The Devil Runs Out

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m still in the middle of repainting this place. Everything should be up and running properly next week.

In this letter:

• the engine that pulls the train forward

• a book about a mad librarian

• notes on episode 5 of DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

OPERATIONS

COMICS TRAIN

I accidentally sort of invented a weird cheap comics format in 2005.

This is just slightly technical. Comics are printed in what are called signatures – eight pages to a signature. Comics have generally been four signatures, 32 pages – either with a cover on a different stock, or, increasingly from the early 2000s, what are called “self-cover” – the cover is on the same stock as the interior signatures.

Comics were getting expensive — there was the beginnings of pressure to go from a standard $2.99 to $3.99 — and also getting less dense. So I came up with something stupid. A three-signature self-cover comic. So the whole thing, including the covers, was 24 pages, all on the same stock. And the story inside was sixteen pages of comics, with backmatter notes to fill out the page count.

(None of this was radical. Previous to, say, the early 1980s, many comics still contained only sixteen or seventeen pages of material. History is there to be learned on and stood upon to reach for something hopefully new.)

I set up many difficult problems for myself on this book, with the additional work involved to make it look not-difficult. The main one was this: each issue would be a self-contained story. A new reader could join the book at any point, not be lost, and get a complete experience out of it.

And it sold for USD $1.99.

Oh, the hate mail I got from retailers.

I remember, years ago, a prominent comics retailer doing an aria at me about how the small tankoubon editions of LONE WOLF AND CUB were a crime perpetrated upon the market by the publisher. They were too small, they were going to be easily nicked, they were hard to rack, etcetera. They quickly became the best-selling book in their category. I remember, a little later, a retailer looking me in the eye and telling me he didn’t want new stuff, he wanted the old stuff done better. When I pointed out that, from that stance, he never would have ordered a copy of WATCHMEN, he kept eye contact and said, “That’s right. So?”

One retailer wrote to me to tell me I was taking food out of his children's mouths by doing this book.

Then the first issue went to a fifth printing.

And my email instead filled up with shock and pleasure at a comic that wasn’t trying to gouge their pockets.

Like I say, I set myself a whole bunch of things to solve, and this was one: in 1984, Alan Moore did an interview in a fanzine called Arkensword, and the interview is not, to my knowledge, online, but there was a bit in there that hit me so hard that I’ve been quoting it ever since: that you can walk into a conics shop with the change in your pocket and come out with, in Alan’s phrase, “a real slab of culture.”

Most things you want to read are $3.99 now. Laying down a line of books in this format at — well, it’s twenty years later, so say $2.50 — would be a significant statement. Even holding at 2.99 as SAGA did for so long seems like a big deal now.

Comics can get caught up with market issues and opinions, and forget the engine pulling the train to the next station. Look for the new people who are laying down track in different territory and trying to push things forward.

ORBITAL

SPADEWORK FOR A PALACE

I love the writing of Laszlo Krasznahorkai. (But hate spelling his name. S before Z!) This is a novella. New Directions seems to have been releasing some of his shorter works.

He’s one of those “sentence-long novels” guys, like Enard or Fosse. If you had a terrible experience with some of Jon Fosse’s hesitant, stammering books after he won the Nobel, try old Laszlo. They may be two-hundred-thousand-word sentences, but they jump and spin and laugh. He can use them for a slow meditative step, as in MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, or, as in SPADEWORK, it can be the fully manic tone of a lunatic scribbling in a notebook.

Herman Melvill is a librarian, cursed with very nearly sharing a name with Herman Melville. And Herman - who signs his name herman melvill to differentiate himself - has issues.

This notebook is the record of Herman’s grand plan. While studying the works and traces of Melville. Malcolm Lowry and Lebbeus Woods, all of whom relate to Melvill’s home of Manhattan in different ways, he develops his great scheme to perfect the New York Public Library. Doing the first spadework for the foundations of a palace for hidden knowledge.

And there are points where he breaks the stream-of-consciousness continuing-sentence thing, and they hit explosively.

It’s the diary of a mad librarian as he spirals out. It’s really good: intelligent, entertaining, often funny, and eventually very affecting. If you haven’t read him before, this would be an excellent, accessible place to start.

I do wonder if old Laszlo has had bad experiences with librarians.

SPADEWORK FOR A PALACE (UK) (US) and any decent bookshop

THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

THE DEVIL RUNS OUT

Episode 5, which you can catch here, on YT, and wherever you get your podcasts.

I had no idea what to expect from Brett Dalton. I’d seen him in things, of course, but had never seen him do anything quite like this part. But Meredith Layne was positive he was an excellent choice, and I always trust Meredith because she is always right. And my God, so she was. Brett just took a breath and became this crazy broken man, a hundred and eighty degrees from anything I’d seen him do before.

Again, as a grand tour of gothic horror, you’ve got to do your occult human sacrifice episode. I don’t think there’s actual human sacrifice to the devil in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT but I couldn’t resist the connection. But that’s not all this one is. At some point, I had to introduce consequences for Carnack’s general behavior towards other people, and that sets up episode 6.

This was one of those “structural” stories, where I had to figure out a path taken through a building and how to illustrate that sonically. I had requests for sound design to help that, which hopefully were less annoying to them than previous asks for something vague like “cosmic gurgling” or whatever the fuck I begged for. On the face of it, it’s one of the simpler stories, but it was a challenge of organisation and sound.

At this point, you can probably see that, even though it’s a sequence of self-contained stories, the connective tissue running through the serial gets thicker. Hopefully, this makes the final episode all the stronger.

If everyone reading this shared the departmentofmidnight.com link on their socials or newsletters or with a friend, it’d probably double our chances of a second season.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

Notes on the cookbook ROAST FIGS, SUGAR SNOW by Diana Henry

The Carousel Lens and Einstein’s Cross (space is weird)

I bought new books

Useful posts from August 2024

A very odd British tv show from 1974

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The polling thing last week didn’t work properly for everybody - including me! Sorry about that.

Keep breathing, stay warm, don’t quit. You’re in better shape than you think. See you next week.

W