Storm Warning

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This was intended as a short piece, but it ended up very long. Sorry.

OPERATIONS

THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM

DC Comics have announced STORMWATCH: THE ROAD TO AUTHORITY COMPENDIUM, for release in the first week of January 2025. This collects all the work I wrote for STORMWATCH across two volumes. Which apparently totals six hundred and fifty six pages. A number that I find kind of scary. It will cost sixty US dollar, which is also kind of scary, but at 656 pages you can also use it as a weapon, a small performance stage or the foundation for a large outbuilding.

This is all work done in the 1990s. Mike Heisler brought me into Wildstorm, and later on Scott Dunbier took over wrangling me. Scott and I have had our share of arguments over the years, but I’m glad to say we remain friends - Scott just left IDW, where he’s been for many years, to start his own venture, and I am very much looking forward to seeing what he does next.

The main artist on STORMWATCH was Tom Raney, and I have incredible respect both for his work and his stoic endurance of every stupid idea I stuffed into those scripts. God, I once made him do Joe Shuster, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby in a single episode. (Now that I check, I did that more than once! And had Gina Going approximate a Frank Hampson colouring effect one time! God, I’m sorry, everybody.) He’s one of those artists I wish I were still working with today.

Even when you’re not talking directly with the artist - and this was the Nineties, remember, so it wasn’t easy when your collaborators were on the other side of the world - the act of the work itself becomes a conversation. Tom’s Henry Bendix was so fucking creepy that I had to lean into what Tom was giving me there.

This is just one reason why comics writers get so pissed off - but not as pissed off as the artists! - when they’re named as sole author of a work of comics. Every comic is the representation of the point where writer and artists meet and fuse. A fusion does not have a single author.

I wrote a little bit about one of the experiments I pulled in the writing of STORMWATCH at this link here. I used that little stage for all kinds of stunts. One time I used the cover and inside front cover as story pages, so the whole book ran together from cover to end. I was allowed to get away with a lot, and Tom Raney made it all work.

Towards the back of the book, you’ll find my first collaboration with Bryan Hitch, also still a friend today, and I believe it was Scott who convinced him to come on board. And those pages were the seed of THE AUTHORITY. I wrote a bit about that at this link here:

A big part of doing THE AUTHORITY was trying to pay back my friends. And this STORMWATCH book is coming out because there’s apparently going to be a THE AUTHORITY film sometimes in the next few years, and I’ve read that The Engineer character is going to be in James Gunn’s SUPERMAN.

Chances are, that film may be more Mark Millar and Frank Quitely’s AUTHORITY than ours. But that’s okay. I chose Mark Millar to replace me on THE AUTHORITY, and I told the office to hire Frank Quitely to draw it without putting him through any kind of audition, and I was proven right. So I will be able to take some pride and pleasure in whichever version is presented onscreen.

The solicitation comes with a kind little piece of text:

ORBITAL

GANZEER’S VOMITBOOK

I can’t find a web end for artist/writer Ganzeer’s newsletter, so you’ll just have to subscribe and see if it reveals issue 202 for you, but here’s the gist:

He uses the unbranded TWONE Pocket Notebook (UK) (now out of stock in the US) and just dates the front with a white pen. He calls these his vomitbooks:

Ganzeer’s newsletter is brilliant, by the way, and ganzeer.today is a daily read for me. There are any number of ways to run a notebook practice, and maybe this one will suit you better.

Sarah Morgan. Big online shop doubling as a gallery. Wonderful stuff.

OTHER

NUCLEAR FOREST RITUAL

For those who love the ritual noise, there’s a new PHURPA piece out, and you can stream the whole thing.

Via Austin Kleon, the ashramas, the four stages of life in Hindu thought: I appear to be well into the vanaprastha stage: “the forest dweller… consisting of withdrawal from concern with material things, pursuit of solitude, and ascetic and yogic practices.” And happy to stay that way, because the next stage sounds less fun.

I read NUCLEAR WAR, A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US) because I read it’s been optioned by Denis Villeneuve and because I haven’t read a proper docufiction doomsday book since probably THE THIRD WORLD WAR by General Sir John Hackett and others in the 1980s. It is a profoundly depressing book. If Hackett’s book is an optimistic “The Day After,” then Jacobsen’s book is very much THREADS. It’s a good read, but it confirms that no nation anywhere is prepared for general nuclear war or even a one-shot pre-emptive strike in any meaningful way. Don’t read it before sleep, the way I did for a week.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv.

It’s been a crappy week and a crappy month, but what gets me out of bed in the morning is that tomorrow is not yet written. It might be worse, it might be better, but it’ll be different and it’ll have its own potential for change. Drop your shoulders, breathe and relax. Better weather is on the way. See you next week.

W