Newsletter #238: Best Summer Ever

Hey guys, it’s Scott.

It is Thursday, August 20th. I can’t believe it’s been a month. I’m so, so sorry. I keep trying to find time and find like, the perfect moment to do it and it’s just been a crazy end of the summer with three boys of all different ages doing very different things. Our oldest is going back to college in Boston in a week. I can’t believe it. It’s been amazing having him here. Our middle guy is going into sophomore year of high school, so he’s busy with all kinds of academic stuff. And our littlest guy, our seven year-old, is a wild man with all his camp and outdoorsy stuff. So it’s just juggling a lot, a lot of stuff.

But first and foremost, a bit of housekeeping. Let’s do a class. I know I’ve been talking about doing cold opens and I have a whole class planned with cold opens, but I was talking to buddy Phil Kennedy Johnson, who’s a longtime friend, and I figured he was free to do a class. And he has one of the biggest books of the year coming out, Marvel’s Midnight Spider-Man, in just a couple months and he’s got Final Order Cut-Off coming soon.

So we thought maybe we’d do a class about rebranding superheroes, kind of carving out a space where you set up a big swing that takes a superhero in a new direction. How do you convince the publisher of letting you do this? How far ahead do you plan? All of that kind of stuff. So we’ll get into it. Really hope you guys can make it. It’s going to be a lot of fun. You can catch it live with a paid subscription of $7/month (or $75/year). That will be this this coming Wednesday, August 26th, at 9:30pm EST. And we’ll send a link to everybody that’s a paid subscriber.

And yeah, so just catching you up on a little bit of what we’ve been doing this summer. It’s been an insane summer. Just starting with San Diego alone, I can’t express how amazing this convention was for me. It was easily the best convention I’ve ever had in San Diego. First, so many friends were there. Second, Jock and I threw a party, not to get too inside baseball, but we decided to just throw a party for any comic creator that was there, editors, regardless of company. We just were like, why not? We’ve had an amazing year and we don’t usually spend a lot of money., so it was like, let’s splurge on friends and try and do a party that isn’t about anything. It’s not for any company, it’s not to promote anything. It’s literally just like, let’s have an old school dance party.

So we got this DJ who was incredible. His name is DJ Goldfinger. And we rented out a place and we just did it at the last minute. And the music was, as my kids would call it, unc music, like, old man music. It was all like, hip hop and R&B from the 90s and early 00s. And it was awesome. Everybody was dancing. We had the heads of DC dancing with big guys of Marvel. It was so much fun. So that was just one of the best moments I’ve ever had at a con. I definitely did my fair share of embarrassing dancing.

And then we won the Eisner, which was unbelievable. I mean, I did not expect to win it.

I was hoping to for Nick and Frank and for me too. The series is so much fun to work on. It’s also so much pressure in the way that we never thought. I never expected it to take off, as I’ve said many times. So there’s an extra level of scrutiny and pressure that comes, I think, especially for the art team, just because they have to meet deadlines in a way that’s much more rigorous than me as a writer. And to do that with so much grace and generosity, it’s just been amazing to watch. So getting up there, Tyler, best assistant, will put our speeches here.

But I wanted to thank you guys for everything, the people that voted, but the fans for this incredible year. I cannot wrap my head around what this book has turned into. And the best compliments, the things that I hear at cons, I can’t tell you how much it means this is anybody’s first comic or this gets them back into comics or made them want to write comics or it got them through a hard time. Those four things, really. I can’t tell you how much it means to me and Nick to hear that.

So it was an unbelievable convention. A lot of fun. Got a good chance to hang out with Frank Miller, who I did an interview with about his incredible memoir recently. But he and I wound up signing in the same room for a while. So we got to talk about 80s New York and getting flashed in Times Square the old days and all that kind of stuff. It was great.

After that, I had a vacation with my family. We went to Hawaii and it was fantastic. It was my dad’s 80th birthday, so we went with my parents and Jeanie’s mom and our kids and my sister and her family. And my grandfather used to live and do research in Hawaii a long time ago. I’ve been going there since I was very little and my mother has too. So we have places we love going there.

And this time my kids were old enough, they found out about from a couple local friends that there were some hikes to do that were more off the beaten path. And we did one and it was like, the rainiest part of the island, the big island, and it was amazing. We went up through the foliage up the side of the mountain towards this big horseshoe gap with all these waterfalls and walked along a little river and sluices and it was raining and muddy up to our ankles and we were all barefoot. And we got there and it was like, a total whiteout. My kids found hilarious and awesome and I found like, “I’m too old for a hike that’s like, an hour and a half to two hours each way for this.” But I’m very glad they had a good time. I fell on the way down like an old man also and busted my hand, but I’m okay. So that trip was much needed.

And now it’s back to work, man. It’s great. So I can’t tell you how excited we are about the things coming up in Absolute Batman…

…with the animated series, with Wytches, with everything. I just wanted to do a quick post and say thanks. So class next week, Wednesday, 9:30pm EST. It’s going to be awesome. Phil is just a huge talent and a friend. I’ve known him a long time, since he was starting out, and he’s got so many amazing things coming like Midnight Spider-Man at Marvel. It’s going to be really, really exciting. So come by!

S

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