Editor’s Note: It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s New Comic Book Day and another edition of Amazing Journey!
The Amazing Journey column will touch on a comics-related topic, such as writing the first issue of a series, what it’s like to run a comic book store, working with artists, and how writing comics is different from writing prose.
Amazing Journey back issues
True believers unite (#1) | My comics origin story (#2) | Comic event series (#3) | The comics of Kickstarter (#4) | Single issues or trades? (#5) | From prose to comics (#6) | Adapting a celebrated fantasy series into a comic (#7) | Charting a career in comics (#8) | Comic book spoilers (#9) | Lessons from Kieron Gillen’s masterclass (#10) | Comics marketing 101 (#11) Designing memorable characters (#12)
It’s a bit of a slow news week, as evidenced by this McDonalds/Loki ad campaign being the most interesting thing I could think of to discuss:
On the writing end, I finally pushed through a roadblock and am finishing up the last few pages of my comic script. And I tentatively have an artist lined up, so it looks like things will hopefully be headed into production next month! More on that in a bit…
I’m also working on a fun piece about writing first issues that will collect advice from a bunch of different comic writers. Hoping to have that hit next month as well.
In the meantime, consider this post an open thread and your second chance to enter the August giveaway. To enter, simply leave a comment with your answer to any of the Questions of the Week from any August Amazing Journey post.
What’s something great you’ve read recently (a book, a comic, an interesting article)? Or a movie or TV show that you recently enjoyed?
What I’m reading this week / Variant Watch
Immortal X-Men #14: This one panel is perfect:
Also I love the homage cover by Elizabeth Torque!
Amazing Spider-Man #31 (Legacy #925): It’s another over-sized, multiples of 25 issue, which has promised to set up year two of Zeb Wells’ and John Romita Jr’s run on the book, part of which we know will involve the medium-size cross-over event Gang War. Mary Jane is also poised to make her hero debut as Jackpot, but I am hoping that there will be a continuation of Peter & MJ’s first-year plotline in the fallout of Rabin’s defeat.
Children of the Vault #1: The post-human Children captured my imagination during their appearance in Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men #1, and their story in Hickman’s run and now Gerry Duggan gets its own mini-series, as they emerge from Forge’s stasis trap. If none of that made sense, then scroll down to my backlist recommendation for this week.
What are you picking up this week?
Backlist Recommendation
Mike Carey introduced the Children of the Vault in his Supernovas arc from 2006. With art by Chris Bachalo, this story in a post M-Day world starts with a desperate Sabretooth fleeing to the Xavier Institute after running into the Children in Mexico. Read it on Marvel Unlimited or get it in the collected hardcover.
The Children returned at the start of Hickman’s X-Men run and a group of X-Men were sent into the temporal Vault (where time passes rapidly compared to the outside world) to assess the situation. Months later and the group still hadn’t returned. This passage of time was coupled with Hickman not returning to the story for more than a year, and this real-world passage of time helped raise the stakes. Unfortunately, you can read all three issues in a row now, but if I were you, I would read issue six and then wait a year!
Hmmm... I'm actually not picking up anything new this week. It is kind of slow as you noted but it's great to hear you're making progress on your own comic. That's great! Can't wait to hear more.
As for something I've read recently that I've enjoyed... I've been reading through the Nine Princes in Amber series by Roger Zelazny... but I've been seeking out and buying the old Avon paperbacks from the 1970s. Cool art, great writing and I'm intrigued by how these old books were like 200ish pages and still epic.