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.
Now that Guild of Magic is done and I have a little bit more time, I have turned back to comic writing and am going to do a full-blown “issue” of Amazing Journey once a month, with weekly Wednesday new issue spotlights in between.
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)
This past week, I returned to the first issue script of my NYC Questing Guild comic that I had been noodling on for a few months in earnest and am trying to stick the landing, as it were. It should be a fun story for old and new readers to this world, but because it’s a comic and not a short story, I feel incentivized to deliver an issue that wallops you like you just read House of X #2.
Of course, that is an incredibly unrealistic goal for someone’s first comic issue, but because this will be a series that I am Kickstarting myself (with a long time between issues), I want to leave the reader wanting more after reading it.
Plot-wise, I have a general direction I want to go for the first arc, but need to spend some time solidifying the story. The way I plot my fiction is to write toward big tentpole beats, adding in details earlier in the book to make late-added plot points mesh seamlessly, but you can’t really do that when the beginning of your story has already been drawn, colored, lettered, and released into the world.
Once that script is done, I’ll be approaching an artist to gauge their interest/availability, and then hopefully the issue can go into production by the mid-to-late summer.
While that’s progressing, I have a second 60% written script of an entirely different series completely unconnected to the NYC Questing Guild that I really want to finish. It’s an idea that’s been gestating in my head in various forms for maybe a decade and I really want to make this story a reality.
Next month I hope to do a deeper dive into writing my first issue, but until then, here are the books of the week!
What I’m reading this week / Variant Watch
It’s a light-ish week on the Marvel side, with only one ongoing book and the rest filled with minis, with Amazing Spider-Man #26 looming over us from next week and its already-spoiled spoiler.
But still, some good stuff to pick up!
Thor #34: With only two issues left, it remains to be seen whether we are getting the conclusion promised at the end of the first arc, before the title is relaunched as Immortal Thor. But even if we don’t, I have been enjoying Torunn Grønbekk’s run on the book and am looking forward to more Ten Realms intrigue from her in Realm of X coming later this summer.
Darth Vader: Black, White & Red #2: More Darth Vader bad-ass-ery!
Fury #1: A trip through the decades featuring Nick Fury Sr. and Jr. from Al Ewing! Plus an awesome variant cover from Mike del Mundo. This dovetails nicely with Ryan North’s Secret Invasion series from last year which I am catching up on.
The Ambassadors #5: Mark Millar’s bi-weekly series reaches its penultimate issue with the Australian superhero who is apparently an asshole? It’s all seemingly building to the Millar-verse crossover series Big Game from Millar and Pepe Larraz later this summer, but I hope this superhero team comes back for its own series after.
Backlist Pick!
I remember trying to get a copy of Strange Academy #1 back in the spring of 2020 and finding all the issues on eBay going for exorbitant prices.1 I managed to buy the Arthur Adams variant for a reasonable price, but now that its value has seemingly quadrupled, I don’t trust myself to read the single issue copy and so have checked out the trade from my library.
Anyway, this series from
and Humberto Ramos is set at the Marvel universe’s first magic academy for young sorcerers! A fun concept made even better by its execution. The series and its follow-on recently wrapped, but Marvel is teasing a new story in the fall.What are you picking up this week? And were you trying to avoid the Amazing Spider-Man #26 spoiler but were foiled by the entirety of the comic book press?
The first issue went back for a fifth printing, something I am pretty sure hasn’t happened since for a Marvel comic, but I am not going to verify that claim.
I know I was late picking it up, but I just grabbed my copy or W0rldtr33 #1 from Image by Tynion. I haven't read it yet but it's Tynion so it has to be decent, right? Also, I've had my eye on that Strange Academy #1, but just haven't pulled the trigger hoping the prices might come down.