Custodian of the stolen plans...
Chapter 16: What's The Furthest Place From Here?
My thoughts on announcing our book!
A cover examination!
Support for Haiti!
Okay. Last week was a big one. Not a lot of sleep. We announced that WHAT’S THE FURTHEST PLACE FROM HERE? is coming out starting this November from the lovely folks at Image Comics. Tyler and I are so excited to finally get this book out into the wild. And so unbelievably nervous. It’s a good kind of nervous, but also gives you feeling that you might barf at any given moment… But a good kind of barf?
Why so nervous? Good question, Joker. I think some of that is normal anytime you put something out in the world. And some of it just comes naturally to me. I’m a worrier by nature and very self conscious. So making a book like this, that feels so very personal, is a bit overwhelming. But some of the nerves come from the fact that we are really pushing ourselves to try and do new things and challenge ourselves. WTFPFH? is one of the best things I’ve ever done, but it’s also one of the most challenging.
When Tyler and I finished 4 KIDS WALK INTO A BANK we immediately began working on our next project and got a little ways into it before I think we both realized that we were just doing another version of the same book. 4 Kids was a critical and commercial success beyond anything we could have hoped, and we had fun doing it, so it makes sense that we’d instinctually go back to the well and try it again. But that also sucks to do. People tell us all the time that they liked 4 Kids because it felt different from a lot of other stuff. And we liked it because it was all new to us. So going back and trying to recreate that just felt like it was cheating our readers and cheating ourselves. We decided to throw out everything we had and start a new project. Something different, and difficult, and weird, and wonderful. And that project became WTFPFH?. But all the confidence and ego and insistence on pushing ourselves to try new things is over… The sowing was fun, but now it’s time do all this reaping. And for those who don’t know, reaping can be stressful. Hence the general barfiness and lack of sleep.
I could talk a lot about how creativity and reinvention are the food that feeds the artistic soul and how just making the same stuff all the time is a form of mind death and ends up not just hurting the artist but also the audience, even if it is often the more lucrative path to walk. But nobody wants to read all that bummer stuff. So I will be positive and say that after all that I think we’ve made a book that is weird and different, but is still fun and full of heart and character and action and intrigue and all the stuff you like. I said fun right?
But it still feels like something only Tyler and I would make, and that was the goal. I think we’ve made something people will dig, but more importantly we’ve made something we’re proud of. I know telling you that ‘I care more about me liking it than you liking it’ sounds rude as I basically beg you to buy it, but I promise it’s not. Well, maybe it is a little, but only in the way that it’s something creative people think but rarely say. I 100% want you to like the book. I promise. But I think the best chance of it being something that people care about and something that resonates lies in it coming from an honest place. This isn’t something we made because we saw what was popular, or felt like there was an opening in the market, or any of that. We made this book because we believe in it and it matters to us, and we wanted to make something honest and personal and not try to chase trends or sell movie rights or any of that. And making something for ourselves is scary and really makes you feel vulnerable and exposed. But it’s a gamble. In doing all this our hope is other people will find something in the book that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Something honest and real that speaks to them the same way it speaks to us.
…
barf.
Moving on! We aren’t showing off much of the interior pages of WHAT’S THE FURTHEST PLACE FROM HERE? even though they are gorgeous. We will soon though. In the meantime I wanted to talk about the covers.
This is the main cover. Tyler drew it. There is a special thing that happens in comics as a writer. You talk with your artist about what you see in your head and it’s clumsy and awkward and you feel like you can’t describe how perfect the thing you want to see on the page is. And then sometimes the art comes back and they understood what you were trying to say, and they saw all the parts that didn’t work so they took those out and made it far better than you could ever imagine. This cover is the perfect encapsulation of that experience.
This record store is a key location in our book. It serves as a sort of home for our cast of characters. It is their safe space in a very alien world. But it’s also an abandoned record store standing alone in the apocalypse so we needed something that felt both familiar and alien, special and forgotten. It had to feel creepy and lonely, but also intriguing. And I think Tyler nailed all of that and then some. It’s a really haunting image and his color choices accentuate his ability to make choices I think few other artists would make and still be 100% correct. When we can show off the cover to issue #2 in a few weeks I think people will be losing their minds all over again about how good he is at all this.
Haiti was hit by another devastating earthquake last week. For those that don’t know much about the tragic history of this beautiful country, it is one the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere and has been a target of exploitation and oppression for well over a century. Following an apocalyptic earthquake in 2010 that left 300,000+ people dead, the country has never fully recovered. Promised aid and relief often never came. Corruption and crime managed to drain any support that did come. And on top of all that the country has been hit with wave after wave of disasters both natural and man made. From Hurricanes, to Covid, to the assassination of their president last month, Haiti is more desperately in need of support than ever.
Hope For Haiti is an organization that works with local groups and communities throughout Haiti in the hopes of creating sustainability and reliable infrastructure. Charity Navigator gives them a 94.32 rating and reports that an impressive 95.9% of the money they raised to program expenses. If you have money to spare, anything you can give will make a real impact for people in Haiti in this desperate time.
To make your donation go a little bit further, if you donate this week and send me a screenshot or forward me your receipt, I will increase my donation by $10.
Stay safe. Take care of each other.
-Matthew Rosenberg
NYC 8/23/21
I love that even the acronyms for your book titles are longer than most other book titles.
I’m very excited for WTFPFH? and appreciate your candor in discussing its origins and your motivations behind what it’s success will be measured by. But also, where’s that chocolate milk update?