TINY UPDATE 2/14: All My Valentines

“Tiny Update” is a weekly 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

I have the same realization a few times a year.

Spending time in the Sun and in the water zens me out like nothing else in the world. I’m back from a week down by my Mom’s place outside of Miami, where I managed to spend a bit of every day in the sun, a bit of every day in some water, and a bit of every day drinking a few glasses of wine outside and just listening to the waves crash on the beach. When I was younger, I thought I would be more of the type to escape the city to the desert someday, but I’m coming around to the idea of just running away to some island and becoming deeply, deeply strange. Stranger, anyways. I’m at a point in my life where I can afford to dip out a bit more often and have this kind of reset, and honestly, I think I need to spend some time prioritizing it.

It’s not that I wasn’t working. I actually wrote somewhere between 60-80 pages of script last week, and I’m damn proud of those pages. I did schedule fewer phone calls, though, which DEFINITELY helped my brain out a bunch. Some time, about two and a half, three years ago, half of my life became phone calls. And then two years ago, a good three-quarters of those phone calls became the real bane of my existence - Video Calls. All of that eats at the real focus I need to do my best work. That’s why I’m working with more and more people who can handle the majority of those calls for me. Mostly, I just want to write stuff and think about things.

Today is Valentines Day.

It’s going to be a pretty low key one on my end, but I just wanted to say that you are all my valentines, and I am so fucking grateful that I get to work in this lunatic industry, and write all of these weird little stories for amazing artists, and that you all like to read them. Every comic and newsletter I write is a little valentine from me to you. A little labor of love. I like ‘em better than those old paper valentines you’d get in class from all of your classmates. With those little candy hearts that tasted and felt like chalk in your hands. I can’t remember the last time I had one of those if I’m being honest.

I hope you all get flowers and candy from your crushes, but in lieu of that, pick up one of my comics and read them and know that I’m sending you some valentines love (usually in horrifying comics where children die in terrible ways).

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This Wednesday, we’re going to be releasing the prologue to the new series THE ODDLY PEDESTRIAN LIFE OF CHRISTOPHER CHAOS! We can’t wait to give you all the first glimpse inside the world we’re building in and around New Briar City. Last Wednesday, we introduced you to the titular main character of the series, but he’s not who you’re going to meet in the prologue here. The character you meet there is someone you’ve seen before, in myriad forms, and I'm excited for you all to meet the version of him the TOPLOCC crew has constructed. More to come Wednesday.

And then this Friday, we’ll be doing a BLUE BOOK BULLETIN before we get back into the groove for the last two chapters of our first season of Blue Book, the story of Betty and Barney Hill. THE MACHINE KEEPS ON TURNING! We’re hard at work to get the next few months of story ready for you here at Tiny Onion HQ. And I’m writing all sorts of other cool things.

I don’t have any new comics in stores this week, but if you haven’t you should subscribe to this newsletter, so you don’t miss out on any of the cool stuff we’ve got in store. I got the proof from the printer on a piece of merch that I’ve been dying to make exist in the world, and paid subscribers are going to find out what it is in the next Onion Drop, on Wednesday, March 2nd! Don’t miss out!

• I had the chance to read the fourth volume of RECKLESS this past week, the horror-tinged THE GHOST IN YOU, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. I’m sure you will all be shocked to hear that it’s incredible. It’ll be out in stores in April, but you should let your LCS that you want a copy right now. And if you’ve missed out on the first three volumes, you should ask them to snag those for you, too. I feel like not enough people are talking about the model of serialization that Ed and Sean have been playing within these books. These are sophisticated thrillers, and we’re getting 2-3 of them a year. It’s the most concentrated burst of high-caliber OGNs from a single creative team I’ve ever seen in our corner of the comic book market, and it feels like a model more of us should be exploring. And they’re so fucking GOOD, too. There’s no other book that I drop everything to read the second I get my hands on a copy. And then I read ‘em again when the hard copies show up from my LCS.

• I think one of the most exciting things that happened in comics last week was C. Spike Trotman building out a crowdfunding platform on her Iron Circus Comics website, eschewing Kickstarter. There were a lot of great conversations I caught wind of this last week spurred by the baffling behavior of Gumroad that led to lots of comic creators leaving the site. This is also happening shortly after Jeffrey Rowland’s TopatoCo launched their own makeshift crowdfunding platform. I grew up in that golden age of Webcomics, and it’s really exciting to see some of the figureheads of that era steer things back toward full platform independence. There feels like there’s a movement away from major platforms and toward rebuilding independent websites, where you have control over what you offer without needing to vouch for whatever lunacy the big tech companies are getting excited about on any given day. I’ve been having lots of thoughts on this theme. Lots and lots of thoughts. We’ll see what they coalesce into.

• Successfully finished the audiobook FIRE IN THE VALLEY in under a week, thanks to my travel. Started another book on the tech that I was really excited about picking up, but the narrator’s voice was too grating, particularly at 1.5 speed, and I jumped ship. Which is always a bummer. I guess I’ll try that one in print. From there, I jumped into another title which I’m still debating whether I like enough to finish, so I’ll refrain from naming it (but it is at least very well narrated). There is such a thrill reading about the people on the ground floor of something so decidedly new. The way these weird kids tinkering with machines built empires. Consequently, I’m revisiting the TV show HALT AND CATCH FIRE, which is brilliant and plays with a lot of the same ideas. This is all research for a comic project you won’t find out about for a good long while.

• Slowed down a bit on my Science Fiction this week. But I did manage to read Robert A. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—,” Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” and Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” The latter was the source material for what is probably my favorite Twilight Zone episode. This week I’m going to spice things up by tackling a couple of William Gibson stories. I do feel like I’m zeroing in on the kind of science fiction that really connects for me. Nightfall was very good but kept losing my attention. I think I need a foot planted firmer in our real world for science fiction to connect properly to me. That’s just a taste thing, it’s nothing against the work itself. I usually have the same problem with fantasy. It feels like I’m zeroing in on something, but I don’t know what, yet. But that’s exciting, isn’t it? My brain is flashing with all of these new exciting inputs, and eventually, I’m going to find out what I’m cooking in there.

• Also managed to get back on my play-reading by revisiting one of my favorites from early high school, Steve Martin’s PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE. It’s a simple play, funny as you’d expect from a mind like Martin’s. It reaches for a few things at the climax that I don’t think it quite gets its hands around, but I appreciate that it reaches. I would have really loved to have seen the production with Kevin Kline as Albert Einstein.

Want to take a moment to point folks over to the incredible Tiny Onion Store at Third Eye Comics.

We’re only scratching the surface on all the cool offerings that are going to launch this year. I can’t wait until you can all really see the scope of what I’m trying to build there. In the meantime, buy some cool stuff!

That’s enough for now. See you all on Wednesday!

James Tynion IV
Brooklyn, NY
2.14.22