Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base...
Chapter 4. Senior slump.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Self doubt!
Late night listening!
Stuff I didn’t write!
Zealot returns!
What do you want from me?!
Hey, it’s me again. Two real reasons for sending out another newsletter so soon. The first is that my dear friend Kelly Thompson sent out her 4th Newsletter this week, so I have to send out my 4th one just to keep up. We compete in all things. Very healthy friendship. Follow her excellent newsletter her.
The second reason is harder to explain but I’ll try. So I’m still learning how to do this thing the right way. And honestly it’s sort of frustrating because, as you may have guessed, there is no actual right way. I have an idealized version of this in my mind though and we aren’t there yet. But please, if you have stuff you want to read about, stuff you like, anything, let me know. I’m trying to make this enjoyable for both of us…
This is weird. Let me start over.
Ever since I was a kid I always wanted to be invisible.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with being in the spotlight. Well, not complicated really. I fucking hate it. In high school I played bass in a band but couldn’t bare the thought of having people watching me, so I took up drums. People notice drummers less. The only problem is people tend to really notice bad drummers, which I was. Also practicing drums in a Manhattan apartment building gets the police called on you, but that’s another story. When I got older the handful of high school shows I had played was enough for me and I switched gears again. I wanted to be involved in music still but decided to put out records rather than play on them. That was the right idea for me, but putting out records is a hard business to stay in love with. So time passed and I switched again. This time to writing. I still wanted to make things anonymously.
I mentioned in a previous chapter that my whole family are writers. My dad wrote hundreds of hours of television and he only appeared on TV twice in his life I think. My mom wrote a movie and was so removed from the spotlight of it that I didn’t even find out about it until the creepy guy at the rental place recommended it to me randomly. My friends and I watched it and I was very amused to find out the writer shared a name with my mom. When I told her she was much less amused that I was renting R rated slasher films at sleepovers. Either way my understanding of writers was always that they are seen through their work and nowhere else. Unless you live with them.
My heroes always slept on floors.
Very early in my career I was asked to be on a music and comics panel with, among other people, Kieron Gillen. I was very excited because I was a fan going back to Phonogram. On the panel someone asked about where they see the intersection of making music and making comics. Kieron gave an amazingly smart and poetic answer that I won’t even attempt to recreate here. But he talked about the transformative powers that are in both, about the pageantry and the fantasy of it all, and Ziggy Stardust. It was a great answer and the audience loved it. And then it was my turn to talk. And I did. I talked about how comics was like punk rock to me because there were no barricades. I talked about how some of my favorite songs had only ever been heard by a few thousand people and some of my favorite bands never played anything bigger than a basement or a legion hall, and that felt like comics to me. I talked about how touring bands would play shows with the local bands, sometimes just kids, and there was always respect, always a sense that we all do the same thing and the size of the crowd and the number of record sales meant nothing. Or that’s how it’s supposed to work. That was very comics to me. And how all those bands would play as hard and as fast as they can, leaving it all on the stage. And they’d share that stage with anyone who wanted to get up and sing along, dance, dive off, or just sit behind the cabinets so they don’t get kicked in the head. And that felt like comics too. And I talked about how those bands would finish their sets and then they’d be at their merch tables hanging out and asking if anyone had a floor they could crash on. And that felt so much like comics. I love the fact that the audience of comics could be the next creators, and the creators are also the audience. How you can run into your favorite writer or artist at a comic shop or at a convention and just talk about this shared thing that most people don’t understand, this shared secret. It’s a club, it’s a culture, it’s a bond we all share, and there’s nothing that stops you from getting on that stage and singing along to your favorite song. You just have to pay the $5 at the door same as everyone else. It was an overly sentimental and maybe idealistic answer, but I believed it all then. And on good days I still do.
The audience had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.
What the hell does any of that have to do with this newsletter?
These two ideas above coexisted in my head when I thought about making comics. Like my family, I could just make comics in anonymity. And like my favorite bands, I wouldn’t be in the spotlight because there was no real spotlight. It was all just “people who like comics.” But, like they say, the reality on the ground is very different.
I spend a lot of time struggling with the idea of promoting “myself.” It’s a weird balance for creatives in general I’m sure, but when so much of a big 2 comic writer’s career is built around some of the most famous characters in the world it becomes even more important and even more surreal. I wish I could just put out comics and the work would speak for itself. But that’s idealistic or maybe just naive. I am really proud of the stuff I’m working on and really proud of all my collaborators. So I don’t feel like I can just disappear and let the work find an audience. I need to be promoting it and helping it find it’s way into readers hands for the sake of my collaborators, my publishers, and my career.
That leads me back here to all of you. I am always beyond thankful for any person who has ever read anything I’ve written or taken a chance on my stuff. It means more than I can ever say. I hope if you read something of mine and liked it, you’d consider giving more stuff a chance. Hence this newsletter. But I don’t want to just send out press releases and solicit copy to you, as much as that would help with me not wanting to be in the spotlight, because it’s gross. Ideally I can give you, the person reading this, some fun, and insight, and other stuff you want from this newsletter. It shouldn’t just be a catalog in the shape of an email. It should be personal and interesting. I want it to be a conversation between us. And I hope you’ll forgive me if I talk too much and sometimes, in the middle of this conversation, I say “hey you should buy my book” though. That’s my compromise.
Which brings me back to the top. I’m not sure that this is the most fun or fulfilling version of this yet. But I’m going to try and send them more often but make them shorter (off to a bad start here) and more interesting. So let me know what you want to talk about. And thanks for coming along for the ride while I figure this all out. I really appreciate it.
Late night listening!
This week I’ve been going back to a musical well I have gone back to over and over again in my life. I was a kid when I first heard Billy Bragg and the mix of heartbreak, hooks, hope, and hard working people hit me almost as hard as anything at the time ever had. Years later and I find myself coming back to Billy whenever I need to be reminded that there can be nobility to a pop song, that we can use our voices to call out injustice and show that a better world is possible. And if that’s true for a 3 minute song, certainly the same must be true for a comic book. So I stay up late and stare at an empty page waiting for me to fill it, and I listen to Billy tell me “Someone asking questions and basking in the light of the fifteen fame-filled minutes of the fanzine writer. Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is. I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses while looking down the corridor, but to where the van is waiting. I'm looking for the great leap forward.”
Stuff I Didn’t write!
This weeks not-a-book-report is about the excellent Appalachian horror graphic novel REDFORK by Alex Paknadel, Nil Vendrell, Giulia Brusco, and Ryan Ferrier. Full disclosure, two of these people have stayed at my house and one of them said that a hamburger I grilled them was “Very solid. B-.” which is a hilarious joke, but I took it personal.
If that cover doesn’t make it clear, this book is wild mix of smalltown despair and Lovecraftian horror. Following a man who finds himself out of prison and returning home to his small mining town on the eve of a catastrophic accident. More than just mine explosion, our protagonist finds himself caught in the middle of labor disputes, the opioid crisis, and a family that has fallen apart in his absence. It’s a heartbreaking set up for a rural drama, but it’s incredibly fertile soil for a horror story.
Nil’s art does an excellent job switching back and forth from deeply grotesque to deeply personal and intimate moments. Where other artists might lean into one or the other, or give themselves whiplash trying to do both, REDFORK never loses a step in its horror or its humanity.
And huge credit must go to Alex’s writing. When I wrote a Constantine story late last year I turned to Alex, who is from England, to help make sure that my Queen’s English worked on the page. He suggested I have John Constantine say such complete gibberish sentences as “spare a smoke? Mine went walkies” and “chance’d be a fine thing.” I was obviously mad at his blatant attempt to sabotage my story, but I respected his audacity. So I went into this hoping his Queen’s English made rural American characters sound and feel absurd on the page. But he didn’t. Instead the book is filled with colorful, wild, unique, and honest-feeling characters who give the story real stakes. It’s a feat. I wish he’d asked me for dialogue help because they’d be saying wildly stupid shit in this book if he had. But lucky for us he didn’t, I guess.
The backdrop, a small town with no future damning themselves by turning to demagoguery, is the kind of thing writers spend careers chasing. And a lesser writer would stop there and go to bed feeling like they’d hit a homerun. But Alex never loses sight of the human drama in the story, the people who were tossed aside by the machines and preyed upon by the monsters. It takes a political allegory and a great horror premise and it elevates them to something much more than their already engrossing parts. A true mastery of the craft all around.
If this sounds good to you you can order it here.
Zealot returns!
I know I just wrote a long thing about not wanting to flood you with my annoying self promotion. Let’s ignore that for a bit. I am just so unbelievably excited about this that I am going to be annoying here. I am vast. I contain multitudes. I am sad to report that BATMAN URBAN LEGENDS #5 is the last of my GRIFTER stories. But I am beyond happy to report that BATMAN URBAN LEGENDS #6 has a story about one of my favorite badasses in all of comics- ZEALOT returns to the DC universe to have words with a certain Amazonian. Words by me and art by Chris Sprouse! I can’t show you any of it, but trust me when I say it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.
What do you want from me?!
Time to return to the old mail bag. Let’s see what we got. And remember you can reply to this newsletter with your questions as if it were a normal email! Magic! And if I choose to answer your question in the newsletter you can legally hug me if you ever see me on the street.
Johnny writes-
Hey Johnny. I spent a while thinking about this and came up with a bunch of answers like “seeing fan reactions” or “reading insightful criticism” or “getting great editorial notes”, all of which are good choices, but then I remembered that my answer is probably the same as every comic writers. Seeing art for your story come in. When I was first making pitches I used to get so excited opening emails with art attached that I’d get jittery. I remember sadly thinking “at some point this won’t be exciting anymore.” And here I am a bunch of years later getting art from Chris Sprouse, Darick Robertson, Tyler Boss, Francesco Francavilla, and a bunch of other amazing people in my inbox this past week… the feeling never goes away. It is the best part of the job by miles.
That’s it for me for now.
Stay safe. Take care of each other.
-Matthew Rosenberg
NYC 5/30/21
Sorry to be a gadfly, but what movie did your mom write? I only feel like I can ask this question because I bought 4 copies of 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank (one for each kid) and because I like slashers.
Yo, Matty Ro! (Sorry, you should never have called attention to it. It’s a thing now.)
I want to start by saying I’m a writer as well. Ok, maybe I’m more of a baby writer, in that I have only written a handful of things and no one really wants any of it. I guess “almost a writer” is more accurate. I hate the idea of promoting my stuff too (which is easy at the moment because of the no one wanting any of it part), but hearing you promote your stuff comes off as genuinely entertaining. I love listening to artists talk about art, musicians talk about music, and writers talking about writing. Creativity and passion are wonderful to witness and we get to see more of it when you gush about it. So I guess what I’m saying is: I understand how much it feels weird to say “you should buy this thing I did” but it’s far less weird for us on this end. I mean, most of us already are? I know I am.
Anyways, I’ll try to remind myself that I said this, just in case someone does want my stuff. No promises, though.
You’re doing great.