TINY UPDATE 1/9: States of Vaguely Organized Chaos

“Tiny Update” is a monthly free newsletter that keeps you up to date on the latest news, comic book projects and merchandise offerings from James Tynion IV and Tiny Onion Studios

Happy New Years, Friends!

Depicted above is a 35 year old comic book writer still trying to recover his sleep schedule from a night out dancing until 4 AM one week ago. I think I am like three more decent nights’ sleep away from those rings under my eyes receding again. But it’s good to be back. Welcome to The Empire of the Tiny Onion: 2023 Edition.

Because I am a bit of a lunatic, I usually try to overclock my Januaries. The start of each year in general. You can chart a record of it through the last few years of my newsletter. Last year it was all about the plays and short stories I was going to read every week, and I DID manage to keep that up for a few months. But this year I’ve been turning my eyes toward a bit more self-improvement and home improvement. My goal heading into January was to go out on more of a limb emotionally in my personal life and see what happened. To strengthen some habits I’ve been building, and add more good habits to my whole system. And first and foremost, I wanted to do some physical organization of the spaces I spend most of my time in.

One of my goals for this month is trying to get both my apartment and the studio in operating condition for the year where I don’t need to do any more apartment projects or anything like that except as they arise. I want to live and work in the ideal version of these spaces that I know are possible in my head! So, I set my plans in motion. Most of my blueprints for achieving peak January were more abstract, but these aspects were firm and finite and I thought I would make some powerful headway in them by the end of week one, and then just need to do little finicky organizational things over the next few weeks.

Of course, I was thwarted immediately. Back in December, I had ordered a new piece of furniture, a nice sideboard to run behind my kitchen counter. I had gotten rid of the old piece that this would be replacing, unshelved everything I had been storing there and was ready to have the whole apartment tucked away and neat by this weekend, but then the sideboard arrived broken. Now I have to try and schedule a new one to come and replace it at SOME POINT before I fly to France at the end of the month. And in the meantime all the shit I unshelved is now all over the place and the apartment is in a state of vaguely organized chaos until that happens. I also lost half the week to the internet crapping out, which made me deconstruct my whole office closet to access the box the router plugs into and transformed my home office into an even less organized brand of chaos.

Anyways. I had higher hopes for the studio. I used to work alone there, but over the summer Tradd Moore and Ian Bertram moved in (we still need to give ourselves a cool studio name). We’ve still been using this dinky little mini-fridge I had when I was a solo act. Which does not have enough room for three lunches and snacks and drinks and junk, so I figured, I can order a new mini fridge and we’ll have this place sorted out nicely for 2023. Cut to today. I saw there was a delivery notification end of day yesterday for the fridge. WHICH concerns me because I was HERE yesterday and no fridge arrived. Delivery notification says it was handed off to a resident. So, I check the nice area the building keeps its packages and had no luck. I checked the area the building USED to keep its packages before there was a nice area for it and no luck. I walk the halls of the studio space, to see if somebody tucked it into the corner. No luck. I even went to the brewery downstairs, since I know they have large boxes delivered pretty often and they hadn’t seen the dang thing. I was walking back to the building entrance from around the corner, and I had given up. I accepted that some rando had intercepted the fucking thing and that I would have to try and figure out how to get it refunded and find a safer way to have the thing shipped to me. I figured at this point that the week was cursed.

Now, I have been in good spirits this week, despite hitting a few separate walls in achieving the peak January I had been shooting for. Even the biggest setback of the week in my personal life had ended up surprisingly fulfilling and I felt like was I was growing as a person in some kind of psychospiritual way. But I figured the EASY shit of the week was going to be getting my apartment and my office in order and now we were a week in, and I had a broken sideboard, my apartment was chaos, and somebody had stolen my refrigerator.

Something in my brain started to scream.

But then I noticed something sitting on the metal steps outside the warehouse next to my studio space. Was it there all night? Who could say! But it was addressed to me.

Achieving peak January has had some bumps, but it doesn’t quite feel like the universe is telling me to quit it. If the universe has articulated anything it’s that there can be a lot of good even when a bunch of shit goes wrong, and sometimes nobody stole your refrigerator, it just got delivered to the wrong place, and now you have to figure out how to lug it into your building without fucking up your back. Nothing ever comes easy, but you can still have a nice time in the face of chaos, and keep making steps in the right direction.

I haven’t been talking a lot of my some of my personal foibles over the last six months, mostly because they are my business and mine alone. But it’s been a year of huge changes in my life. One that’s going to be a lot more visible come next convention season is that I’ve lost fifty pounds since September. I still have a ways to go to be where I want to be on that front, but I’m making a lot of steps in the right direction and come this summer I’ll hopefully be looking a bit different when you see me on the circuit. Fingers crossed! I’ve also been making a lot of big leaps on the inside of my weird brain. Aspects of myself that I think I sublimated because sublimating them made it easier to focus on my work are starting to reassert themselves. I’m trying to hold a more honest image of myself in my head, and I’m using a few words I haven’t in a long time to think of myself in. Which has been empowering and terrifying, but all feels necessary.

I think my best work has always been my most emotionally raw, honest work, and I want to make a lot more emotionally raw, honest work, and I think part of that requires me to be a little more emotionally raw and honest with myself. Even if that puts me in a more vulnerable place than I’m usually comfortable being. I’m a work in progress. I just keep picturing one of those cheesy “under construction” GIFs people used to throw up on their Geocities pages. We’ll see if any of this shit ends up being stuff I decide to throw out to the world for you all to chew on, but in any case, these are the emotions that will form the bedrock of my next generation of fucked up murder comics. We’ll see how you all like them!

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This week is the start of a new phase of this newsletter.

I’ve fully separated out the Onion Club from the machinations of Substack, and I want to give a brief rundown of what you can expect from me in 2023. No tier of subscription to this Substack comes with physical goods, so I want to be clear about what a paid subscription gets you, and what an unpaid subscription gets you.

FREE SUBSCRIBERS

• Monthly Tiny Updates! Posts like this one where you get to hear about all the cool comic books I have in stores each month, and hear me ramble about refrigerator deliveries and the weird shit I’m reading and watching and thinking about.

• News About Upcoming Print Projects! In addition to the print releases of Blue Book and The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos, I am debuting a whole new generation of comic projects in print, starting with W0RLDTR33 with Fernando Blanco in April from Image Comics. We’ll be debuting the Issue #1 cover, and some of our exciting variants in just a few weeks in tandem with the Image Solicits. After W0RLDTR33, I have at least two more unannounced #1’s releasing in print this year, and this newsletter as always will be where I bang the drum the hardest about these projects. I’m never going to put any important news behind a paywall, so if you just want to keep track of what I’m up to, a free subscription will do the trick!

PAID SUBSCRIBERS

• Deep Dive Industry Thoughts! A new monthly feature that’s going to be a deep dive into my thoughts about the industry and where it stands in 2023, and lay out how those thoughts shape my decisions about my business and my creative life. You’re going to find out more about this brand new feature TOMORROW, when it debuts (first one will be free to give everybody a taste!).

• Early Access To Merchandise! I’ll be continuing to release my monthly ONION DROPS each month, typically on the first Wednesday of the month, where I release new through my storefront on ShopTinyOnion.com! This year, we’ve got a variant cover planned pretty much every month (except maaaaybe May???), with some phenomenal artists lined up. Each cover has a limited print run of 500, and new t-shirts and pins will all be limited runs of 100 each!

• Digital First Comics! In addition to wrapping up THE ODDLY PEDESTRIAN LIFE OF CHRISTOPHER CHAOS Season One, I’m back at work on BLUE BOOK Season Two, and we’ve been recruiting more amazingly talented creators for our TRUE WEIRD anthology series. I’ve also got a new comic project in the works here, teaming with some wonderful (and familiar) creators to do another longer project in the True Weird genre. I hope to start teasing that a bit later this month!

• A New Illustration Series! As we wrap up the contents of the DEPARTMENT OF TRUTH: WILD FICTIONS illustration/prose series and begin to prep the hardcover artbook we’re hoping to release later this year, we’re going to be kicking off a new project in the same format that’s going to appeal to all the folks who have been loving those Wild Fictions!

If you’re a paid subscriber, I hope you stick around for another year! If not, I hope you stick around as a free subscriber to hear me ramble on about junk! But in any case, I think it’s going to be a really good 2023. And if the above sounds enticing to you, you know what to do!

Now, let’s get on with the show… It’s a light month in comic shops from yours truly, but if you’re a fan of the Slaughterverse, we’ve got some exciting stuff coming your way!

January 11th

SOMETHING IS KILLING THE CHILDREN #28

W: James Tynion IV / A + Main Cover: Werther Dell'Edera / C: Miquel Muerto / L: AndWorld Design / E: Ramiro Portnoy & Eric Harburn

As Erica closes in on the Duplicitype, another hunter closes in on her!

Time is running out for Erica as the ruthless Cutter leaves her with nowhere left to turn.

Weakened and unable to flee from a town that's too full of suspicion to trust her, can Erica find a way to save the people of Tribulation before Cutter arrives? Can she even save herself?

January 18th

HOUSE OF SLAUGHTER #11

Created by: James Tynion IV & Werther Dell'Edera/ W: Tate Brombal / A: Antonio Fuso / C: Miquel Muerto / L: AndWorld Design / Main Cover: Mateus Manhanini / E: Ramiro Portnoy & Eric Harburn

New series artist Antonio Fuso (Lost Falls, GI Joe: Cobra) joins returning writer Tate Brombal (Behold, Behemoth) to reveal the next chapter of Jace Boucher's story!

No longer the monster hunter he once was and unaware of Aaron's fate, Jace's new mission is to protect the orphans under his care.

Can he save them from not just the monsters, but his own rage and guilt?

One of these children may be in even worse danger than Jace knows, as a strange pair of eyes watches him from the woodland shadows...

I am flying to France for the ANGOULEME COMICS FESTIVAL in just a few weeks! And I’m sticking around for a week after to tour a bunch of different towns! I’m going to make sure I post my full signing schedule a bit closer to the date in question, but I am very excited to fly to France!

BEYOND THAT, I’ve been firming up my signing schedule for 2022, both at stores and conventions around the country. We have a particularly exciting event building around Blue Book this March that I absolutely can’t WAIT to tell you about. So stay tuned for news on where to find me this year, SOON!

• I’ve been getting back into a lot of Broadway Musicals lately. Being with your parents over the holidays always has you revert a little bit to being yourself at age 15, and I was an intense mopey musical theater gay at age 15. The original Broadway soundtrack to EVITA has been the one I cycle back to in between trying new ones out, and it’s so fucking good even though I have never been the biggest Andrew Lloyd Webber fan. One of my resolutions this year is to get to the theater here in New York at least six times. I knocked one of those out this week (INTO THE WOODS with my Dad), have tickets for another, and have my eyes on a third launching in the fall… I’m trying to reactivate a partially dormant part of my brain and it’s fun to reconnect to stuff that used to mean a lot to you and see how much it still does. Also: BEETLEJUICE is much better than it has any right to be!

• I am going to try to get back on my play-reading habit that I broke after the first third of last year. I think it’ll be easier now that I’m carrying a tote bag with my bullet journal in it again, so I’ll have a physical book with me as I move through the city. I haven’t finished a play yet, so if you don’t hear me jabbering on about it next month, then I probably already broke on this front.

• I keep chewing on BABYLON. The first hour made me think it was up there with TÁR and BANSHEES OF INISHERIN as one of my real favorites of the year. The second hour dropped it a few notches, and rolling into the finale I would have said “This is like 5-7 wrong decisions away from being a legitimately great movie”. But the last 5 minutes… Woof. Let’s just say they lost me, and it bumped the film way out of contention for me. I do think you should see it in theaters if you can. The spectacle of the first two big setpieces, the party, and the film shoot, are some of the best things I’ve seen on film this year. I just wish the rest added up, too.

• I’m going to see M3GAN this week and I am EXCITED.

OKAY! That’s it for today!

We’ve got a new feature coming your way tomorrow, an Onion Drop coming your way Wednesday, and lots more to come this month on Substack. I hope you’ve all started your year off on the right track.

Lots of love to you all! More soon!

James Tynion IV
Brooklyn, NY
1.9.23