SPECTATORS - Part 63
Plus, BKV interviews writer W. Maxwell Prince!
So, what did you make of that exhilarating, brilliantly written and wholly satisfying (if somewhat morally ambiguous) television finale?
Brian here, and I’m of course referring to last week’s final episode of Jeopardy! Masters. Evil may have triumphed over good, but I certainly enjoyed the gamesmanship.
Anyway, I hope you’re having a peaceful and relatively work-free Memorial Day, and I’m so grateful to Spectators letterer Fonografiks for being on-duty for this final (for now) double-page spread from equally assiduous artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon. For your viewing pleasure, we’ve included our three prior spreads to help ramp up to the reveal of exactly where our spectral protagonists Sam and Val have have gone for a “ride” inside this future version of the Museum of Natural History…
The surprising answer to that question coming in seven short days. While you wait, you can always catch up with prior installments of our serialized graphic novel in the Exploding Giraffe Archives.
In last week’s chat thread with you generous paid subscribers in The Tower, I asked members to please plug absolutely anything they felt like promoting, and the responses from you creative giraffes were predictably awesome.
Reader greenmeeple shared a song called “Stars Go Down” inspired by a scene from the comic Ex Machina, my collaboration with overjoyed new grandfather Tony Harris.
And one of my oldest friends and former Bank St. flatmates Clay Adams has an Indiegogo campaign for his hot new NSFW comic Carmilla Unbound, based on the erotic novella by Sheridan Le Fanu that apparently inspired Bram Stoker’s vampire tale 26 years later. You know you want to look.
I promised signed copies of the most recent issue of Saga to a few randomly selected contributors, and here’s whose plugs our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe picked out of the proverbial hat:
Andrew H.
Nothing of my own to plug. But in honor of the late, great, Ray Stevenson...
I’d highly recommend the underrated screen adaptation that he starred in of Albert Sánchez Piño’s Cold Skin (2017) which was expertly directed by Xavier Gens.
Seriously folks, this was The Lighthouse before The Lighthouse. Give it a watch. I think it’s up on Amazon Prime right now.
Kelly
I manage the social media for a municipal animal shelter and create TikToks to help promote the animals, many starring guinea pigs (we have so many guinea pigs). Here’s guinea pigs, but Succession: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTREm6d4S/
Tanner
Kansas City’s local amusement park, Worlds of Fun, is opening a new roller coaster this weekend and, thanks to some good luck in a charity raffle, I’ll be on one of the first two trainfulls!
Thanks for plugging, and Tanner, you have to let us know how that first ride goes.
Everyone else, we’ll be giving away some more signed books in today’s chat (and another original page of Niko Henrichon’s Spectators artwork next week to a random paid subscriber!), so if you haven’t already, thanks for considering joining our merry Tower.
It’s a day off from picketing for those of us in the WGA, but our strike continues apace.
Given the state of our industry, I was bummed but not exactly surprised to read this update from all-around great guy Quinton Peeples, Executive Producer of Marvel’s Runaways:
I don’t have any kind of relationship with Marvel anymore, so I have no idea why all three seasons of this particular series were “disappeared” while other, shorter-lived Marvel shows remain, but as Quinton notes:
Completely and totally unrelated, I’ve been thinking a lot about this recent Hollywood Reporter article looking behind the scenes at Amazon Studios. (The article isn’t about Paper Girls, and no one from our show contributed to this piece, but still…)
Several Amazon insiders say the reliance on testing and data led to a clash late last summer, when an Amazon executive said in a marketing meeting for the series A League of Their Own that data showed audiences found queer stories off-putting and suggested downplaying those themes in materials promoting the show. Series co-creator Will Graham became greatly concerned about bias built into Amazon’s system for evaluating shows, which multiple sources say often ranked broad series featuring straight, white male leads above all others. One executive calls A League of Their Own “a proxy for how diverse and inclusive shows are treated.”
I really don’t know what the increasingly algorithm-driven future of film/television will look like, but I remain very grateful that my human collaborators and I will always be able to tell the kinds of stories we want to tell, that reflect the world we all live in, through our creator-owned comics.
Speaking of… last week, I was delighted to get an email from one of my favorite writers, Ice Cream Man co-creator W. Maxwell Prince, who sent me the first issue of his new anthology book from Image Comics, Swan Songs. Each issue is about something ending (a marriage, the world, etc.), and features a different all-star artist.
The first is drawn by The Department of Truth’s Martin Simmonds, and will be on stands July 5th, which means you probably have another week or two to ask your friendly neighborhood comic shop to set aside your copy.
Here, enjoy the first several pages for free, and then stick around for my exclusive interview with the mysterious Mister Prince…
You want to see how that ends, don’t you?
Here’s how I responded to W. Maxwell Prince’s kind message to me:
***
Bad news, sir.
Perhaps you sent me your latest masterpiece hoping for a nice blurb, or at least a few words of praise?
TOUGH SHIT, because you’ve willingly entered the Thunderdome of Content Economy, and that means your polite email has just condemned you to an hour of godforsaken homework, namely ten questions that I’ll use to pad out my dumb newsletter next week.
***
And guess what? The dingbat fell for it!
Paid subscribers get access to our full and illuminating discussion, which I hope you dig as much as I did…
BKV SABOTAGES W. MAXWELL PRINCE WITH TEN AWKWARD QUESTIONS
1) Greetings, W. Maxwell Prince. You’re one of my favorite writers, but we’ve never met in person (right?). I don’t want to know what the “W” stands for (as it will likely activate some kind of Rumpelstiltskin-esque curse), but what the hell do your friends call you?
Funny coincidence: you’re one of MY favorite writers. You and I actually HAVE met, but it was long before I ever thought about writing comics. I’m a Brooklynite, and attended the “launch party” for Saga #1 at Bergen St Comics (RIP, you beautiful place). I was just a fan and a local, hanging out, drinking wine.
Fun fact: one Mr. John Hodgman was at the signing with you, though I think most people didn’t recognize who he was. But I certainly did, and so I think I might be the only person to have a copy of Saga #1 that is signed by both you AND the author of The Areas of My Expertise.
As for my name: it’s Will. The stuffy pen name (W. Maxwell Prince) is, in fact, a boring SEO decision: my real name is William Prince, and if you Google those two words together, you get a million results for some balding British guy who is on bad terms with his younger brother. And so: I use my first initial and middle name!
2) Congrats to you and your collaborators on the haunting and beautiful SWAN SONGS, a new comic about endings. What’s the best series finale in the history of television?
Thank you!
As for TV: I think Mad Men is the best experience, start-to-finish, of any show I’ve ever watched. The finale was precisely what I wanted it to be. (Though it was also precisely what a lot of hardcore fans DIDN’T want it to be….)
3) I see that you once wrote an issue of Marvel Zombie, but I don’t think you’ve done too much other work for Marvel or DC, correct? What gives? Don’t you secretly want to abandon this indy shit and just write a proper Batman comic?