23 - 26; schedule to come)

INSPIRATION WATCHING:

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Well, it’s been three and a half weeks since ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 1 debuted and somehow I am still no less disoriented.

Which must be boring to hear me say over and over again, but it’s no less true.

Part of that might be because I’ve been on the move so much. As part of this whole experience, I’ve told myself to lean in and say yes to everything. To really see what this portion of the ride is like. As it turns out… I might have said too many yes’s.

It seems like much of this goes in waves. My life is usually pretty simple. I stay home and write. Barring that, I see friends. But that careful schedule was first disrupted by the two to four weeks of press before the orders of ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 1 were cut off. Then when the book launched, it was a whirlwind two to three weeks of store signings, where I signed over 12 K copies of the book. And now comes the month or two of conventions I’ve said yes to, which was meant for me to get out of my house and see more of the country. But you have to wonder, how much of “the country” you’re seeing when you don’t get past the convention centers.

But it has given me the chance to get feedback from lots of different fans, and that’s what I really wanted. Because a comic doesn’t just make an audience, it creates a community, and I was curious to see what it looked like. I’m currently writing this the night before HeroesCon in North Carolina. I’ve heard glowing things about the show for so long, so I can’t wait to see what it’s like. My biggest goal is to see if they have any $1 comics boxes, and if I have time to shop for them.

And here’s my time to break and be honest: I worry I’m coming across withholding in this chapter, because while so much seems to be happening right now, I’m still so caught in the whirlwind that I really can’t process much of it. I feel like there’s tons to talk about: the ways signings and conventions have changed since debuting a very popular book; my growing awareness and fascination of WhatNot (which apparently seems to be a part of the huge popularity comics are currently having); how I’ve heard multiple times now people comparing this current moment in comics to the Image days of the ‘90s; what I think the success of comics can teach a struggling film and TV industry; the fear of gravity when reviews start turning on us. But it’s been hard for any of those thoughts to settle in my head, probably because I’m trying to balance all this travel and signings while staying on top of my writing schedule. But is anyone really interested in hearing a writer talk about his schedule?

Well, if you don’t, you’re fresh out of luck, my friend, because that’s the topic of this chapter: This one is for the process wonks. A breakdown of how I break up my writing day. I write this the way I write every chapter, hoping it’s helpful to someone, not entirely sure it is.

Because I’ve never had a closer eye on my schedule – even before all this travel started. For the first time, I’m writing three books simultaneously – ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, EXQUISITE CORPSES: LONE GUNMAN, and a third book that probably won’t be announced until next year. Writing three books simultaneously is new for me. I’m still learning how to do it, since I’m used to focusing on 1 book and maybe a TV job.

I work 6 days a week and for comics, I usually write very detailed page breakdowns before going to script. While I do send them along to my editors for notes, I’d write them even if I didn’t have to. My page breakdowns for a 20-page comic is 4 - 5 pages, because it’s meant to include everything I need to get me excited to write a scene, even if I might not write that script until months later.

For ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, I wrote the page breakdown and then the script for the first issue, just to make sure that it was working and everyone was happy with it, and then I wrote page breakdowns for every issue of the series before writing the subsequent scripts. Since it’s a big mystery, I wanted to make sure it all hung together. It calms my anxiety to know I know the whole story in detail. I liked the process so much, I wanted to do it with LONE GUNMAN as well, but because of deadlines, I only got to writing the page breakdowns up to issue 3 before I had to turn around and start cranking out scripts.

I try to break down an issue in two, maybe three days. Once I have the page breakdowns done, my goal is to write 5 pages of script a day, which I’ve been told by other comic writers is a very achievable goal that can be done while juggling other tasks.

I hate those writers.

I think about them all the time on all the days I don’t hit 5 pages a day, because I frequently don’t. 5 pages to me is generally the equivalent of 2 dramatic scenes. By the end of my day, I generally feel decent about one of those scenes and ashamed of the other. There are occasions, though, when I’m writing a big action scene, I can get past 5 pages. Some advice DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE writer Zeb Wells gave me while walking on the picket line together is not to try to make up pages on later days. So if you only write 3 pages one day, your goal is still to write just 5 pages the next day. I’ve found that to be good advice. But if I write 7 pages one day, I sure as hell am writing 3 pages the next. It’s a marathon, never a sprint. I try as much as humanly possible to keep office hours. My friend Jose Villarrubia once told me that you can tell if an artist will be reliable about deadlines if you know how their schedule works. An artist who constantly talks about pulling all-nighters tends not to get things in on time, because they’re not used to working on a consistent schedule. While I’m sure there are exceptions to that rule, using that rule of thumb has helped me think ahead of when I might need to plan for fill-in artists.

The other good thing about detailed outlines is that on days (like today) where I need to write 5 pages but there’s a lot of life stuff happening, I can jump ahead to an action scene that I’ve been picturing very vividly in my head since I conceived it, and save a harder dramatic scene when I have more time. The important thing to me, though, is to try to hit those 5 pages. By the time I’m done, I have what I consider a vomit draft. Then, I generally spend a full two days at the end doing a full pass of the vomit draft and really digging into its themes and emotional throughlines to turn it into something I like. Sometimes I actually do like it too. I often work into the nights on one of those days.

I tend to let save my mornings to do any administrative stuff or any meetings (notes, publicity, etc.) that need to happen, so I can spend my time between lunch and dinner, staring in terror at a blank page until words appear.

So that’s my day, as for my week… before all this travel started, I broke up my week with something I call the “4 – 2.” It’s something I do when I’m forced to wrie multiple things at once. That’s something I got from my friend, TV writer Niceole Levy, who literally wrote the book on TV writing. It’s called THE WRITERS' ROOM SURVIVAL GUIDE. If you’re interested in TV writing, do yourself a favor and get a copy.

Nicole introduced me to the idea of writing my first position project (the script with the soonest deadline) for the first 4 days of the week and then my second position project (the project with the second soonest deadline) for the back 2 days. The idea is that way you’re mitigating the stress by always knowing you’re moving forward on two projects. Also, by your 5^th day on any project, you start to get tired, so shifting over to 2 days to another project and dumping out the ideas you have because you only have 2 days to work on them helps you get that vomit pass done. Because with that done, I can get to the part of the job I feel most comfortable with: Editing it and making it better.

I like working the 4-2, but all this travel has kind of made it so I have to focus on only one script at a time. That’s why having a detailed page breakdown ensures those travel breaks don’t get in my way writing. In the next ten days, I’ll be in five different states, but by the end of it, I should have a vomit draft of the last issue of ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, and then when I’m back to LA, I can spend the week turning it into something I hopefully like. And because this conclusion is so important I probably will devote twice the time to making sure I get it right.

It’s a process that’s surprisingly has worked for me so far. At that’s me telling myself this, because as of tomorrow, I start HeroesCon, and a slew of balancing a lot of travel to many shows while finishing the last issue of a series that suddenly has a lot of eyes on it.

Hopefully, you’ll agree the process works.

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm EST)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 2 (JUN 17)

WASHINGTON STATE SUMMER CON (JUN 19 – 21)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 3 (JUL 15)

MIDTOWN COMICS signing (JUL 15) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

COLLECTORS PARADISE signing (JUL 15) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

ARSENAL COMICS & GAMES signing (JUL 18) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

COMIC BUG signing (JUL 18) – with Rafael Albuquerque!

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON (JUL 23 - 26; schedule to come)

INSPIRATION WATCHING:

So ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 1 came out a little over a week ago, and it has been a dizzying week and a half.

Even before our launch, it became public that our print run was over 300 K, even higher than the first printing of ABSOLUTE BATMAN 1, grossing over $1.4 million in pre-sales. For context, before this, my dream was to have one of my books crack 50 K copies.

And then there was the news we sold out and went to press a week before the comic arrived in-stores. Which led to my new worry that thousands of these books would stay there, the first Absolute title to haunt $1 bins. And yet somehow I kept hearing reports of same-day sell-outs across the country. A friend of mine said when he walked into a store in Utah, he was told before he could ask they were out of Absolute Green Arrow, and the poor clerk had been fielding calls all day and couldn’t keep it on shelves. And I’ve now signed thousands of copies and met hundreds of fans in the span of a week.

The book seems to be well-regarded creatively, logging in at a 9.6 with 17 reviews on comics’ equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes,ComicBookRoundUp.com. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure I’d immediately read reviews on this book, given how nervous I was about its launch, but my partner in all this, artist Rafael Albuquerque was so excited he kept sending me reviews as he found them. That’s something I can’t overstate. Rafa is an almost 20-year award-winning veteran of this industry, and I’m so so honored to have him be this excited about the reception of this book. He told me before he hasn’t been this anxious since American Vampire, and I get it. This book has become so personal to both of us, our fears and vulnerabilities both encapsulated in its pages.

What all of this has resulted in is (most surprising to me) is that despite all the enormous pre-sales, more than a few stores seemed to have also underordered it. Actor Jason Bateman once said something in an interview that’s always stuck with me. He said it as a throwaway line, as a build up to his bigger point, but I don’t remember that bigger point at all. Instead I remember him saying this: “You don’t want to buy the hype you ought to be renting.” I love that sentiment. Don’t believe that the hype people throw at you is yours; it’s not, but don’t ignore it either. Because then you might be depriving yourself of something, because it will go away when you can no longer afford it.

All of which to say – as obnoxiously douche-y as it is to say this about one’s own work – we might be a hit.

And if you’re reading this and bought a copy, all I can say is thank you.

But OK, that’s what happened. If you’re reading this, you’re probably curious how does it feel going through that. To ride the wave of a hit. And the answer is… I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

You’ve heard me say it before in previous chapters, this book is me processing my emotions of feeling helpless and frustrated at the current state of the world. About not being able to do anything to affect change. And if you’ve read the book, you’ve seen the different ways I’ve tried to translate that onto the page. And truth be told, the first issue doesn’t get into all those ways. In many ways, the first issue (like a good first chapter should, in my opinion), tells you only part – not all – of what the book about.

So it’s a very surreal experience to take something borne out of admitting you feel helpless and have it become something people want to turn into a collectible. Please please please don’t get me wrong. It is an enormous (perhaps the utmost) compliment one can receive and one I’m quite grateful for. I hope it never stops, but it still takes some adjusting.

I’ve been in four different states in the span of 10 days, in which I got to sleep in my bed for three nights. It’s changed little habits I’ve amassed along the way. I no longer automatically accept every collab I get on IG (even though this is something I’ve made fun of friends for not doing), because I worry my account is turning into a sales account. I have to talk to people less during signings, because otherwise, I won’t be able to get to everyone in the time allotted (or worse, my fear during one signing, that they’d all get rained on). My signature is apparently overly complicated which means when signing books I can’t concentrate on anything else but that. Which sounds like a the trivialist of details until you have a conversation with Scott Snyder at the same time as he signs hundreds of books, and you wonder perhaps you should open your life to multi-tasking more? And as of this writing, I’m in Philadelphia for FanExpo Philly, giving this a read-over and because of everything going on, I’ve only just been reminded it’s my birthday today.

Grant Morrison does these great annotations of his work on his substack, and I think when issue 6 comes out, I’ll do that as well. But for now, for anyone who’s read the book and curious about where some of the science behind the brains of billionaires came from, here’s the Rolling Stone article that started me down that rabbithole.

And in case you’re wondering, with all that response, no, the nerves don’t go away. If anything they get worse. Because ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW is built to have a series of very big swings all throughout the story, and I wonder / worry when those swings happen if the entire readership will throw down the book in disgust. The first of them happen in a few weeks in issue 2, and I’m worried the fans will come after me with torches and pitchforks after it does. But it’s an integral part of the story Rafa and I set out to tell as well as the conversation the book was designed to inspire. It’s nerve-wracking telling a story serially with such a big audience. Everyone assumes they know the thematic story you’re trying to tell. But the truth is, that won’t make itself apparent until probably issue 3, and will the audience actually be interested in hearing it?

So… we’ll see. That’s the thing they don’t tell you about “bold storytelling choices.” When I’d hear about writers doing it, I’d imagine some smoking Hunter S. Thompson-esque figure maniacally laughing as they write. But the reality is it’s a solitary figure at a keyboard, one trying to type through their fear of incoming pitchforks.

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OUT NOW:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 1

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

FANEXPO PHILADELPHIA (MAY 29 - 31)

NUCLEAR COMICS signing (JUN 6, noon PST)

HEROESCON (JUN 12 – 13)

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm EST)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 2 (JUN 17)

WASHINGTON STATE SUMMER CON (JUN 19 – 21)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 3 (JUL 15)

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON (JUL 23 - 26; schedule to come)

INSPIRATION WATCHING:

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OK, so a lot has happened lately, and so much of it is good, I hesitate to put it all down here, because it mostly sounds like boasting. But at the same time, the purpose of DAY 2 was to be honest, so if I sound vain, maybe it’s because I actually am vain.

But it’s been a good couple weeks. The people organizing San Diego Comic-Con has invited me to be a guest this year alongside a living legend like Peter Bagge, the cartoonist behind Hate!; V. E. Schwab, the author of The Invisible Life of Addie Larue; Mimi Pond, who (amongst many other things) wrote the series premiere of The Simpsons (!); and Stephan Pastis, the creator of the syndicated comic strip Pearls Before Swine. Getting this invitation means a LOT to me. I’m embarrassed by exactly how honored I feel being in the same company as these people who’ve made undeniable contributions to pop culture. So I guess I’m just going to just say thank you, feel grateful, and move on, and hope no one reads that as me being ungrateful because I very much am not.

The proof to all this if you need it (‘cuz I certainly did) here:

Then, I was vain enough to let Voyage LA interview me for their Inspiring Stories of Los Angeles series. Honestly, that felt really conceited even by my standards, but I promised myself to never turn down an opportunity to promote the work when it’s time to promote the work. And I do feel really flattered a hip LA web-zine was interested in a local comic book writer.

Then, DC Absolute universe megamind Scott Snyder made it public that ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW is the biggest launch of an Absolute title yet:

which just goes to show you how much good will the Absolute universe has garnered, although it probably doesn’t hurt to have Rafael Albuquerque design a bow made of swords. Oh, and as I was writing this, I just found out that the book got a second printing a week before the book debuts! Which really earnestly blew my mind. Hopefully such a strong launch gets us extended past a mini-series, but I’ve been around the block enough to know how your numbers hold up month to month are just as important as a strong launch, so we’ll see. But in the meantime, it led to this cool second printing variant cover by Ivan Tao that I only saw for the first time with the announcement.

And then a lot of people texted to congratulate me for EXQUISITE CORPSES' Eisner nomination for Best New Series. Which is slightly embarrassing, because I just happened to be a lucky passenger on the rocketship James Tynion IV and Michael Walsh built. I happened to be the fortunate first writer to write an issue after the series creators, so my name got listed in the nomination when really if my name was up there, so should have Tyler Boss, Che Grayson, Jordie Bellaire, Gavin Fullerton, Valentine De Landro, Adam Gorham, Claire Roe and Marianna Ignazzi as well, since we all played the Supremes to James and Michael’s Diana Ross.

And as a testament to how sturdy a phenomenon the house that James and Michael built was, the tabletop card game designed around Exquisite Corpses got funded in just 80 minutes on Kickstarter. But you can help it meet its stretch goals here.

I’m deeply proud of my involvement with everything Tiny Onion. James has put together a group of people I’ve come to adore, and it’s really gratifying to say you had a small part in helping good, talented people win.

So everything’s coming up roses, right? Nothing can go wrong now, right?

Right???

Next week, ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 1 finally comes out. This book I’ve been developing and writing for what must be at this point a year. And part of the allure I think of reading a real time column is its no-take-backsies nature. So I thought it’d be embracing our conceit to be honest about how I’m feeling about it less than a week from its debut, before I have the chance to change my tune after it’s officially out.

Because some early responses to the book online have been really positive. I’ve got retailers emailing and posting about how much they like it before it’s even out. We sold out of our first printing already! So how does that feel for a writer with imposter syndrome who sees himself as an indie band?

Terrifying. Because now that people’s expectations have been raised, is that a bar I can clear? And since this is a mystery, which tend to be judged with how you wrapped it up, can I keep living up to those expectations for the next 6 months? It reminds me of something Scott Snyder said once, about how he was so stressed out during his first mega-successful run of Batman that he didn’t enjoy himself. And it’s something I’d like to figure out how to do without jinxing the quality of the book.

Because now we get to that thing I’m embarrassed to admit, but in the interest of being honest, I’ll admit it here. One of the perks of being a cool indie band is that generally the axe doesn’t swing that low when it comes to people being vocal about hating your work. Oh sure, you get critical reviews, but if people hate the work, they just generally move onto the next thing. The axe doesn’t swing that low. But I’ve been preparing for a while that no matter how good ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW is, there will be people who hate it. Hopefully, it’s a lot less than the ones who like it. But when you take something people love and try to do something bold with it, people will feel passionate about it both ways. It’s inevitable and literally the price of doing business. And when doing business is doing that thing you’ve always dreamed of the way you always dreamed it, it’s a very small price.

But it will be new for me. It will be a learning experience, and this next phase of my writing growth will be learning to live with that and not let it detract from the story I want to tell. Not to block it out per se, since you never want to just pay attention to the good reviews. But parse the constructive criticism from the reactionary hate. Which is something I’ve had to do for all my books anyway, but I guess because it’s a big DC icon it feels like a new task now. I keep having to remind myself all I can do is open up and tell the story I have to tell and try to make it clear in the writing why it means so much to me. At the end of the day, that has to be my north star and not let the good or bad response make me waver from it. Or at least that’s what I feel now.

We’ll see what happens when I get to the other side.

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OUT NOW:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2

Comic Book Club Live's interview with Pornsak Pichetshote & Rafael Albuquerque

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (MAY 20)

MIDTOWN COMICS signing (MAY 20, 5 pm EST)

THIRD EYE COMICS signing (MAY 23, 11 am EST)

DARKLORD COLLECTIONS PRESENTS: THE SHOWDOWN Live on WhatNot (MAY 24, 6.30 pm PST)

FANEXPO PHILADELPHIA (MAY 29 - 31)

NUCLEAR COMICS signing (JUN 6, noon PST)

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON SIGNING (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm EST)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 2 (JUN 17)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 3 (JUL 15)

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON (JUL 23 - 26; schedule to come)

INSPIRATION READING:

OK, a bunch of developments since last chapter, but perhaps most significantly:

The Final Order Cut-Off for ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW has passed, and it was certainly unlike any FOC date I’ve had, with retailers I know emailing to say how excited they were about their pre-orders, and did I need any extra copies for myself? Could they help me get them? Let me tell you, this is not a thing I’m used to with my creator-owned books, so I’m very grateful for the excitement.

Also, in the week leading up to that, the interview I did with David Harper at Off-Panel aired, where David used the opportunity to talk about DAY 2 quite a bit, as well as ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW. As a result, the number of subscribers to this little experiment I wasn’t sure anybody would read has doubled.

The great Kieron Gillen (of The Power Fantasy, The Wicked & the Divine, Young Avengers) learning of its existence on Off-Panel and plugging it on his own newsletter no doubt helped that too.

So to return the favor, if anyone here didn’t come from Off-Panel, which is honestly one of the best podcasts in comics, you can find my interview with him here. If you’re not familiar with SKTCHD and Off-Panel, then congratulations, you just discovered one of the best websites on the art and business of comics.

And while I can’t imagine anyone here who isn’t already reading Kieron’s wonderful newsletter, you can find a link to KIERON GILLEN'S WORDMAIL here nevertheless.

Also, in the time since the last chapter, we’ve had a few reviews of the book trickle in through social media, and I’m really grateful that readers seem very excited.

Speaking of excitement, on an Instagram post I made about the Green Arrow stories that influenced ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, no less than New York Times bestselling author and someone The Hollywood Reporter once listed as one of “Hollywood’s Most Powerful Authors,” writer of GREEN ARROW: THE ARCHER’S QUEST, Brad freaking Meltzer, commented saying “Can’t wait.” And I geeked out.

But that’s the magic of the world of comic making. Keep your nose to the grindstone, and you get the chance to potentially disappoint your heroes.

But back to DAY 2 matters: Last chapter was an interesting one to write. I promised myself (and I believe all of you) I’d do my best to make sure every chapter had utility and entertainment, and honestly, by the time I was done writing it, I wasn’t sure last chapter did. To me, it felt very self-indulgent, just going on about my insecurities. And yet, it’s undoubtedly the chapter that’s received the most response, with a number of people taking the time to say how hearing about my own imposter syndrome is helping them get over their fears of sharing their writing, and that is very, very cool.

So maybe what I’m going to do now is exactly what people don’t want. Because I promised myself last chapter if I was going to write something self-indulgent about my feelings, I should balance that out by offering something that could potentially be useful to people - tips of how people can break into and get started in comics.

With that in mind, I’m starting a recurring feature I’ve been thinking about for a while now: THINGS I’VE LEARNED ALONG THE WAY about comics in my 20+ years as a comics editor, TV executive, and writer of TV and comics, using real life anecdotes I had a front seat for. And the first topic I thought about focusing on was….

HOW TO BREAK INTO COMICS – THE PITCH

OK, if you’re a writer breaking into comics, the first thing you’re going to need is a great pitch, and my first instinct was, hey, why don’t I talk about the ones that got away – the great pitches I’ve gotten that I still think about to this day. That I’m convinced would make good comics, but I was too green to get my boss to sign off on.

And then I realized, oh no, wait. That’s a horrible idea. Don’t go out and tell people other people’s great ideas. Those writers might one day want to use those great ideas someday, because they’re, you know - their ideas.

So back I went to the drawing board… until I remembered one great pitch that circumvented that problem.

See, once upon a time, I was a Creative Director at DC Comics’ Creative Affairs team. It’s one of those ambiguously titled Hollywood jobs where it’s not quite obvious what you do, so you try to convince people quickly that you are in fact doing something. Part of that job for me was starting what would eventually become DC’s TV department. But being a former Vertigo editor, there eventually became another aspect to it. Over 15 years ago, one of the things that department did (I have no idea if this is still the case) was sign off on the media value of pitches of original titles – and since Vertigo was the only part of DC creating original titles, that meant as a former Vertigo editor, I was asked to rate the media value of new pitches coming into Vertigo.

The idea wasn’t that Creative Affairs would get veto power of what books came out and what didn’t, but rather, for those pitches where publishing wasn’t sure if the title would earn out, because perhaps the talent was too untested, maybe we could put a finger on the scale by saying, hey, we might be able to turn this into a movie or TV show, so maybe publishing should take the risk. When we started, though, it took us a while to work out the kinks. (Again, I’m going to stress, I’m pretty sure this isn’t how things work at DC now.)

Originally, the system was if you thought a new book could be turned into 2 media from the following categories - TV show/animation/movie /video games - you rated the project as having a HIGH media value. But if it could only be one, it was a MEDIUM, and if it couldn’t be turned into any, it was a LOW. The system meant well, but it would eventually need to evolve when we realized certain projects could seem like slam dunks tailor-made in one medium, but maybe not for any of the rest, and still only rate a MEDIUM.

That was the case for one pitch that came through. It landed on our desks right after the pilot script for a new show by Gideon Raff called Tyrant, circulated Hollywood. About the son of an infamous Middle Eastern tyrant who’s been running from his past for 20 years and now living as a pediatrician in the US. Until his father dies and he’s forced to inherit the throne and all the political tensions that come with it.

The show would debut to mixed reviews and last three seasons, but man, everybody was talking about that script when it made the rounds. At the same time, a comic book pitch landed on our desks about – for all intents and purposes – an American soldier in Afghanistan, trying to solve a murder in the midst of a war zone. It was basically a detective story set in a war zone. It was called S.O.B., and most impressive of all was that the writer had actually worked in the CIA.

But alas, because of the faulty system, even though it seemed like a slam dunk for an HBO show, since it only felt like it could exist in that one medium, the pitch only rated a MEDIUM, and because the writer was so new to DC, that wasn’t enough to get the book published. Like I said, it was a flawed system.

But god, did I love that pitch. I talked about it all the time. Years later, I bumped into Hank Kanalz at the water fountain. At that point, he and Shelly Bond were overseeing Vertigo, and I told him about how much I loved this old pitch, S.O.B. He mentioned that that new writer was starting to get more work in the DCU. A pitch that couldn’t pass while he was an unknown writer might be able to now, and he left me very excited to see if he could get it going.

A couple years later, DC published that book. Its name was changed to Sheriff of Babylon, because DC realized that new writer Tom King could write a good comic.

And now, Tom is a multi-Eisner winning writer, who’s adapting his Eisner-winning DC maxi-series Mister Miracle for animation and a film adaptation of his Eisner-nominated mini Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow will be out in theaters on June 26.

But I think about that pitch a lot, because I think it’s such a recipe for what a good comics pitch should be. And why I talked about it for years, despite only having read it a couple times: It’s easily digestible in a sentence or two. Clearly knows what its audience is (both crime / mystery fans and people interested in politics / current events), and has a clear personal connection the writer. I can’t tell you how much that helps a pitch stand out from the pact.

As for what a comics pitch looks like, when I my published my first mini-series INFIDEL (with art by Aaron Campbell, colored & edited by Jose Villarrubia with letters & design by Jeff Powell), I made it a point to include our pitch for the series at the back of the book. You can buy a copy here, or just borrow one from your library. I’m proud to know both writers Julio Anta and Tony Fleecs used the format when pitching their first Image books, HOME and STRAY DOGS accordingly.

OK, hopefully that was just as useful as me going on about my feelings, and I’ll try to do a mixture of both going forward if so. If these are the kind of stories you’d like to hear me tell more of, say so. I’m suddenly realizing there’s another chapter I could do about finding an artist for your book.

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OUT NOW:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (MAY 20)

MIDTOWN COMICS signing (MAY 20, 5 pm)

THIRD EYE COMICS signing (MAY 23, 11 am)

DARKLORD COLLECTIONS PRESENTS: THE SHOWDOWN Live on WhatNot (MAY 24, 6.30 pm)

FANEXPO PHILADELPHIA (MAY 29 - 31)

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON SIGNING (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 2 (JUN 17)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 3 (JUL 15)

INSPIRATION READING:

First, some updates to last chapter, where I listed my screw-ups as I tried to adjust to the new promotional opportunities ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW has opened me up to.

Where I basically learned that if you’re a podcaster who uses Streamyard, I will eventually be apologizing to you. Apparently, that software involves me uploading the audio from my end once the interview is done. Except mine doesn’t. At all. And apparently it doesn’t happen to anyone else, and no one can seem to explain why it only happens to me, so as I type this, I can just hear my friends’s voices yelling, “Why are you so old??!”

Otherwise, the past two weeks have been spent doing press interviews and organizing a signing tour for when the book launches in May – including a WhatNot signing despite not entirely understanding what that is.

In that time, I’ve also been introduced to the concept of private signings and will be doing my first one. This is a very new thing for me that I’m still trying to wrap my head around, so a future chapter will probably be dedicated to it once I’ve, in fact, wrapped my head around it.

But as I was also reminded last chapter, I should occasionally use this space to do what people use Substacks to do: Promote My Crap. And since this will be the last chapter that comes out before orders close on ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (April 27^th, for an on-sale in stores date of May 20th), I figured I’d use this space to talk about the one thing I’ve had trouble talking about in interviews and on panels: What this book really means to me.

But first, if you’re not sick of me saying it: ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW reimagines the iconic DC character as a serial killer targeting corrupt billionaires, the only clue to his identity being the green arrows he leaves in the bodies of his victims, a message to his very rich enemies that you can’t get away with killing Oliver Queen. I Know What You Did Last Summer for billionaires, it follows Dinah Lance – aka ABSOLUTE BLACK CANARY – as she’s tasked to unmask the Green Arrow Killer, all of her suspects drawn from the ranks of DC’s most dangerous archers. A six-issue urban horror murder-mystery heavily influenced by my love of giallos, Korean revenge thrillers, and of course, many, many Green Arrow comics. Lock step with me on this journey is artistic superstar Rafael Albuquerque. I could not be more excited to be working on this book with Rafa, and it is the honor of my life, that he’s so excited by it he’ll whip up promo pieces like this on his weekends, just for the hell of it:

(Yes, yes, there’s a typo. But maybe that typo’s there purposefully for legal reasons, how do you know? Or maybe you see right through that and feel I need more sleep? Will we ever know the answer? (Yes, you say? OK, I’ll move on.))

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW is my attempt to tell a serialized Knives Out whodunit mystery, which seems like a fool’s errand during these spoiler-filled internet days. I mean, I’m so paranoid about the ending being spoiled, I have a back-up in a “break glass in case of emergencies” scenario. I wonder if I’ll be crazy enough to use it.

But yes, onto what ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW means to me. Because I haven’t talked about this publicly much, because the answer involves me having to be surprisingly vulnerable, and I haven’t been able to get there on panels in front of hundreds of people. Or even with podcasters I consider friends.

But my first mini-series was my creator-owned comic INFIDEL. It was a modern reimagining of the haunted house story, but for me, the real goal was to use a horror story to have this conversation about race which I felt we as a society weren’t having. A story about what racism looked like in liberal communities. A story about privilege – a term that only hit the pop consciousness the same year that book came out. I know this because it was only after my publicity tour that I learned of the term and realized how much knowing it would have helped me communicate the ideas of the book. Because despite my working on the book for years leading up to it, it came out in 2018, at the same time when, after the 2016 election, the topic of what racism looks like in liberal places became so widespread.

My next book was THE GOOD ASIAN, a noir mystery, about the first generation of Americans to face an immigration ban of their own kind – Chinese-Americans. It focused on the roots of anti-Asian prejudice and was announced the same week that national news started reporting an explosion of anti-Asian hate crimes across America as a result of Covid.

And since those two books, I’ve been… scared. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve written books I’m quite proud of, but many of them were on the lighter side, because – and I realize how self-aggrandizing it sounds – there was this subconscious superstition after those books that if I wrote about the horrible things in the world, I would somehow be invoking them. And after Covid, I just wanted to focus on the good things again.

But that changed with the last election. Somehow, after it, a switch flipped in my brain, and I couldn’t stop writing horror again. To write about ugliness again. Because it felt like this thing I had been so scared to invoke had finally arrived, and it almost felt irresponsible to look away. It made me think of this wonderful and very short story by Spencer Holt called "The Zebra Storyteller", a story about what the function of a storyteller is. (You can click on the link to get to read it, a trick I only just learned.)

Because while ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW is very much a superhero mystery about a serial killer murdering corrupt billionaires, it’s also about Dinah Lance, who’s looking for answers in the midst of these killings. A person doing her best to fight and protect her family in a world where the bullies seem to keep winning – where they can apparently act callously without consequence. And it’s about someone who wants that to change… but can one person really change anything? And if so, what’s the right way to do that? Because it seems everywhere you look there’s a dozen wrong ways.

It’s a question I’d been thinking about a lot as I showed up to protests and donated money to causes online. Can things change? And for this book, I set myself a tall order. A challenge I figured I could easily take back if it proved too hard. I wanted to see if I could use the book to give me a hint if it was possible and how so.

And to my greatest surprise… it did. Don’t get me wrong. It didn’t give me The Great Solution, and I’m sure putting it the way I am right now is overstating its profundity. But it gave me my first step. In writing this thriller / whodunnit about a serial killer and the corporate bodyguard trying to stop him, I found direction of what I can do to make myself feel useful and stave off this helplessness and depression. How to believe those actions matter. As cliché as it sounds, writing this book healed me in a way I really needed. And I’ll never be able to thank Scott Snyder (the writer behind the Absolute Universe) and DC enough for giving me the opportunity to write it.

I’m sure that’s all very vague, and when the mini-series is over, I think I’ll come back to DAY 2 to do some kind of annotations of the series and unpack what exactly I’m talking about, but after struggling to say it in every interview - honestly only managing to articulate it to my therapist - I guess I did feel the need to say it publicly. In any event, ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 1 comes out May 20^th; orders are due to stores in April 27^th. I really hope you read it and like it.

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OUT NOW:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (MAY 20)

MIDTOWN COMICS signing (MAY 20, 5 pm)

DARKLORD COLLECTIONS PRESENTS: THE SHOWDOWN Live on WhatNot (May 24, 6.30 pm)

FANEXPO PHILADELPHIA (MAY 29 - 31)

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON SIGNING (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 2 (JUN 17)

INSPIRATION READING:

I did my first AMA recently, and so many questions were about the Green Arrow stories influencing my run, so I figured I’d share them here as well:

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Tom King once tweeted something along the lines of, “Today, my job got in the way of writing. And yet my job is to write.”

Because as it turns out, there’s a lot more to maintaining a comics career than just writing the comics. This past week reminded me those are all the parts of the job I desperately need to get better at.

So perhaps it’d be educational to go through all the mistakes I’ve made and areas I’ve run smack dab into my ignorance during these last two weeks – all of which have to do with the aspects of comic book creating that has nothing to do with the actual writing or interacting with the creative team. All of which I’ve experienced before but never at the level one gets when working with a big company like DC Comics.

For example, it was pointed out to me that part of the reason for having a substack is to keep people up to date with your announcements… which I have completely forgotten to do.

Case in point, the past weekend, I was on two panels at WonderCon in Anaheim. The first was Storytelling Across Games, Comics, and Beyond with actor / writer Matt Yang King (Riverdale, Mortal Kombat), president & creative director of PCB Productions Keith Arem (Call of Duty, Modern Warfare), voice actor Julie Nathanson (Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Batman: The Long Halloween), voice actor / director Courtenay Taylor (Mass Effect, X-Men ’97), and moderated by voice actor / director Carrie Keranen (League of Legends, Persona 5). It’s the kind of interdisciplinary panel I love where a bunch of us from different media talked about how our approaches differ and converge. I get so much from talking to people from those panels and everyone was so lovely in every sense of the word.

The second was the very packed DC Panel with Scott Snyder (Absolute Batman), Josh Williamson (Superman), and Tini Howard & Babs Tarr (Gotham City Sirens: Love Hurts). It was actually the first time I think I met Babs, despite being a huge fan of her work for almost a decade now. We showed off some more pages of ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, and the enthusiasm was very palpable. DC people seemed happy with how I talked about the book even though I felt I spent more time talking about the vibe than the story (something I’m trying to be better about going forward). And of course, I didn’t think far ahead enough to get a picture of that.

The panels were back-to back and great times, catering to very different audiences. If you weren’t there, you should have been there. If you didn’t know about it, it’s probably because I never mentioned it. That might have been helpful.

I also forgot to mention the gorgeous covers of ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 2 which came out two weeks ago, featuring Rafael Albuquerque finally drawing the Absolute Black Canary design he came up with on a cover, and I can’t get over the power of it:

This monster of a cover by Gerard Parel:

And one from another artist I’m a huge fan of, Riley Rossmo (from the hit The Moon is Following Us).

Oh, and Matias Bergara did an amazing cover that DC hasn’t released yet, so I’ll wait to take their lead. I hope they do it soon, ‘cuz it’s so. Freaking. Cool.

And I can’t wait to see Kaare Andrews’s cover. I’ve been a fan of his for ages.

So, OK. Those were the things I forgot to do. Next are everything I realized I had no idea how to do.

For example, much of the past week was coordinating with stores for the signing tour I’ll be doing to promote ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW in May – which at the moment looks like four cities along two coasts for the first week, with an additional two cities in the two weeks after that. And I’d love to tell you all about them, but I realized… I have no idea when I’m allowed to talk about them. Surely, the stores should be the ones to break that info, right? So I guess I should just keep an eye on my social media? Or maybe not, since a friend was at Midtown Comics in NYC and saw a flyer saying I was coming, so hey, I’ll be signing at Midtown Comics in Manhattan on May 20^th, and I guess I should find out when I’m allowed to announce the rest of the places. (Also, I realized I never asked what time the signing was until I saw the flyer. Fortunately, it’s not an issue… but I really couldn’t even ask?)

Podcasts interviews for ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW (does it feel obnoxious I keep putting it in all caps?) took up the other big chunk of my week. And there I scored on the screw-up board by discovering my side of one of those interview failed to upload. Fortunately, they were able to work with the audio from their side, but of course, I’m now paranoid about it on every other interview I do.

(One of the interesting ways doing press for a popular pre-existing character differs from doing press from an original creation is that on the original creation, I feel my job is to get people excited. On a popular pre-existing character, people seem to already be excited, and I think my job is to give them a sense of what they’re in for, and it’s something I think I’m slowly learning how to do. In the next round of interviews, I’ve told myself I have to talk more about the story, even though - because that story’s a murder mystery - I don’t want to spoil anything. We’ll see how I do.)

And then I agreed to do an AMA for ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW. That sounds simple, right? Ask Me Anything. People ask questions. I type up answers. Except a reddit AMA involves setting things up, and I asked no less than a half dozen questions before I could figure out how to do it correctly. And even with that, I couldn’t figure out how to create my own username and am using the randomly generated one they came up with.

A friend in college once marveled at my ability to be consistently beaten by life’s tiny bureaucracies. College was a long time ago, but apparently, some things never change.

All this while finishing writing the first issue of EXQUISITE CORPSES: LONE GUNMAN # 1 (which I only just learned is the actual title of the book, even though I’m fairly sure someone told me that before.) and starting the script to ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW 4.

Oh, and while I’m admitting mistakes, someone pointed out to me that DAY 2 should have 26 chapters, and not 24, because it is a well-known fact that there are 52 weeks in a year, and basic arithmetic suggests you get 26 when you divide that by 2.

So if you ever wondered all the important things you can not know how to do while making comics that have nothing to do with making comics, there you go.

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OUT NOW:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (MAY 20)

MIDTOWN COMICS signing (MAY 20, 5 pm)

FANEXPO PHILADELPHIA (MAY 29 - 31)

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON SIGNING (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (JUN 17)

INSPIRATION WATCHING:

So Tony Fleecs was one of the first people I mentioned DAY 2 to. Tony’s the Eisner-nominated writer of such comics as STRAY DOGS, LOCAL MAN, and FERAL. He’s sold about a million copies of STRAY DOGS and yet, is still somehow one of the most underrated writers in comics, because he’s just that good. He’s now writing one of my favorite DC characters: DEATHSTROKE THE TERMINATOR, which just launched this past Wednesday. It’s already been deluged by stellar reviews, so grab a copy before it sells out, because I have no doubt it will soon. It’s fantastic.

And whenever I’d bring DAY 2 up to Tony, he’d say, “You’re going to talk about your new theory of comics in it, right?” And every time, I promised I would.

So this is me talking about my new theory of comics. Blame Tony if it’s boring. Because this entry is turning out twice the usual length. And I’m going to stress it’s all theory. I’m sure there’s lot of places to poke holes, (I can see some of them on a re-read, but pre-offering my counter-arguments would make me even more monstrously behind on deadlines). So take this as a conversation prompt I hope you find interesting.

But since I was writing an Absolute book, I looked at how different Absolute writers regarded theirs, this leading me to a Substack post written by Absolute universe architect and writer of comics juggernaut ABSOLUTE BATMAN, Scott Snyder. In it, he says some very smart things (because Scott is very, very smart) about writing for the current comics market. You can find that here:

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Newsletter #255: 2025 - A Year in Review

Hey guys, Scott…

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8 months ago · 63 likes · 12 comments · Scott Snyder

It’s been months, and I’m still obsessed with that post. Coupled by that is how DC’s Absolute line has not just been the mega-hit the comics industry desperately needed, but also that unicorn everyone in comics hopes for: comics that bring in new readers, a large portion of them in that coveted 18 – 32 range.

And that along with Scott’s insight into the comics market led me to the following theory that admittedly sounds rather obvious:

I think the core audience of direct market comics – single issue comics regardless of genre, an outgrowth of superhero comics – are people who want to feel like they’re in their 20s – regardless of how old they actually are.

But as obvious as that sounds, stepping that through, there are 3 different types of groups who want to feel like they’re in their 20s:

(1) People younger than their 20s

(2) People in their 20s

(3) People older than their 20s

Nothing groundbreaking about that breakdown, so let’s project what those groups might want out of their reading experience.

(1) People younger than their 20s who want to feel like they’re in their 20s want something that feels smarter and less inhibited than what’s aimed towards them. That’s been written about a lot. They want to feel precocious.

(2) Meanwhile, people in their 20s wants something that feels authentic and relevant to what they’re going through. They can feel something phony.

(3) And people older than their 20s who want to feel like they’re in their 20s are presumably looking for something with the abandon and energy they miss from when they were younger, with just a hint of the familiar so they can feel safe. Because as much as they want to feel like they’re in their 20s, they’d rather avoid the worrying about rent and dating that random crazy person drama.

So going off that logic, the bullseye of a reading experience that has something for all three of those groups is something with:

(1) Intelligence

(2) Abandon / Lack of inhibition

(3) Authenticity

(4) Relevance

(5) Energy

(6) And a hint of the familiar

And when I look at all the Absolute books, but especially ABSOLUTE BATMAN, I feel like they easily hit those criteria. And I feel the same about the Ultimate and Energon books too, regardless of what age the characters actually are.

And sure, maybe you can say that any good comic should have those qualities, but the whole extrapolation got me thinking about 20-somethings in comics, which led me to a different rabbit hole: Because the two biggest publishers in comics – Marvel and DC – used to routinely hire 20-something writers way more than they do now.

Through the entire 20^th century, in fact, it was very common for the Big 2 to hire 20-somethings. Joe Simon and Jerry Shuster were around 23 when ACTION COMICS # 1 was published. Jim Shooter was famously younger - 13 when he started writing SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES. Inspired, Paul Levitz was 21 when he started writing LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES. Stan Lee was 19 when he started writing comics. And although he was 39 when he created the Marvel Universe, much has been written about how obsessed he was that college students liked Marvel. It’s also interesting to note that when it was time to find someone else to write in the Marvel voice besides him, he went to Roy Thomas who was 25. And while Lee experimented with other writers to help Thomas, he eventually went with Denny O’Neil, who broke in at 27 (all this taken from Sean Howe’s THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF MARVEL COMICS).

Even as late as the 1990s, Marvel and DC hired 20-somethings for ongoing books, including Garth Ennis (21 when his HELLBLAZER run started), Warren Ellis (26 when he wrote HELLSTORM), Ron Marz (26 when he wrote SILVER SURFER) Mark Millar (24 when he wrote SWAMP THING), Brian K. Vaughan (23 when he wrote SWAMP THING), Geoff Johns (26 when he wrote STARS & S.T.R.I.P.E), to name just a few. But in the late 1990s, based on the strength of DC Vertigo and THE SANDMAN, DC Comics developed a trade paperback program that led comics to no longer be disposable. They could sit on bookshelves and sell for decades to come – yielding a creator royalties in the process.

And as royalties and shelf life became more substantial, the Big 2 took less chances on younger writers. By the aughts, Editor-in-Chiefs of both Marvel and DC – Joe Quesada and Dan Didio respectively – publicly stated that aspiring writers shouldn’t expect Marvel or DC to be their first credits. They were looking for writers with produced credits, whether they came from indy comics, film / TV, or novels. ) This was actually a new stance for the Big 2.

And as comics got less disposable, more Hollywood TV and film writers were lured to write them, probably most notable was Joss Whedon, whose BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, FIREFLY, and DOLLHOUSE TV shows were all canceled before he brought them to comics, a move which would eventually lead him to write ASTONISHING X-MEN for Marvel. And it sure seemed Whedon found new relevance amongst the nerd crew in the process. I’m not saying X-Men led him to direct AVENGERS in 2011, but it certainly didn’t hurt him. And while writers like Kevin Smith and Sam Hamm were writing comics before Whedon, those always seemed more like bucket list side gigs. I’d argue after Whedon, more TV and film screenwriters wrote monthly comics as a path for career growth.

And while 20-somethings would still break into comics, they were markedly less. In the aughts, we saw G. Willow Wilson (25 when she wrote CAIRO for DC Vertigo), Sterling Gates (25 when he wrote SUPERGIRL), and Kyle Higgins (26 when he co-wrote BATMAN: GATES OF GOTHAM) to name a few. In the 2010s, there were James Tynion IV (25 when he wrote TALON) and Marguerite Bennet (27 when she wrote DC COMICS: BOMBSHELLS), both students of Scott Snyder.

Of course, there were still 20-somethings making comics, either on the indy scene or with smaller publishers. It just became much more common for writers to break into the Big 2 writing in their 30s, which was the case for Scott Snyder, Jeff Lemire, Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Kieron Gillen and more. (I’ll let you guys google the exact ages and projects on your own….)

But the 2000s into the 2010s led to another interesting trend: The boom and bust of corporate consolidation in comics, where comics were seen as R&D for movies and TV. That meant the Big 2 would publish comics they knew might not make money if it could serve as a basis for a TV show or movie, because that’s where the bigger money was. With that, a comic’s audience didn’t just have to be people in comics stores, something Scott Snyder talks a lot about how media development money shifted the bullseye from the true market of comics. And for non-Big 2 books, it meant a comic creator could make more money from a media option than from book sales. I can speak to this personally. By 2018, even though INFIDEL was always intended to be a comic first, I ended up making more money from the film option than from sales of the book. All of this led creators to go where the market was, so it wasn’t the end of the world if your book wasn’t the exact thing the direct market wanted.

Add to that a generation of writers who aged alongside the Direct Market. These were creators born around the same time as the direct market in their 70s or when DC and Marvel first released product tailored to the direct market in the 80s. This generation was in their teens and 20s when the Image Revolution happened. I consider myself one of this crew and the lesson I – and I think other creators of my generation – learned was, oh, as I grow older, so does the comics audience, so as long as I stay true to my creative north star, there will always be people like me hungry to read it.

What I find interesting is how all these tangents are coming together now. You have an industry that stopped hiring 20-something writers to write their books. Creators who lacked incentive to write to that audience because of Hollywood option money. And then the natural aging of a generation of creators so their first instinct might no longer be writing about feeling like they’re in their 20s. So perhaps when an ABSOLUTE BATMAN comes along that has all the intelligence, abandon, energy, relevance, authenticity, with a hint of the familiar that everyone who wants to feel like their 20s wants, it reminds us of who direct market comics were always for. Maybe that’s why ABSOLUTE BATMAN feels like the most organically successful comic in the past 25 years. To me, it says a lot that when Scott did press on his New 52 BATMAN, he talked about what Batman meant to him, but with ABSOLUTE BATMAN, he’s looking to his teenage son as inspiration.

If that’s true, does that mean if I want my comic to have a healthy audience, it needs to feature the exploits of 20-somethings? Well, the truth is, I don’t know. This is all theory. But I honestly don’t think so. There are lots of successful comics where you don’t even know the age of the characters. But it does make me wonder, rather than changing what I’m writing to suit the market, maybe challenging myself to write those stories in a way that really delivers on their intelligence, abandon, energy, relevance, authenticity, with a hint of the familiar. And that seems like a noble writing pursuit in general, so I’m trying it with all the comics I’m writing this year.

(It also makes me wonder whose people favorite 20-something comic book writers are at the moment. If you have suggestions, please let me know. It’s easier of course to find 20-something cartoonists, since a writer needs money (or someone else) to fund their comic-writing, so I’d love to hear specifically writers.)

Or maybe this is all horseshit. I’m sure there are numerous holes in my argument, but hopefully there’s enough here to be fun fodder for conversation amongst comics fans - I’ve certainly been having my share when I talk about it with comic creator friends. But maybe not. Maybe there’s too many holes to be worthwhile. Maybe this been an enormous waste of your time. Maybe this isn’t what you come here to read.

I blame Tony.

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OUT NOW:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2

I’m so immensely proud to be a part of this book. Created by James Tynion IV & Michael Walsh, EXQUISITE CORPSES center on the Thirteen families that secretly rule America. Every five years, they each hire a serial killer and set them loose in a battle royale within an unsuspecting town, the family with the winning killer getting to rule America for the next five years. James and Michael put a writers’ room of creators together in Buffalo to break the story of the townspeople trying to survive the slaughter and now I have a group of people I can’t wait to see again. This volume features my second issue of the series, where I got to work with the gloriously gory artist Adam Gorham and share a volume with some enormously talented comics creators like Che Grayson, Jordie Bellaire, Tyler Boss, Claire Roe, and Gavin Fullerton. I wish every comic I made was as much fun and well run as this.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

WONDERCON, Storytelling Across Comics, Games, and Beyond panel (MARCH 28, Noon pst)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (MAY 20)

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON SIGNING (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm)

INSPIRATION READINGS:

OK, for anyone needing a recap, last week I launched this chronicle, but in order for the logistics of it all to work, I needed to write my first chapter before those books – ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW and LONE GUNMAN – were announced.

So this is me actually responding to the response, and it’s been… a lot.

The announcement happened at ComicsPro, a convention for comic book retailers. It’s become one of my favorite cons, and every time I get the pleasure to go, I leave inspired and excited.

And since I knew it was too soon to talk about anything involved with LONE GUNMAN, I figured ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW would get the lion’s share of attention but I had no way of knowing how much a lion it would be. This little teaser image was released the day before the announcement:

By the end of the week, it hit three-quarter of a million views. Right now, it’s a little short of a million views, way more than anything either I or artist Rafael Albuquerque (my creative partner in all this) have ever had on anything we’ve worked on. We’re both gobsmacked by it, really, and don’t truly understand it. And the online response to the actual announcement has been tremendous. It just goes to show how well Scott Snyder and the other Absolute creative teams set the quality bar for the whole line.

I can honestly tell you I’m overwhelmed by the response on our book. It’s obviously the best result I could hope for, but I’m surprised by how much it kinda overwhelmed my nervous system, leaving me grateful but also neurotic.

After all, this is my first superhero book, and one big way they’re different from creator-owned books is that people come to them with their own pre-conceived notions of what a character is and what a book should be about. When people are responding this positively based on just promotional materials, are they seeing the same story I am? Or will they just get more disappointed if it doesn’t fit what they see in their head? But energy is always better than apathy, right?

I guess I’ll find out. Because what I keep telling myself is all I can really do is tell the story I want to tell – and for ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, it’s definitely a very personal one.

A few days later was the DC summit, where DC gathered a bunch of writers and artists on their books in one room to go over long-term plans.

And man, imposter syndrome is such a real thing.

I started as an assistant editor at DC’s mature readers imprint, Vertigo, in 2003, the year after the first Spider-Man movie. In many ways, I feel like I grew up alongside the industry. And while I had worked at DC while summits had gone on – either as an editor for their Vertigo line or an executive working on the TV side – I’d never been to one of the DC Universe’s editorial retreats. Summits were just places where I would occasionally bump into freelancers I liked in the halls. This was my first time actually in one.

And it was a wonderfully nurturing experience. My biggest highlights were from people I either just met or didn’t know well. Discovering comics legend Denys Cowan (Hardware, The Question) knew who I was (which my brain still cannot compute). Sitting next to James Harren (UltraMega) and getting to hang with him for a bit. Learning Matt Fraction (Hawkeye, Batman) was a fan of my work.

It’s weird to feel both like a veteran and a newbie at the same time. The editorial old fogie in me felt guilty I wasn’t giving advice to newer talent while the newbie writer in me worried I’d lead them astray with my untested thoughts. I’ve been in this industry for over two decades, and yet the imposter syndrome is still so real.

And I realized, for me, it’ll probably never fully go away. At one point, we were asked what advice we’d give ourselves ten years ago, and I realized that ten years ago, I had just quit a well-regarded tenure at DC to pursue writing with exactly nothing lined up, and now I was at DC again but as a writer, not as an executive. And I still felt the imposter syndrome just as strongly now as I did ten years ago. And I realized I’d tell myself that being a freelancer is letting your imposter syndrome fuel you and not control you, because it’s never fully going away. I wonder if I would have started my writing career sooner if I knew that.

Which brings me back to ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW, because my reaction to the very excited response is just another version of that, I suppose, and like I said before, all I can really do is remember I have a personal story I’ve been dying to tell and tell the hell out of it. Fortunately, I can be confidant it will have the sickest art ever, because the work Rafael Albuquerque and Marcello Maiolo (our colorist) is turning in will melt readers’ faces off.

Oh, one last thing I learned: After the announcement, there were a ton of stores I’ve signed at who reached out to set up signings for Absolute Green Arrow. As well as podcasters requesting interviews. All people who were kind of enough to do that for my creator-owned work, and was now excited to do it again on a big launch. When they were doing it for my own books, I always felt like they were doing me a favor – helping me out when I needed it. So them coming back around now with so much excitement in a weird way felt like we were all celebrating a new milestone together.

It made me wonder if that’s an aspect of “networking” we don’t talk enough about. Not just impressing people and making them like you. But being vulnerable and letting people help you when you need it. It’s not something I’m naturally good at, but I’m trying.

Pornsak Pichetshote

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2 (MARCH 18)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (MAY 20)

TRENTON CHARITY COMIC CON SIGNING (JUN 14, 10 am - 4 pm)

REFERENCE READINGS:

But I suppose all writing starts like that, so let’s just start:

What’s DAY 2?

There’s a lot of stories about how writers break into the industry. But there’s much less about how they maintain their career afterwards. Probably because that story is made up of a thousand tiny decisions that only form a narrative in hindsight, once the writer’s forgotten so many of those minute moves. And yet, it’s a story I’m obsessed with. I’ve sifted through my idols’ interviews and histories to piece theirs together, as I think most writers do. It’s undoubtedly an interesting story. But is it interesting to follow as it goes?

DAY 2 is my experiment to find out. It’s a 24-chapter story posted on the Friday of every other week for the next year. It starts with the announcement of the two highest-profile jobs in my career and follows what happens next as I try to write them and other secret projects in the undoubtedly politically tumultuous year of 2026. I have no idea if it will be interesting. I’m not a public person (I don’t even post personal photos on IG), so the idea of offering this kind of access to my life is – and I can’t underscore it enough – terrifying. The idea any aspect of my life might be interesting seems silly.

But this would be a good time for context: My name is Pornsak Pichetshote. I write comics and am probably best known for the Eisner- and Harvey-winning graphic novel THE GOOD ASIAN from Image Comics with art by Alexandre Tefenkgi or the horror hit INFIDEL with art by Aaron Campbell, also from Image. I also write television like Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger, Two Sentence Horror Stories and Light as a Feather. Before that, I was an executive at DC Comics, where I started what would become their current TV department, leading to (amongst other things) the Arrowverse of DC shows. And before that, I was a comics editor at DC Vertigo where I edited critical darlings like Jeff Lemire’s SWEET TOOTH, the New York Times bestseller THE UNWRITTEN by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, and the Eisner winning DAYTRIPPER by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.

And despite Forrest Gump-ing my way through comics / geek culture, I’ve always seen myself as an indie band. But this week, I’ve had two books announced which, I suppose, gets me out of the dingy bars I feel most at home playing.

The first is ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW – reimagining the iconic DC character as a serial killer targeting corrupt billionaires, the only clue to his identity being the green arrows he leaves in the bodies of his victims, a message to his very rich enemies that you can’t get away with killing Oliver Queen. I Know What You Did Last Summer for billionaires, it follows Dinah Lance – aka ABSOLUTE BLACK CANARY – as she’s tasked to unmask the Green Arrow Killer, all of her suspects drawn from the ranks of DC’s most dangerous archers. A six-issue urban horror murder-mystery so personal I honestly think working through its themes kept me out of depression during these increasingly tumultuous times. Given its topics, I can’t believe anyone is publishing it, but that’s the power of DC’s ABSOLUTE UNIVERSE. The megahit brainchild of comics ultra-mind writer Scott Snyder – and one of the most successful imprints in comics. The art is by powerhouse fan-favorite artist Rafael Albuquerque, and the following cover and pages make evident why I use the word powerhouse.

You can see what I’m psyched, right?

The second announcement is LONE GUNMAN with art by Alberto Ponticelli, one of the three spin-offs of James Tynion IV & Michael Walsh’s horror hit EXQUISITE CORPSES from Image Comics – arguably the biggest original comics hit of the past year – of which I also wrote on. When the time is right, Tiny Onion will reveal more about it, and it’ll be apparent why I’m unbelievably excited to write it.

Both are coming out this year. Both will probably introduce me to more readers than usually pick up my books. I’m very grateful for the opportunities. I am – oh my god – so so SO proud of what everyone on the teams are doing. But it also occurred to me it gives me the chance to tell this story I’ve always wanted to read. About this Day 2. Of what it’s like doing your own thing and then getting what you think is a big opportunity. Does it lead to more? Is it just sound and fury signifying nothing? Or will I screw up something along the way? Do you know it while it’s happening?

Speaking of screwing up… DAY 2 is also a chronicle of trying to write in 2026, what will probably be one of the most politically tumultuous years to live through… until next year. Because that’s the reality we live in now, so this story is also about how a writer writes during politically tumultuous times. And I don’t really know the answer to that in advance. I’m sure there’ll be times whatever happens in the world will make everything here offensively trivial. I don’t plan on ignoring that, but hope to write through it here in real time. I apologize in advance if I don’t handle it correctly. I worry in advance anything I say will be insensitive. I worry in advance anything I don’t will be worse. I have absolutely no idea what the right response is and will try to own up to my mistakes when I make them.

And since I have no idea if enough interesting things will happen to sustain a bi-monthly REPORTS FROM THE FRONT LINES, on the slow weeks, I’ll alternate it with THINGS I LEARNED ALONG THE WAY – lessons and insights I’ve learned over two decades (God, I’m old) working alongside some of the biggest names in comics and pop culture. Things I learned about making comics from watching much smarter creators than me.

That, and two additional regular features: COMING ATTRACTIONS featuring previews and information of my books and signings as they become relevant, and REFERENCE READINGS, a picture of something I’m reading as reference / inspiration for a project I’m writing that may or may not be announced without any context as to which project I’m referring to or why. Honestly, I’m just doing that for me. The answer might not always be as obvious as it seems.

Since my roots are in comic book editing, I’ve always believed in “open source” comics, providing access to how I make comics in my books, and this is just another version of that, I suppose - writing something I’d like to read. I’m sure there will be things that will happen I won’t be able to talk about, but my gut tells me there will still be interesting insights regardless. We’ll see if I’m right. If this feels like the kind of ride you’d like, well then, please subscribe and get ready for 23 more chapters of it. And with that…

Welcome to DAY 2, my currently theoretical reader,

Hope I survive the experience.

Pornsak Pichetshote

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COMING ATTRACTIONS:

EXQUISITE CORPSES VOL. 2 (MARCH 18)

ABSOLUTE GREEN ARROW # 1 (MAY 9)

REFERENCE READINGS:

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