Playing with cosmic forces and other daily problems

HELLO AND WELCOME TO A NEW EDITION OF MY NEWSLETTER!

After weathering the end of May with winds straight out of hell (I didn’t move up North of Spain to suffer this heat), your favorite newsletter is back!

SPAM!

My usual calendar of releases:

USA & UK
-Galaxy of Madness Omnibus: The Mortal Machine, published by Mad Cave, is on sale. The book compiles the vol. 1 (written by Magadalene Vissaggio and art by Mike Oeming & Taki Soma) and vol. 2 (written by Vissaggio and art by me).
-Moon Eaters GN will be published by Titan in October but I think pre-orders are available or they will be very soon.
-My Fahrenheit 451 adaptation also should be released throughout the year by Titan.

SPAIN
-Cassandra (The Left Hand of the Devil) is on sale, published by Yermo Ediciones.
-Kid Maroon GN and Galaxy of Madness will be released in Spain surely in the second half of the year.

FRANCE
-Against Hope GN coming out published by Komics Initiative (with two editions, regular and an exclusive limited print of 100 with exclusive cover).
-Requiem Chevalier Vampire volume 1 is on sale and the 2nd volume coming surely in October.

BRASIL
-Moon Eaters is on sale in Brasil, published by Poptopia.

And if you are a paid subscriber, you have your monthly doses of SILENZIO. On the June 1st, I posted Episode 6, which means this strange experiment has now been going on for half a year.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

In a creator-owned author’s life, there are plenty of conversations about rights, licensing to other countries, contracts... You might not like this bureaucratic side of your job, but you have to get familiar with these issues if you don’t want your routine to consist of just drawing pages, getting paid, and forgetting about it (and even in work-for-hire, there’s paperwork to do, buddy).

I was recently talking to an agent who represents the publication rights of one of my Spanish graphic novels. Since she knew the story was optioned by a small producer to make a TV show adaptation, she used to ask me if there was any news. She knew that this kind of project helps to sell the book to other countries.
At the same time, the producer was asking me whenever he had the chance if there had been any progress in finding some publisher to release the book in English, since that would go a long way toward attracting new partners. And the potential show writers would love to read the book in English.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re both incredibly kind people... But there I was, in that sort of dissociative state where each of them was pulling me in the opposite direction: “Get me a show to sell the book! Get me a book to sell the show!”

What did annoy me a little, though, was that the agent had told me that a foreign publisher was interested in the rights to my book... provided that they also handled my audiovisual rights. This essentially means representing those juicy TV and movie rights and, I suppose, sharing the benefits with me. It’s not a bad thing in and of itself, since I’ve done that way with Dark Horse and it worked out with Polar.
But Dark Horse PRODUCED that book.
In this case, we were talking about buying the license to publish an already-made book in a different language, which is substantially cheaper than paying people to create it in your market/language.
Just imagine if I bought the rights to publish a series in Spain… for example, Naruto, and demanded that the publisher, Shūeisha, let me handle the anime adaptations myself.

I understand that the publisher wants to release only series for which it offers the full package, including the audiovisual rights. But that would be a different matter (I’d be happy to pitch them something), though of course with the page rates for something created specifically for them.

Looking at the bigger picture, it’s not an unusual situation either.
Fair? No. Common? Significant.
It wasn’t exactly a situation that lifted my spirits... Is that how things are now?
It’s cool that the prospect of making movies or TV shows serves as a source of support, something that allows us to finance risky projects we believe in.
But do we write and draw for editors and readers, or for agents?
I have this feeling that comics are now just an excuse to sell ideas like sausages without consulting the true creative force behind those stories: the creators.

RETURNING TO FANTASY

I’m trying to include more recommendations and reading suggestions in the newsletter again, which I think might be more fun than some of my boring personal opinions about the Comics Industry.
I’ve mentioned before that although part of my career has been linked to fantasy, and I’ve been an avid reader of the genre, it doesn’t make up a large part of my regular readings. I’ve shifted more toward science fiction and sometimes space opera, with a few notable exceptions like Terry Pratchett (whom I’ve always resisted categorizing solely as fantasy) and my revisitations of Michael Moorcock, undoubtedly my favorite writer in the genre ever since I read The Eternal Champion as a teenager.

I’ve been meaning to read some modern fantasy; since I read a couple of his SciFi novels I’m not interested in George R. R. Martin anymore, and I have the strong feeling I won’t like Sanderson… But I’m hopeful about Joe Abercrombie, who seems more in line with my interests.

Meanwhile, I also recently tried to start super-famous Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I gave it a shot because my wife is a big fan and I wanted to discuss it with her (we’re reading all of Pratchett’s Discworld novels in chronological order), but I just can’t get past page 150. I had the same problem I had with Ready Player One, that feeling of a guy telling me about the game he played the other day on the PlayStation. As soon as they started with “And then a level-20 goblin came along, and I hit him with my +5 mace and took 3 hit points off it,” the book fell right out of my hands. And I’m a casual RPG player, though I’ll admit that the tables are the part that bores me the most. But I recognize that Dinniman writes quite well (which is something I can’t say about Ernest Cline) and has a fresh sense of humor.

But what finally happened is that I returned to the genre with the first Heroic Fantasy book I’d ever read (before Tolkien, before Moorcock): Louise Cooper’s The Time Master Trilogy. Although heavily influenced by Moorcock (Cooper was a huge fan of the novels about the albino Elric of Melniboné), she has a rather unique personality and her character development that was quite sophisticated for the standards of the genre then.

I’ve owned the first volume (The Initiate) since I was a kid, and I found the other two volumes in excellent condition at a secondhand store. So I picked them up so I could reread the entire series.
I read The Initiate when I was very young, and it’s funny how certain books leave a mark on you, because reading it now I gradually began to recognize writing patterns, cadences, and rhythms that I had used in my own stories. In other words, you never suspect how a first love determines your subsequent relationships.

I think it’s beautiful to be able to map out your influences and see where you come from, and how the things you loved shaped you. And this is why I’ve never liked to project the image of a reclusive artist living in a world of his own. I’ve always believed in making your influences visible, embracing them, and sharing them with the people who read your work.

And that’s all for today! Pray to the Gods of Chaos for my damned soul and see you in a new edition of BrokenEnglish, and if you are a paid subscriber, in a new episode of Silenzio or The Red Circle.

Copyright © 2026 Victor Santos. All rights reserved.

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