A Whole New Era

The Empire of The Tiny Onion is expanding, with new subscription options, and original comic books.

The last couple of months have been extremely surreal and gratifying. 

I launched my highest selling original comic book series yet with THE NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE at DC Black Label. News got out that my best-selling horror comic, SOMETHING IS KILLING THE CHILDREN, is in development at Netflix with Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy’s Intrepid Pictures. And we announced that Boom Studios and I are launching the first spin-off title in the “Slaughterverse” with HOUSE OF SLAUGHTER. Over at Image Comics, my conspiracy thriller THE DEPARTMENT OF TRUTH hit sales highs approaching our original launch numbers for Issues #10 and 11 (turns out people like Bigfoot!), while we continued to develop the project for television with the fine people at Sister. I’ve also been having some extremely exciting conversations about the future of my Young Adult series, WYND, in comics and other media that I can’t talk about just yet…

And then, a few weeks back, I found out that I had been given one of the top accolades in the comic book field, winning the award for BEST WRITER at the Eisner Awards.

But in the midst of all of that, I was trying to make one of the most difficult decisions of my professional life. DC had presented me with a three-year renewal of my exclusive contract, with the intent of me working on Batman for the bulk of that time. I was grateful of the offer, but I couldn’t help but look at the success of my original, creator owned titles and wonder if it was the right choice.

And then I received another contract. The best I’ve ever been given in a decade as a professional comic book writer. A grant from Substack to create a new slate of original comic book properties directly on their platform, that my co-creators and I would own completely, with Substack taking none of the intellectual property rights, or even the publishing rights.

Given my bandwidth, I knew I could only pick one of two contracts sitting in front of me.

Which is a lot of preamble to say that I am going to be leaving BATMAN with Issue #117 in November, and THE JOKER with Issue #14 next April, with no immediate plans to write any other superhero comics in the near future. 

Instead, I’m going to dedicate my whole brain to building a bunch of really cool stuff on my own terms, without having to get permission from any publisher to make it.

So, that’s the headline. If you’re already sold, you can click this button right now and subscribe, or upgrade your free subscription to a paid one…

But for the rest of you, let’s break it down a little.

WAIT, WHO THE HELL ARE YOU, ANYWAY?

My name is James Tynion IV. I’m a comic book writer. For most of the last ten years, I’d say that if you’re a comic book fan, you’d most likely know me from my work on the Batman line at DC Comics. I started in 2012 by co-writing short stories in the back pages of the main Batman title during the blockbuster Scott Snyder/Greg Capullo run. I showran two weekly Batman Comics. I wrote three Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossovers. I wrote 50 issues of Detective Comics, and for the last year and a half I have been the head writer of the flagship Batman title, working alongside the incredible Jorge Jimenez, and the writer of a Joker series with the incredible Guillem March. And that’s not counting a bunch of one-shots, and event tie-ins, and what have you.

I have loved Gotham City and the characters in it for my entire life, and most recently, I’ve loved creating brand new characters to flesh out and modernize the line – Characters like Punchline, Vengeance, Clownhunter, Ghost-Maker, Miracle Molly, The Gardener, and Peacekeeper-01. Later this month we are starting a big Batman cross-over event in the Bat-Books, Batman: Fear State, centering one of my favorite villains – The Scarecrow. It’s been the joy of my life to get to play with all of these toys that meant so much to me growing up, and bring a bit of my own spin to the mythology… Taking the reins of the main Batman title was a dream come to life. Validation of a decade of hard work.

For most of the last decade, DC Comics was effectively my day-job. It paid the bills, and was pretty creatively fulfilling… But a few years ago I realized something big was missing from my life. While I had always loved Superheroes, they were only a small fraction of what I loved about the comic book medium. I had grown up on independent comics, manga, webcomics, newspaper strips, and literary graphic novels… And there was this whole larger world of my interests I wasn’t getting to explore creatively. It felt like I was only stretching one group of muscles and I was starting to feel burnt out by the limitations of superheroes.

So, I started building a slate of books. My first new creator-owned titles in a few years. And starting work on these books was the best creative rush I had felt in my career. I had worried all my creative “muscles” in these other genres would have atrophied, but they were aching to be used. I had four books locked and loaded that I planned to release over two years… Something is Killing the Children with Werther Dell’Edera and Miquel Muerto. The Department of Truth with Martin Simmonds. Wynd with Michael Dialynas. The Nice House on the Lake with Alvaro Martinez Bueno and Jordie Bellaire. 

Contracts were signed, creative partnerships lined up, and I was ready to go.

And then I got the call that I was going to be the new writer of Batman. It was a call that I had been waiting for my entire professional career… But I knew that it would be a lot of work. I spent a sad weekend late in the summer of 2019 with emails sitting in my drafts folder that would put all of my projects on pause for another year, so that I could focus my attention on doing Batman right… But there was a problem. I couldn’t get the thought of that creative rush out of my head, and I knew I couldn’t let these books go… I figured, hell, I’m still young. I can just push myself and do it all… And it’s not like they would be too overwhelming… I’d be done with the five issues of Something is Killing the Children before I really dug into The Department of Truth, and I’d be close to wrapping Department of Truth by the time Nice House came out in stores. Wynd was just one OGN a year… I figured I could manage it all.

And then the books started coming out. And they started wildly exceeding all of our projections for them. Sales kept climbing on them, arc to arc… Suddenly Something is Killing the Children wasn’t 5 issues anymore, it was 15 issues. Then it was an ongoing. The Department of Truth sold over 100,000 copies (when we were hoping for somewhere around 50). Wynd was my highest selling Boom! launch to date. And then The Nice House of the Lake topped them all. None of them were slowing down. The audiences were engaged and picking up steam… But I was basically working two full-time jobs at once. Both of them dream jobs. 2020 was an enabler of a year… I couldn’t travel anywhere. My partner was in another state for a few long months. All I had was work and reading, and so I worked and I read and I made a bunch of really cool stuff that I am incredibly proud of.

I started realizing something pretty early in this process… I was happiest with my work when my collaborators and I had the most creative control. I even tried to carry the energy I was capturing in my original work back into the Superhero line, creating new characters rather than relying on the classic Gotham stable, and those new characters sent the sales of those books to shocking new heights (I had been told when I was put on the book to drive up sales, but it wasn’t until I started doing the things that excited me the most the most that the sales started rising). But as 2021 kicked off, I knew in my heart of hearts that this was not a sustainable system. DC wanted me to stay, but could I manage another three years trying to do everything at once?

But there was another problem… I had all of these ideas for NEW creator owned comics that I wanted to build, but I didn’t have the money to build them all myself. After seeing the difference in back-end between comics I owned myself, and ones where I shared ownership with a publisher, I wasn’t interested in launching something big and new that I didn’t have control over with my partners… But some of the ideas that I had in mind were a little outside the box. Could I afford to experiment and test out some of the ideas I was most excited about without the income I was getting from my Batman titles?

When I got the Substack deal, my jaw pretty much fell out of my skull. I remember sending it to my lawyer asking if it could be real, because it was exactly the kind of offer I was dreaming would fall out of the sky and into my lap. And it was. 

So, the math in my head started changing rapidly. And I knew what I had to do.

WHAT’S SO EXCITING TO YOU ABOUT SUBSTACK?

I like to think of myself as a builder. I like making stuff. Trying things. Seeing what works and what doesn’t. I like getting caught up in all the finicky details. 

Last year when the world slipped into quarantine, I started a self-published quarterly horror anthology series called Razorblades: The Horror Magazine. I personally worked with the printer, managed distribution, and hand-shipped out the orders on the first issue from my Brooklyn apartment. Later that summer, approaching the launch of The Department of Truth, I decided to start making Enamel Pins and shipping them straight from home. I did all of that pretty much exclusively through my Substack newsletter, which I started almost two years ago. 

So, to start, I’m excited it’s Substack, because I’ve built a great audience here already, and that audience already knows to expect to expect early access to cool new stuff that I think up.

But there’s a bigger side to all of this… One that keeps hitting me the more I think about it. For the last couple of decades, there’s been a particular model to sustainable careers in comic book writing. First you do work at some of the smaller independent publishers to get the attention of the Big Two (DC and Marvel), then you transition into writing for the Big Two and work your way up the ladder to the highest profile book you can muster, and then you use your larger platform from your superhero work to draw folks back in to your independent work, often using the money from those big superhero books to subsidize your own books before they turn a profit.

But even if you do that, you're still subject to the whims of a small market with VERY specific habits and tastes. There are limits of what you can get away with, if you're worried about funding issue #6 when you're writing issue #1. This deal gives me the security to build the sort of books that I think could thrive in the comics market given the chance, but require growing in a different sort of way than monthly periodicals.

Because, let me tell you… I have IDEAS. Anthology projects were just the beginning of the cool stuff I want to make. There is a whole range of non-fiction comics about fascinating subjects that haven’t gotten a spotlight in comic book form, and I want the power to do something when I sit back and have the thought “This comic book SHOULD exist.” The white whale for me is being able to write a whole giant horror novel in comic book form without needing to worry about breaking it up into equally sized monthly chapters. I want to make weird standalone comic book novellas, too! Beyond what I’m capable of writing, I want to hire young creators I'm excited about to help me develop some NEW projects, outside of a system I’ve seen break as many creators as I’ve seen it make. I want those creators to be able to come to me with a cool idea and see how I can help them make it reality. Hell, it’s not just comics. I even have the idea for a non-fiction prose book about a period of comics history I’m obsessed with, that I’d love the power to just MAKE exist.

I like that the Substack deal calls me a publisher (seriously, it’s right there in the contract). I want to take that title seriously, and build out what Tiny Onion Studios can be. Razorblades: The Horror Magazine was just the beginning. 

And it scales up… The more you support this newsletter (more on that in a minute), the larger the budget I have to start building the next wave of big, cool ideas that I’m dying to try out. There is no upper limit.

The comics industry is undergoing a tremendous amount of change, and I want to experiment and try things, because I think creators making the books they WANT to make the way they want to make them is going to be the way we pave the road to the next few decades of our industry, rather than us just waiting to see what corporate publishing thinks they can sell, in the formats they dictate to us. It all comes down to a simple thing that I know I said up top. I want to make all the cool things in my head that I know should exist without having to ask anybody for permission to make them exist.

If we play our cards right, this is day one of a whole new paradigm. Right now, you can’t see the scale of this thing yet… But it’s bigger than you think. Over the next few months, you’re going to see exactly how big. And I hope your first reaction to all of that is “I want a front row seat for what comes next.” And I hope all of the creators signing up with Substack see the potential. What happens when a bunch of the top creative minds in an industry are given the funding to reshape the future of that industry. Because this is the moment we get to decide. We’ve been given grants with no strings attached. There are no rules. There is nobody you need to get permission from to do what you want to do. Make the books you most want to make, the books you think should exist, the ones that it has driven you crazy that nobody is making. Make them yourself. Produce works by people whose work you absolutely love. Will them into the world.

I think this is the best deal for creators the comics industry has ever seen, and with some ambition and some ingenuity, I think this deal, and deals like it, are going to redefine the next few decades of our industry. 

The power is in our hands. It’s up to us to use it wisely. Let’s make cool stuff.

WHAT KIND OF COMIC BOOKS ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE HERE?

Right now, I’ve got five things in development for Substack of various shapes and sizes. Originally, I was thinking I’d just tease them out here. Talk about them in the vaguest terms, just imply the shape of what I’m doing… Use the classic formula for these things from comic newsletters, and not talk specifics until I’m ready to drop the first one. I might have posted something like… 

SEPTEMBER – OPERATION SKYLIGHT

OCTOBER – OPERATION ZOOBOOK

Q4 2021 – OPERATION TOPLOCK

Q1 2022 – OPERATION NIGHTMARE

SUMMER 2022 – OPERATION DIAL-UP

And then I’d give you fun details like: One of these is a non-fiction comic. One of these projects will be a Prose/Illustration series that will tie into one of my existing books. One of them is a Novella. One of them is a long form horror project (the “White Whale” I discussed above). One of them is a project that I started dreaming up back when I was a student of Scott Snyder in college. Two of them I’ll be bringing on some very talented writers to work on with me. All of them have incredible art… And it would be honest and true to tell you all of those things. And it would be honest and true to tell you that I have EVEN MORE ideas of what I might be able to build in this format that I haven’t started cooking yet, and therefore don’t have catchy operation titles.

I’d ALSO tell you that, on top of the above projects, and the continuation of all my creator owned books (with big stories I’ve been dying to tell since I launched each of them), I’ve got some MORE comic projects in development with artists already attached - that will release in print first over the next few years. This newsletter is going to be the best place to find out about those books and see them come together. This is going to be a great place to get behind the scenes looks at everything I’m up to, across the board.

But look, you might have picked up on this already, even if this is your first newsletter… I like to overdo things. And I want to give you a taste of what I’m looking to build here at The Empire of the Tiny Onion. 

So, I want to introduce the project that I just hinted at as “Operation Skylight” but is REALLY called BLUE BOOK. It’s written by me, drawn by Michael Avon Oeming, and lettered by Aditya Bidikar. It’s about UFOs.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH BLUE BOOK?

People have always been fascinated by the strange and the frightening. I know I have. In grade school and middle school, I got my hands on every book about aliens and ghosts and cryptids that I could. Around 5thgrade, I did one of those “what do you want to be when you grow up” papers about becoming a Cryptozoologist (I got very grumpy when I realized this was not a degree you could get from a reputable school). I think a lot of people recognize the impulse to explore the strange borderlands of modern life when they get invested in True Crime, particularly stories about Serial Killers, because “Human Evil” is the most explainable strain of dark curiosity… But I think there’s a stranger cousin to True Crime brewing out there, just coming together… I think it speaks to the success of The Department of Truth, and podcasts like The Last Podcast on the Left. I’ve taken to calling this genre “TRUE WEIRD.”

Now, we can quibble on the “True” part of “TRUE WEIRD” – But I’d say that’s often the case with stories that brand themselves as “True Crime.” Another name you might call the burgeoning genre is “STRANGE BUT TRUE.” What I am talking about here are stories taken from true accounts and testimonies of people who have encountered something strange, outside the bounds of the order of things. Whether or not their experience happened the way they think it happened is sort of secondary, the story they tell is what enters our collective unconscious. There’s just something compelling about the idea that you could live a completely normal life, and then one day you encounter something outside the rules you’ve accepted. There’s a thrill in imagining a brush with the abyssal unknown. And there’s a value in the weird stories we tell each other, beyond their objective truth, and it feels to me that there’s a deeper truth that lives in that space.

There’s also a layer that goes beyond all of that… This particular blend of fact, fiction, pseudoscience and all of it are the building blocks of contemporary geek culture. It’s the font that science fiction, horror, and fantasy sprang forth from at the turn of the 20th Century. That’s the reason the Earths in both the DC and Marvel Universe are hollow and filled with secret civilizations. Why both of their magic systems are rooted in early 20thcentury esoterica. We’ve spent so much time echoing the echo of the source material, that too few of us have dug into the weird culture of science fiction and Fortean magazines that fueled the imaginations of the people who built our industry. Bringing a modern eye to old, strange stories and bringing those stories to the present feels like it could inspire a whole new generation of readers and creators. Because the original raw material is stranger and more human than any adaptation of it that needs to follow the rules of story logic, and clarity. I’ve long felt that ephemeral ground is a rich place to mine.

I also think it was healthier on a cultural level to engage with these curiosities rather than bury them away. This is something that I hit over and over again with researching The Department of Truth… Having knowledge of the conspiracy theories in the past doesn’t make you more susceptible to believing them in the present, it helps you decode the present by seeing the way frightened people come up with the same answers to the same stimuli over and over again over centuries. But a lot of the stories I grew up on, my middle grade “Real UFO” stories, feel like they are harder to get your hands on these days. Sometimes, the only way to engage with these strange stories is to go down a dangerous algorithm-driven rabbit hole into the many hells of the internet. So I really feel like these stories need to be more accessible, and more in the world. I am a skeptic, but I believe the world is stranger than we think it is, and I like to think about the strange stories that happen in the dark.

But the specific thing that has been in my head over and over while I’ve been working on The Department of Truth is that I’d read the testimony of a purported encounter with a strange thing, or hell, even read about an obvious hoax about a strange thing (sometimes these stories are MORE interesting when it’s obvious who is faking it and why), and I’d think to myself “This would make one hell of a good comic book.” There are some stories that I’m just going to fold into Department of Truth, and there are others that grouped together and became the raw seeds of some of the future comics I’m developing… But there was one group of stories that stood out on their own.

I started digging back into UFOs last year in preparation to write The Department of Truth #7, and I was getting extremely frustrated by how much I wanted to dig into and explore the rich lore around UFOs and the Men in Black, while knowing that I needed to keep DOT from becoming entirely about UFO stuff (there will be MORE UFO stuff in DOT, but as a part of a larger spectrum of weird conspiracy stuff)… I think I tweeted at some point last year something in the neighborhood of “One of these years I’m just going to read UFO books and see what my brain cooks up.” A few minutes after tweeting, I had a DM from Michael Avon Oeming who I’d become friendly with earlier in the year, and he told me that if I ever ended up cooking up that UFO book, I needed to give him a call.

The first email I wrote after I spoke to Substack about the deal was to Oeming, asking if he wanted to build something with me. This was on June 15th.

Okay. So, please keep this all under your hat for the moment… 

I got a call yesterday with a truly insane offer to develop comics on the newsletter service, Substack. They are looking to increase their profile and bring eyes to their platform, and comics is one of the key spaces they are looking to expand. The money they are giving is a grant, with no strings attached, other than a certain number of posts they want me to hit in a year, and the expectation that I will create comic content (though if I decided to take the money and do a recipe blog, there’s nothing in the contract stopping me). The only downside is there’s an expectation to get things up and running quickly. I’m seriously considering stepping away from my DC Commitments to do all of this, but even doing that, most of my ideas need a bit more cooking upfront.

Except, I’ve had this idea in my back pocket for the last year about trying to do non-fiction adaptations of credible UFO encounters. Go with the most detailed accounts and try to match them as close as we can, not extrapolating or dramatizing, just illustrating more or less what happened. And that we’d do it in a kind of two tone, black, white and blue style. And we call the project. BLUE BOOK. And stylize it like… If we were doing the Kenneth Arnold sighting, we’d do “BLUE BOOK: WASHINGTON 1947” And have some fun design work around it. And maybe that sequence is only 10 pages long… But then later, we could do the Betty and Barney Hill encounter, (BLUE BOOK: NEW HAMPSHIRE 1961) as an OGN length type thing. But the key thing is to treat it soberly, and focus on the encounters themselves, and try not to create too much that’s not already present in the material. Like we treat it like it’s a true crime account. Try to match the UFOs and Aliens seen to the descriptions.

It’s also something that if you’re interested, but don’t know how much time you’d want to commit to a project like this, where we could bring in guest artists to draw some of these… So let’s say we wanted to do 12 encounters (of various length over the year), and you did 6 of them, and then we hired 6 other rad artists whose work complements yours, and keep them locked into the blue two-tone of the project. And then ultimately, we could bring the collection of all of these to Image or somewhere in a nice big HC, and just kind of keep doing them whenever we wanted to. We’d also design a cool logo that we could make into pins and t-shirts and other neat stuff. It feels like it could be a cool complementary project to all things DOT, and given the state of all things UFO in the world, we might hit at the exact right moment to capture a lot of curiosity.

Let me know if that sounds interesting to you!

Michael said yes a few hours later, with a simple caveat – He wanted to draw it all. Within a couple of days, he’d drawn up a rough for a teaser…

Which coalesced into this, and captured the exact spirit of the beast.

As we talked over the last couple months, we determined a few things… Rather than starting with a bunch of shorts, we wanted to start big, doing the story of Betty and Barney Hill over several chapters, launching in September. We agreed that the “Blue Book” title was a bit more of a thematic title, so we’re not limited to the cases actually investigated by Project Blue Book (though they DID investigate the Hill Case). We nailed down the phenomenal Aditya Bidikar to do letters on the project. I already had about half of the sources I needed to do the book right and got my hands on the other half (including the two issues of LOOK MAGAZINE from 1966 that brought their story to the entire country). When we’re done with the Hill encounter, we’ll likely take on a few odds and ends before we dive into another big one. Ultimately I want this to be a series of “non-fiction” OGNs with Blue Spines that will sit pretty on the shelves, and I could see this being a project that Michael and I come back to over and over. As always your support will dictate how long we do this, but we wanted to come out the gate with something strong.

BLUE BOOK will start next month, in September, which happens to be the 60th anniversary of the fateful drive that Betty and Barney Hill made through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. 

I really hope you enjoy what we’ve made for you. It’s only the beginning. 

WHAT ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR NEWSLETTER?

1.     TINY UPDATES – Every week there will be a free newsletter for all of my subscribers, letting you know what comics I have in stores that week, where I’m appearing next, news about me and my titles, reminders to buy things off my webstore, and nudges to sign up for the pay version of the newsletter by letting you know what those folks are going to get by signing up. I’ll probably still stick a longform rant in there every now and then for old time’s sake because I do love to ramble. This is basically a more regular, stripped-down version of what my newsletter has been over the last two years.

2.     THINKING BAT THOUGHTS – As we build up to my last big Batman hurrah, I thought I’d pull together a retrospective on my Batman run. I know a lot of creators shy away from talking about how the sausage gets made, but I want to get into the gory details a bit, and talk about a few more what ifs. Want to know the original identity of The Designer? Want to know the genesis of Punchline and the other new characters? Read excerpts from different iterations of pitch documents as they evolved? Get some dirt on how this was meant to set up 5G? Then this is going to be your favorite recurring feature.

3.     MERCHANDISE & COLLECTIBLES – Another key component to what I’m looking to build out over the next year is how I approach merchandise and direct sales to retailers and fans. My enamel pins and Razorblades: The Horror Magazine have taught me a lot, and now I’m getting ready to put everything I learned to the test. I’m going to have some announcements on this front over the next few months, about new merchandise and some cool variant covers that will be available exclusively from me. Paid subscribers to this newsletter are going to be able to get the first and preferred access to that stuff (and they’ll get access to some hyper limited subscriber-only products and covers, too).

4.     COMMUNITY – I’m still looking into how I best want to approach this, but as I’ve been saying in this newsletter for a while now, I am planning on pulling up all stakes on social media. I’m going to stick around another month or two to keep pointing people in the direction of the newsletter, but ultimately my plan is to close the account and delete the twitter app from all my devices. I’ve got somebody I trust running the @ReadTinyOnion account on my behalf, but I won’t be using it. This newsletter is really going to be the only fan-facing place where folks can interact directly with me. I am going to host some AMAs and things like that, trying out a few different approaches until I land on a version I’m comfortable with and make it more regular.   

OKAY, WE’RE INTERESTED… WHAT COMES NEXT?

So, I’ve got three payment tiers for all of you…

For $7/month, you get access to everything. Every comic. Every post. Early-bird access to special covers and merchandise, etc. 

For $75/year, you STILL get access to everything, but pay 9 bucks less over the course of the year. I’m also going to run a special deal… Everyone who signs up for an annual payment option in the FIRST 24 HOURS is going to get a signed single comic book in the mail that I’m going to pull from my storage locker. I’m going to try and nab you some goodies, some rare covers I have extras of, etc. No guarantees, no requests, no promises that they’re going to be perfect 9.8’s or anything, but I’m going to try to dig up some gems. 

And then there’s something special called The Founders Tier, which I don’t know how long I am going to keep open so nab a spot while you can. This is the super fancy deluxe version. For $250/year, you get access to everything I’ve laid out above (The first 24 hours deal applies here, too)… but you will ALSO receive six extremely exclusive covers from six different projects over the course of the next year that will not be made available to any other sales platform. They won’t be on the webstore. They won’t be available to other paid subscribers, monthly or otherwise. The ONLY WAY to get those six covers from me is to sign up for this option.

And, if you’re not interested in a front row seat to what we’re building, and want to stick to free posts, you’ll still get our weekly “Tiny Update” from me, with news on what comics you can find in stores each week, appearances, and more… 

HOUSEKEEPING

Okay, that’s pretty much it. My goal is that by the start of September, I’ll be shifting into roughly two newsletters per week, one free, and at least one paid. The next couple of weeks I’ll be posting a bit more regularly than that to help get folks on board, and explain a bit more of what I’m planning here. Once we have a few projects up and running, you’ll be able to sort and choose which ones you get in your inbox, and I’ll explain all of that when the time comes. 

I want to thank Greg Lockard, who is joining me as the editor of everything I’m building here on Substack, without whom it would NOT be possible to build out this whole big crazy system for all of you. I also want to thank Dylan Todd, who continues to be the best design partner an independent comic book creator could ask for. You’ll be seeing a lot of fucking cool Dylan Todd designs coming up in this Substack.

I also want to say one more thing on the Batman front… I can’t say enough incredible things about working with Jorge Jimenez and Guillem March, and the entire Batman editorial team this past year. In ten years of working with the company, it’s been the best and most exciting time to work in Gotham City. I also want to say I’ve had conversations with the editors and creators continuing to work in the line, and I can tell you that right now there are still plans to continue the stories of the characters we’ve created over the last few years. Finally, I want to say that I know who is following me on Batman, and what they have planned for you, and I can assure you that the Batmobile is in incredible hands.

Anyways, I think that’s enough for all of you to chew on. I’ll be firing off the first “Tiny Update” tomorrow letting you know what all I have in store for you this week, in stores and here on Substack!

Much more to come. Stay tuned.

James Tynion IV
Brooklyn, NY
8.9.21