Have won their first victory...
Chapter 5. I'm all outta slumps.
Thinking about my ceiling and Anthony Bourdain but not at the same time.
Grifter has some friends in Gotham!
Batman also has some friends in Gotham!
The Joker does not.
Stuff I didn’t write! - Young Shadow.
What do you want from me?!
Stuff worth supporting!
Hello again.
As you can see I have gone to great lengths to make my dispatches prettier. Or much more unwieldy for your inbox. You can choose. My thinking was “I write comics. That’s a visual medium. My little letter thing should be more visually appealing.” But then other me pointed out “I’m a writer. I don’t know how to make things look nice.” And, sadly, other me was correct. So I stole art from a bunch of books I wrote. Thanks to Tyler, Otto, Ryan & Antonio, Josh & Amanda, Travel & Rachelle, and Salvador for helping me fake it.
Along those same lines, my good buddy and excellent writer Ed Brisson told me I had to stop taking screenshots of emails for my Q&A section because they are too hard to read on a phone. I specifically write this to not be read on phones. It is supposed to be printed up and read by candlelight, but I can never say no to Ed. Also it was just announced that Ed will be writing some AMAZING SPIDER-MAN issues coming up! You should congratulate him by subscribing to his Substack and reading it on your phone.
It’s summertime and I am young, dumb, and full of Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine, so I decided to get out of town for a few days. Go to the country to do some work and be around a tree or two, stop in and see my mom so she can tell me that I should be directing movies (?) and also working less (?!), maybe try a new chocolate milk. But it turns out when you’re in the middle of the woods to get away from everything, including most technology, and then you find out you have to record a Zoom video for your publisher, that’s a problem. What do you do? You pack your stuff up and head home early. Which was actually fine because it turns out the woods are really dirty and full of bugs. Lesson learned.
But then I came home to a very exciting development.
That’s right. My fucking ceiling caved in over my bed. It turns out when you see a crack in your ceiling and say “Is that a crack?” and then respond “Nah” and laugh, it’s a good joke. When that crack grows bigger every week for four years and you just repeat that joke over and over, it becomes a great joke. And then when it falls onto your bed and crushes a bunch of your stuff, it goes back to being only an okay joke.
I had assumed that my ceiling was just a bunch of plaster over some… well I guess I don’t have any idea how you make a building. But however I imagined it was very not correct. So the place I gently lay my head every night to have my anxiety nightmares was crushed under 90 pounds of plaster, cement, wood, and horse hair. Why horse hair? Apparently they used to use it to hold plaster together. So if you live in a building that’s over 100 years old parts of it are held together by an 1800’s horse. That’s a fun thing to think about. We could Jurassic Park it and recreate a long dead horse, but I don’t know that horses were any better back then so it may not be worth it.
Most of the people I have talked to about this were much more freaked out than I was. Am I unnaturally calm about stuff like this or am I overly confident that 90 lbs of building material falling on my head wouldn’t kill me? I’m not sure. I think it probably wouldn’t have killed me, right? I use a lot of pillows if that helps you calculate my odds.
Anyway, fix stuff in your life before it crushes you.
Well that was an awful segue…
Today is the three year anniversary of chef, writer, tv person, and world traveller Anthony Bourdain taking his own life. He was that rare person, the larger than life personality trapped in a down to earth body. He inspired and educated and just seemed pretty fucking cool. A lot of people will have a lot more elegant things to say about him today, but I do have my own little connection to him I have been thinking about.
Anthony Bourdain was my neighbor for a bunch of years. I think he lived two floors above me. But we lived in a pre-war building in upper Manhattan that had a lot of apartments in it, so it wasn’t exactly Mr. Rogers levels of friendliness amongst all the neighbors. We’d pass each other in the lobby sometimes or share an elevator with a pleasant enough hello. I had read his article in the New Yorker that eventually became Kitchen Confidential but I don’t think I’d read the book yet. He was on TV too at that point. He was already a darling of the culinary world but he had a burgeoning level of celebrity outside that as well. None of that really registered too much with me.
But I began to notice a curious thing. I was always out late. Going to shows, traveling, or just generally being out late for the sake of being out late. And I’d come home at 2 or 3 AM and there in our lobby would be Anthony Bourdain sitting with our night doorman, drinking and chatting. It’s a very little thing but it really stuck with me.
The building was pretty fancy but not opulent. Fancy enough to have a doorman though. When you get to certain levels of class and wealth people sometimes seem to stop registering people like doormen as people. They know their names, they exchange pleasantries, they give Christmas bonuses, and that’s where the relationship ends. But coming home and seeing the most famous person in our building not just recognizing and treating our doorman like a person, but actually hanging out with him, was pretty endearing. They were friends. I'd come in and they'd be drinking and laughing or talking intensely about something or other. They’d both greet me warmly, in a way uncommon for neighbors in New York. A couple times they’d offer me a drink and I’d decline. I don’t drink but it was a nice thing to come home to.
I know this all comes off in a very pretentious way on my end, but I’m not entirely sure how else to frame it. It is easy to see the roles we inhabit in society as having firm dividing lines between them. How many times a day do you see people be rude and dehumanizing to the people under them at work, the people who make their food, or deliver their packages, or sell them their goods, or open their doors for them. The people society tells you “you work for” and the people society says “work for you” is a simple one, but there are so many of these artificial lines we subconsciously recognize on any given day.
But Anthony Bourdain didn’t seem to see those lines. He wanted to be with people who had good stories, knew good jokes, and liked good food. I don't know how to describe it other than to say that it helped me at a young age clearly see that the things that separate us from each other are much smaller than we think. The barriers we make don’t make our lives better and they are ours to destroy if we want.
Anyway, be good to each other. It will make your life better, I promise.
And if you need help, get it. Please.
BATMAN URBAN LEGENDS #4 is out now. If you don’t know what happens yet, all I can say is it’s a big one. It was my first time writing 3 different DC characters that are also 3 of my favorite DC characters, so I am very excited for it to come out. It’s my penultimate Grifter issue and I’m making sure it gets messy before I’m dragged off this book.
And out next week I have a story I am really excited about coming out. LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT Chapter 12 is out digitally on June 18th. It’s only $.99 cents and you can pre-order it here right now and read it on your computer, or your smartphone, or your tablet, or if you own that one place I Airbnb’d once you can read it on your refrigerator. So weird.
The charming and lovely Cian Tormey drew the hell out of my script and coloring legend Matt Hollingsworth colored the hell out of what Cian drew. And then Aditya Bidikar came in and lettered the hell out of all of that. And all of this was orchestrated by our wonderful editor Dave “Have Heart” Wielgosz who, you guessed it, edited the hell out of it.
I can’t tell you much about it but it’s got Batman, a lot of water, and an unlikely team up with someone who doesn’t mind a lot of water. Oh, and it’s named after a Bob Dylan song of which Dylan once mused “After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song.” Our story isn’t really that heavy, but I stole the title anyway. I’ll see you in court, Bob.
And for those of you who don’t have computer refrigerators the story will be in comic shops in a few months.
Speaking of comics to read digitally, the first chapter of my very wild new series THE JOKER PRESENTS: THE PUZZLEBOX is available to read right now! Hurry!
Each chapter will feature a different artist but we launch with the amazing Jesús Merino and Ulises Arreola on art, Ferran Delgado lettering it, and covers by the brilliant Chip Zdarsky. We really tried to capture the feel of old Batman stories and even the show, but filtered through the Joker’s POV. The story is wild and weird and ambitious and absurd. God bless our editor Katie Kubert for holding it all together, because this one is hard.
It will be coming to comic shops before too long, but you can start reading it now from Comixology or the DC app. Or, if you have DC UNIVERSE INFINITE you can read it now and get a bonus story every week alongside the regular chapter. Honestly the bonus stories are some of my favorite parts of the the book. You can check it out with a 7 Day Free Trial!
I picked up YOUNG SHADOW, the new graphic novel from the mighty Ben Sears, recently. I’ve been a fan of Ben’s for a long time. In addition to playing drums in a bunch of Louisville hardcore and metal-ish bands I really like like Xerxes and Whips/Chains, Ben just makes cool stuff. Also, I could be wrong, but I think the first full cartoon story he ever drew was for the old webcomic I co-wrote MENU. Anyway he’s been making cool stuff for Koyama and Oni Press for a while now and his newest offering from Fantagraphics is my favorite so far.
YOUNG SHADOW follows a young superhero in a semi-dystopian future who is just trying to help people. That includes sweeping up for local shopkeepers, rescuing a dog from some crust punks, and messing with the cops whenever possible. I couldn’t help but feel like this is the book Frank Miller would have written if he wanted to make THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS but he wanted to make it okay for little kids to read, he only wanted to use Robin, and he really disliked cops.
Ben’s art is truly something magical. He manages to use simple lines and shapes to build very detailed and intricate worlds that have a real atmosphere. His characters are charmingly adorable but also have a great capacity for action and violence, and have real emotional weight to them. His stuff truly doesn’t look like anything else I’m reading and it fits the story perfectly.
If you’re burned out on the grim world of superheroes and want a very earnest, sweet, and fun take, YOUNG SHADOW is very worth your time.
Time to answer some questions. Fingers crossed I didn’t get threatened too much this week. Not optimistic. Let’s find out.
Dan has written in to say-
“Great start to the newsletter! My request as a fellow comic writer is how do you build up your characters? Especially in regard to giving them a unique voice. I struggle with this idea and worry that my characters all 'sound' the same.
Looking forward to more newsletter!”
Hey Dan, thanks for reading. I’m always excited/nauseated by the prospect of giving advice to other writers. Even though, for all I know you just asked this casually while you were on line at the bank and don’t really care, I find it to be a lot of pressure. Maybe I’m just measuring myself against all the comic pros who gave me great advice. When I was an obnoxious little kid I used to delight in giving people bad directions. Any tourist who crossed my path and asked where Central Park was undoubtedly ended up walking in the opposite direction. So I’m going to embrace the mid-point of those two ends of the spectrum here and try to give you some good advice but let you know I might be sending you into the river.
Character work is always fascinating to me because it is both the most fundamental part of a story for me, and it is the most complicated. That’s not true for everyone, but you didn’t ask everyone’s newsletter, you asked mine. I think in the simplest terms though characters are made of two separate things- their actions and their words. It seems obvious but it really isn’t.
First, when you create a character you should be defining who they are beyond the confines of your story. What do they do? What do they care about? Where did they come from? All of that will help them become more realized in your story. When each character has a unique backstory, a unique set of things they care about, or even a unique set of goals, that will help inform how they move through your story. What a character does is defining to them, so make sure what you understand what your characters do and why.
But it’s also good to remember that characters can approach the same thing in slightly different ways, and those differences will help define them. It might seem like your two meth-dealing bikers are pretty similar when you start writing, but when you understand one of them sells meth to help pay for their grandma’s pool maintenance and the other sells meth because he just really loves meth and he wants more people to try it, you will start to see avenues where they can become very different from each other while still doing the same things.
The second part is the character’s voice. The key to finding that is listening to people talk. All the time. Studying it. Paying attention to it. Being weird about it. Go eat dinner by yourself in a crowded restaurant and listen to everyone else’s conversations. Ride the subway for a few hours and just take mental notes. But don’t stop at real people. Study characters in movies and tv shows you like. Study characters in comics and prose you like. But just think about the way different people let language move through them. Start focussing on little things and bigger things that feel unique. Anything from repeated phrases, to vocal ticks, to just the way different people voice their view of the world. Who speaks assertively. Who mumbles. Who doesn’t use contractions. Who uses big words to try and sound smart and who uses big words because they are smart. All of those can speak to character in some way. So just as you’d want to tell an artist “this character is tall and tough and looks like they know how to fight” you should be making notes in the same way for yourself about how they talk and what that says about them.
And, I can’t stress this enough, read all your dialogue out loud. It feels weird. It’s embarrassing. But it matters so much. Even though they are just drawings of people, treat your script as if it has to be read by real actors, and then you audition for every role. When you go to say a line and you realize you can’t make it not sound clunky or awkward, it means the line sucks and you need to clean it up. So much of character work is making nothing into somebody people would want to listen to. If you can do that, you’re well on your way to a good story.
Hope that helps. I look forward to reading your stuff sometime.
Since I’ve already been talking about mental health and we’re in the throes of watching local government after local government unveil some of the most brutal and cruel anti-trans legislation in the history of this country, I figured it’s a good time to encourage people to support the trans community and especially focus on mental and financial help.
Trans Lifeline is a non-profit organization offering direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis – for the trans community, by the trans community. They are an organization I try to donate to every year because the work they do is so vital and offering support to vulnerable and at risk people should be all of our responsibilities.
If you can afford to donate please consider it.
And if you are a member of the trans community and in need help please reach out to them- translifeline.org or call US (877) 565-8860
Wow, this one really got away from me. Thanks for sticking around. This is your post credits scene as a reward.
-Matthew Rosenberg
NYC 6/8/21
Wow, I learned a lot this week. Ceilings made from horse hair is the midnight dread I didn’t know I needed (or that would be thrust upon me), so thanks for that?
But seriously, the writing advice was super good too. I love listening to random conversations around me. Many have surprised me. I don’t want to go so far as to say I’ve even taken notes a few times, but I totally have. Whoops.