SPECTATORS - Part 90
Plus, Niko Henrichon's final Artopsy of 2023!
Are you ready for your long winter’s nap?
Brian here, eager to start mine. But first, I had to thank everyone who forwarded me this very cool note from Eric Kripke, executive producer of Amazon’s awesome adaptation of The Boys:
This is deeply flattering, and you Hollywood types are always welcome to reach out to my agent, but my poor rep has been asked to give everyone the same annoying message about Saga: for the moment, Fiona Staples and I are just concentrating on making our comic the best it can be, and we’re not pursuing any kind of adaptation. Sorry we’re not ready to share this baby we’re still raising, but we’re hard at work on some wild new issues that I’m excited for everybody to see.
Speaking of Saga, looks like the ad for Spectators we included in the back of the latest collection brought a lot of new readers here to Exploding Giraffe over the weekend, so welcome! Every Monday, you’ll be treated to some free pages of this new, NSFW, 300-plus-page graphic novel I’m serializing with co-creator/legendary artist Niko Henrichon and Saga’s renowned letterer Fonografiks.
You can get caught up anytime in our Archives, then come back here for today’s installment, as our voyeuristic ghosts Val and Sam encounter two other restless spirits haunting New York City’s distant future….
I know I just said you’ll be getting a new missive from us every Monday, and while that’s been true for the last 50 weeks in a row, it’s finally time for Exploding Giraffe to pause for our annual holiday break.
We’re shutting down until January 8th, but we’ll be back that Monday evening with more Spectators and news about our third (and last?) year here at Substack, where we’ll be bringing you the final 100 or so pages of our epic graphic novel.
Many thanks to Zack Quaintance over at The Beat for naming Spectators one of the Best Comics of 2023:
I enjoy Spectators as much for the comic as for the weekly reading experience that accompanies it within Brian K. Vaughan’s newsletter. It’s no easy thing to put out a weekly newsletter (ask any creator, now that newsletters are vital to reaching readers), let alone one as robust as Vaughan’s. Yet each week Vaughan and collaborators Niko Henrichon and Fonografiks deliver at least one new page (often more) of Spectators, a stunner filled with twists and seemingly determined to strike a perfect 1:1 ratio between meditating on dying and sex. The comic is free, but pay a bit and you also get a second part, in which Vaughan interviews creators, poses interesting questions to fans, incorporates art insights from Henrichon, and more. It’s a comic AND a reading experience working in tandem to recreate the fading communal feel of buying periodical comics in real-time. I love it.
Robust!
That means so much to our whole team, thanks again.
And thanks to you generous paid subscribers in The Tower for making all this possible.
Last week, after revealing my personal favorite comics of the year, I turned it over to The Tower, and you all had many diverse and excellent lists of your own.
In our weekly chat thread, Jeff L. recommended:
Batman/Superman: World’s Finest - Old school superheroics done as well as they can be done.
Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees - The first issue shocked me.
Dwellings - I’ve been reading Jay Stephens’ work for decades. This is the best yet. And the worst.
Giant Robot Hellboy - Giant! Robot! Hellboy! Fegredo masterwork.
Hunger and the Dusk - Never expected to enjoy a D&D story as much as I have enjoyed this so far.
Fellow Tower member Adam R. suggested:
I had Something Is Killing The Children recommended to me by about a trillion people, but ignored them, until I read the interview with Tynion here, and saw the preview for W0RLDTR33, and now I feel like I should apologise to those trillion people, because I loved it so much. Also, I’d never read Colleen Doran’s A Distant Soil before, but I’ve been enjoying her delightfully snarky Substack about unscrupulous publishers, so I sought it out, and now I feel like I've found lost issues of Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans or Claremont/Smith X-Men and it is a joyous experience, like when the protagonist in Harlan Ellison’s Jeffty is Five finds all those unaired radio plays and unmade movies. Also been enjoying Urasawa's Asadora, Brubaker/Phillips Night Fever as well as some gems in the weekly 2000AD and monthly Judge Dredd magazines.
And Rosy F. added:
Agggg I admit I’m into the Lore Olympus webcomic. Had managed to avoid the Webtoon app but SDCC 2023 made me aware of Rachel Smythe. Since I love Greek mythology, I took a look at it and bam! Down the rabbit hole.
As thanks for your strong picks and fine taste, you’ll each be receiving a signed copy of Saga Volume 11 (available at your local comic shop right now).
Our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe will be reaching out for your mailing addresses, but it might not be until after they get back from safari in early January, so thanks for your patience, winners.
And congratulations to astounding co-creator Fiona Staples for earning that latest volume of Saga a spot in the CBC’s absurdly impressive list of Best Canadian Comics of 2023.
That new collection was also fortunate enough to be recognized by sci-fi/fantasy mainstay Tor in their very thoughtful Best Books of 2023 write-up.
Which reminds me, if you need a classy last-minute gift for a book-lover in your life (or just for yourself; go on, you deserve it), the first three deluxe hardcovers of Saga are also in stores right now, as are all three oversized editions of Paper Girls, each featuring loads of exclusive extras:
Last week, Paper Girls co-creator Cliff Chiang told me about one strange sighting of our series, and this week, he let me know about another unexpected reference, in a Hallmark Channel movie called Round and Round:
Cliff and I haven’t been able to find this allegedly real film yet (is it about a time-altering dreidel?!), so a prize to the first of you cineastes who can bring us a clip…
This year is ending as brutally as it began, huh?
I was very sorry to hear that we lost two of my favorite creators, both much too soon, actor Andre Braugher and comic artist Ian Gibson.
My kids loved Andre Braugher from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but my fellow precocious Gen Xers will never forget him as Detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street, especially his work in the episode “Three Men and Adena,” the greatest interrogation scene ever performed. What a giant.
Different medium, same level of talent: Ian Gibson drew countless British comics, but I knew him from one of my top five favorite books of all time, The Ballad of Halo Jones, written by Alan Moore.
Here’s one of the stylish Mr. Gibson’s highly unique pages that I’m lucky enough to get to stare at every day:
My condolences to everyone who loved these gifted men.
Yep, it was a long, hard year, filled with much loss, heartache and grief… but we’re still in the game, aren’t we?
Here’s to not being spectators quite yet.
I’m going to let my old brain rest for a fortnight, but I look forward to seeing you back here in 2024 for my favorite Spectators scenes yet, courtesy my dear friend Niko.
The past two years working on this graphic novel with him and Fonografiks has been one of the best creative experiences of my life, and I can’t wait to finish our story together for you over the next twelve months.
But before we part ways for 2023, one final treat for you loyal Tower members: a mind-blowing new Artopsy from Niko AND a chance to win one of his incredible pages of oversized original art (normally only available at Essential Sequential, where you can currently get 20% off of all Niko art by using the code “holiday20” at checkout).
To be automatically entered in a drawing for this frightening masterpiece (and to get full access to today’s Artopsy and all past/future bonus stuff), just be an existing monthly or annual subscriber, or join us as a new member anytime before we return live on January 8th, cool?
No closing question or other homework this week, but I’ll leave our chat open throughout the break just in case you Tower folks ever want to swing by and check in, brag about some cool gift you got, tell us what you’ve been watching, etc.
Peace - BKV
Niko here!
Let’s talk about what I call my “industrial” period.
Since I first started working for Marvel back in 2006, editors asked me to work on monthly books, which had, obviously, monthly publishing schedules. Back then, I had just finished working on Pride of Baghdad and, being satisfied with the result, I made the decision to always do my own colors on future projects. I thought it was an artistic preference that would benefit me in terms of quality and specificity.
However, the amount of work required to do all the traditional steps of the visual part of comics (layouts, pencils, inks, and colors) made it too hard to work on a classic monthly 20-page-long comic book.
As I said, editors kept suggesting that I work on monthly comics and I always had to pass on these projects since I knew I would not be able to meet deadlines. I could only do small stories, one-shot comics and covers, from time to time. So that’s what I did for many years and I moved a bit to the European market and went back and forth to comics, for small assignments.
But somehow I felt I was missing something from the whole comics experience. There’s an interesting aspect in doing these serialized monthly comics, which are an important part of the general comics market.
In the 2010s, the Cintiq digital tablet became very high performing, and I acquired one to work on my digital coloring. I wasn’t really drawing on it at first but I knew I could do it if I wanted. And so I started to try it more and more while working on other projects. My goal was to be able to finish a whole page in a day, from layouts to final colors. Everything in a day. If I could pull this off, thanks to a 100% digital process, it would mean I could move onto some monthly comics.
I often was in touch with editor Nick Lowe at Marvel who was giving me work on a regular basis. He knew my problem with monthly schedules. But still, Nick told me they were looking for someone to take over Doctor Stange after Jason Aaron and Chris Bacchalo’s beautiful run. I told him that I was very interested but I had to run some laboratory tests before accepting such a piece of work. So I did the following unfinished page.
If I remember well, I managed to do it in about five hours. I started the colors but didn’t care to finish since I knew the experience was successful:
With hindsight, I don’t really like the page. Let’s say it’s doing the job. It was okay for the time.
I also did this illustration in a few hours, after which I accepted the work on Doctor Strange:
Looking through my archives, I also found this Thor drawing I did at the same time, as a sort of inking exercise.
Next up is my very first sequence—including process steps (layouts and inks)—of my first Doctor Strange run, as Strange is struggling to get out of the mouth of a monster…
[Fifteen more extraordinary images after the jump, don’t miss out!]