 |
| By Steven Scott |
Time flies! I attended Image Expo for the second time this year and although the last one was at the start of the year, it still feels just as fresh in my mind as the latest one. It’s as if, in my mind, Image Expo never ended and we just picked up right where we left off.
Once again, the event kicked off with the Keynote Address, once again given by Eric Stephenson. He focused less on Image’s growing success in the market (no graphs or pie charts on display this time) and instead hammered home the point that Image owns nothing, and that Image creators are in control of their own destinies.
We’ve heard this all before, but it’s still a cool reminder that Image is so dedicated to the creators who choose to work with them, and as the line up this year showed, Image is more than capable of wooing the biggest A-list talent in all of comics.
Stephenson went on to say that comics existed for more than 40 years before creator owned comics became a thing, so while the guys who founded Image didn’t create fire, they’ve been stoking the flames for the past 20 years. I have to agree.
Stephenson quickly exited the stage to make way for the latest line up of creators announcing their upcoming projects, some expected and others surprises (Gail Simone! Bryan Lee O’Malley!).
There were some pretty cool announcements made by some of today’s most exciting creators. The ones that caught my attention the most are as follows:
- A new series from Jason Aaron and his Scalped artist R. M. Guéra called The Goddamed. Aaron was there to sell it as “if Tarantino were hired to remake The Ten Commandments.”
- C.O.W.L. co-creators Kyle Higgins and Alec Siegel were there to announce they were re-teaming on a new sci-fi series Hadrian’s Wall. They had me at “Ridley Scott.”
- Kaare Kyle Andrews nearly brought down the house with his announcement which had a lot of set up but even more payoff – The One%
- Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott are teaming up on a mystical/procedural type series Black Magick. With these two involved, I’m sold.
- The last person I expected to see up on the stage was Bryan Lee O’Malley and the most surprising thing about his new series Snotgirl is that art duties will be handled by Leslie Hung and not O’Malley himself.
- Steve Orlando announced his Django Unchained inspired Virgil, which he described as “queersplotation.” Consider me curious.
- I am a recently converted Mark Millar fan so Rafael Abuquerque teaming up with him on Huck definitely grabbed me.
Two other series announcements that were met with a lot of positive attention were Heartless by Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay as well as Joe Keatinge’s ode to wrestling, Ringside, which made my Twitter feed explode.
They kicked off the announcements with a tease of an Invincible reboot, but the biggest surprise announcement in my mind was the fact that Brian K. Vaughan revealed that in addition to The Private Eye coming to Image in print, in addition, Vaughan and Marcos Martin will be collaborating on an in-canon The Walking Dead story which will be exclusive to their digital Panel Syndicate site.
Speaking of Vaughan, there were several panels to follow featuring a mix of creators on each one, but my personal favorite was the one-on-one with the man himself. This was previously advertised as A Conversation with Robert Kirkman, which would have been fantastic as well, but if anyone can fill Kirkman’s chair, it’s clearly Vaughan.
As always, Vaughan was both modest and hilarious. For such a brilliant writer, he seems perfectly at ease with playing down his own contributions and putting his collaborators (such as Saga’s Fiona Staples) on a pedestal. His ability to turn every answer into an inspirational piece of advice while consistently cracking on himself while making the audience laugh is like a magic trick.
Randomly, he kicked things off recounting a debate he had with Y: The Last Man artist Pia Guerra over whether Superman was American or Canadian (she being Canadian herself). It set the tone for the arbitrary talking points that were to come.
Vaughan spent the majority of his time on stage answering questions from the audience. Of course the often asked question “what’s going on with the Y: The Last Man movie?” eventually came up (to which Vaughan says might be a TV series… eventually), but there were some more inspired questions as well such as why he prefers working without an editor, to which he answered that after ten years or so of getting notes from editors, as well as his inner circle of friends and family, that he begins to anticipate their notes, and at some point you can’t rely on favors from those people to edit your stuff and you “just listen to your gut as much as possible and it’ll be ok.”
An odd question about why Vaughan decided to go old school with his letters column using snail mail as opposed to email led to an interesting response. He said you’re a lot more likely to get weird, and unrelated, mail in an email inbox, but also, if someone writes in, it typically results in an outpouring love, as opposed to the reactionary negativity you get with the instant feedback of the internet (no wonder he doesn’t have a Twitter account). In his words, “almost no one wastes a stamp to tell you that you suck.”
A fan noted how Vaughan liked to stick random pop culture nods (especially from the 80’s) into his work, citing a Pat Benatar reference in The Runaways. When asked what obscure movie he could recommend, Vaughan threw out Night of the Comet as one to watch, stating that he couldn’t say if it held up, but that “8 year old me loved it.”
On working with Staples, he praised her for drawing the things he makes her draw (robot dicks and the like) but where she draws the line is she will not draw Lying Cat being tortured beyond reason. On that note, Vaughan commented on the flak he received from readers about killing off certain characters and he admitted that it’s not easy doing so but that his favorite thing about fiction is he likes to get hurt sometimes and bring on the pain. “There will be many more deaths to come. Sorry,” he apologized.
With Vaughan, there’s always a lot of talk about the voices in his head and that day was no different. “You just hear the weird voices in your head and then you sit at the typewriter until it doesn’t suck.” On being asked if he has any regrets with anything he’s every written the answers, in typical Vaughan fashion, was “every single sentence I write.” He says sometimes he’ll go back to something he’s written in the past and then “hey, that was pretty good,” but for the most part he agonizes over every word and that nothing he ever considers finished, it’s just good enough before he has to hand it off to the artist.
On whether he’ll ever return to previous series such as Y and Ex Machina, he says he has no plans to ever do that because, although he misses those characters and sometimes wonders what they’re up to, those stories concluded and will remain so. Unless his kid needs braces, he then joked.
But his biggest regret of all? “Getting stuck with my dumb initial.” It’s ok Brian, you can drop the K. I don’t think anyone would waste a stamp to send you hate mail about it.
That’s going to wrap it up for Image Expo. As always, I walked away feeling more inspired than when I arrived, and I can’t wait for the next one. The other panelists were great, but Vaughan was, for me anyway, the one to beat, and he really stole the show.
Until next time… Now go read Saga!
