TINY UPDATE 2/7: The Perpetual Chaos Engine

“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

Feb 07, 2022

I’m in Florida right now.

Not the right now when I’m writing this, but the right now when it lands in your mailbox. Maybe I’ll go back and tweak some of the punctuation in the earlier bit here from my hotel room in Florida. I’m visiting my mom, but I’m also visiting the sun and the beach and the ocean and I am going to try and absorb as much of it as I can. See if my brain can release a little tension. Not too much, but some. Last week was a very big week. There was the part of that very big week that was public, for all of your benefits, and then there was the stuff I can’t tell you all about.

Suffice to say it’s all really exciting.

Let’s talk for a minute about Comics Day on Substack. There was definitely a moment where I was a little worried that all of the big moves I made were drowned out by the shiny new offerings being laid out by my fellow Substackers, but the steady growth in subscriptions in the days following have been very, very encouraging. One of the big things that have been on my mind lately is the sustainability of Substack as my primary communication platform with my readers and as a kind of “test kitchen” for story ideas and formats. Right now, you’re seeing me throw the test kitchen sink at you, but there’s going to come to a point as we get to August where my output here is going to be shaped by the monthly support I’m seeing here.

Some of that talk is going to happen just between me and the Tiny Onion brain trust I’ve assembled to run what is quickly becoming a kind of… decentralized comic book publisher. But I also think part of the fun here on the newsletter is me being a bit open and honest about what Tiny Onion is evolving into. I keep thinking of us as an independent Production House, like you see in Hollywood, but still focused on making comics first and foremost. We make the books that we then bring to different publishers, best suited to those books, to distribute them to the world. I have the crazy version of what that could grow into, if I play my cards right, and find a way to get some balance and peace of mind.

What you’re seeing play out on Substack is the kind of… Beta Version of a business model taking shape. The cornerstone of that business model is not putting all of my eggs in any one basket. But the heart of it all comes from spending years thinking about what I think the comic industry should look like, what it should prioritize, and finally being in the position to enact some of that myself. Try and build a working model of what I think is possible, and find out if it is.

There are a few big things that might happen over the next couple of years. What I have been doing is building a sturdy infrastructure that can work as a foundation of the next step in my evil plans on very short notice. When the moment comes to scale up, I don’t want to be building from scratch. There are two things I’ve learned about growing my business in the last couple of years. The first is that you need to have a big picture end state in your head. Every time you are in a position where you have to make a decision, you need to understand whether the decision you make brings you closer to that end state or moves you further away from it. The second is that both business and creative work is defined by making considered decisions, so you need to give yourself as much information as you can to make the best decisions. Every balloon on every panel on every page of every comic I write is a decision. Every story or piece of merchandise I put into the comics market is a decision. It’s not about a cold calculation of a five-year plan… ultimately, there’s too much you can’t predict and can’t plan for. And creative work requires reacting and adapting based on what you get back from your collaborators, or whether audiences respond to what you’re making. You do need to make quick decisions based on your gut, at the moment… But your job is making sure you have enough information to make GOOD gut decisions.

Creatively, that has meant breaking out of the echo chamber of influence that comes from only reading superhero comics. I documented digging further into the Fantagraphics/D&Q side of the comic book aisle back at the start of the pandemic and I think it did a lot to remind me to disregard the “rules” of the medium, and pull from a broader frame of influence and make my writing stronger. Recently, I’ve talked a lot about reading plays, with an eye to improving my dialogue. To fall back in love with the cadence of people talking with each other. But I’ve had a white whale I’ve been needing to kill, and last week I started my attack.

For the last six years or so, I’ve had a strange block against reading prose fiction. I’ve done most of my fiction reading in comics, and most of my reading, on paper and in audio, shifted to non-fiction. I think part of it was a kind of rising anxiety as my career writing comics came screaming into life that made it harder to sit and focus enough to get into the flow required to enjoy fiction, and another part of it was the shock of the mid-2010s where reality basically collapsed all of my naive assumptions about how the world worked and sent me into the non-fiction stacks for me to build a new outlook on reality. Recently, I’ve been dipping my toes in the water. Reading plays has been one way I’ve been just trying to get back in the habit of reading a book on paper, without distraction, like I used to do years ago.

But there’s been one reading project that I’ve been putting off for ages, and I’m going to try and kick it back into gear. I want to read (and in many cases reread) the prose genre canon of the 20th Century, with an eye toward Science Fiction and Horror. Last week I decided to start on this path by finally picking a collection of short stories off the shelf that I’d been looking at guiltily for years, and I read Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” for the first time. It’s a story I’ve heard about second-hand, for years, and it did not disappoint. It’s such an angry, wrenching work of fiction that it stopped me in my tracks a bit. I sat for a while after reading it, just staring out into space, thinking. Soaking in the raw emotions of it, and wanting deeply to manifest my own anger on the page in a way that lingers. I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time. Particularly as I keep writing NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE…

I continued my Ellison streak by reading “‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” which reads so remarkably like a 1980s deconstructionist take on superhero fiction that it’s easy to forget that it was released in 1965, at the dawn of the Marvel age of comics. Then, over the weekend, I treated myself to a sampler platter of Ray Bradbury. I read “The Veldt,” “A Sound of Thunder,” “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and “The Million Year Picnic.” I’d read bits and pieces of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man back in high school, but given that was more than half a lifetime ago, the stories are hitting me fresh now. Beyond that, I’m seeing a context I never had for these stories before. When I was a teenager, I basically just knew the history of comics provided to me by Wizard Magazine. In college, I taught myself the history of horror cinema, dabbling a bit in how it connected to the broader history of the genre across media. But ever since, I’ve been reading and watching and listening and stitching together a chain of influence and inspiration. We live in such an echo chamber of culture these days, where everything is an adaptation or re-adaptation of some older loved thing, that I think we’ve disconnected from the raw creative energy that stitched together rules that we still follow. I want to read the originals. I want to see how they work and use that to better understand what I do.

In the past, I’ve always let myself be a bit too much of a completionist, to my own detriment. And I’m insanely busy, so it’s hard to predict when a novel is going to capture my full attention, and when I won’t be able to let go of the writing I need to do on a given day. So, this time, I’m giving myself permission to write myself a little survey course in the genre canon, starting with a sampling of some of the greatest short stories ever written in speculative fiction.

But anyways… I’m building a list. I’m trying to stick to two or three short stories an author to start. Next up in my journeys are the big three. Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. I dabbled in some Asimov in high school, but the other two I only know from what they inspired (Update from Florida: I read Asimov’s “Robbie,” and Clarke’s “The Sentinel” and “The Nine Billion Names of God” on the flight down). I think I’m going to expand my weekly reading homework to include at least one play and at least one short story from my list.

Right now I’m clearly riding on some manic energy, so I bet I keep reading beyond that assignment for a few weeks, but after that, I’m going to try and keep it up. Gotta keep the brain fed so I can keep writing all of these comic books for you. If there’s a short story you think should be on my list, call it out in the comments! I’ll keep you updated on my progress through this side project in the “Quick Things” section of each Tiny Update.

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This Wednesday, I’m going to reveal a lot more about the next hit Tiny Onion series, THE ODDLY PEDESTRIAN LIFE OF CHRISTOPHER CHAOS in advance of the release of its prologue the following week. I’m going to discuss this a bit more on Wednesday, but given the response to the full issue of THE CLOSET, and some of the other successful launches last week… I’m re-thinking how I want to release this project. We’ve built a schedule of small bite releases, but I’m feeling that people like to chew on a meatier chunk of a comic book, rather than smaller segments. We’re still going to run the prologue to the series next Wednesday, and we’ll let you know how we want to move forward

By the way, in case you missed this, I released a brand new comic book called THE CLOSET last Monday, and paid subscribers to this newsletter can read the whole dang thing right now. So if you want to read a whole 30-page horror comic from yours truly, you should do two things… First, you should…

And then you should…

Read The Closet!

Wynd Book Two: The Secret of the Wings HC (Direct Market Exclusive)

W: James Tynion IV / A+C: Michael Dialynas / L: Aditya Bidikar / AE: Ramiro Portnoy / E: Eric Harburn / P: BOOM! Studios

Wynd and his friends must journey to the Faerie realm in this second chapter of the hit series!

Wynd, Oakley, Thorn, and Yorik take the next step in their dangerous quest across Esseriel but are soon attacked by a mysterious enemy. Can Wynd rise to the moment and if so, at what cost? And when Wynd is captured and taken to the Faeries’ hidden capital deep in the Weird Woods, his friends must rescue him before he’s put on trial… and Basil, Titus, and Ash unknowingly lead an even greater threat to the Faerie City – Vampyres! The GLAAD Award-winning team of writer James Tynion IV (Batman, Something is Killing the Children) and artist Michael Dialynas (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) continue their hit young adult fantasy series about learning to spread your wings no matter the dangers life puts in your way.

Collects Wynd #6-10.

Just wanted to let folks know that a bunch of the super cool items we released in the last ONION DROP are now available for anybody/everyone to purchase! As of today, the password-blocked items are now available for everybody!

We still have a VERY LIMITED number of signed bundles of WYND Vol. 1 & 2 available right now. These bad boys will ship in March. We also still have a few WYND t-shirts available! So you should go snag them now on the new Tiny Onion Webstore, powered by Third Eye Comics!

Tiny Onion Webstore!

The next Onion Drop is coming on Wednesday, March 2nd, and is going to feature the first release of a Tiny Onion Exclusive Variant Cover. It’s also going to feature the pre-orders of the piece of merch I’ve been dying to get into the world for years now. Could not be more excited.

Okay, so I need to come clean. I almost never play games, but I bought TIMBERBORN on Steam and I think I have a problem. The first night I started playing it, I lost track of time, and literally stayed up all night. Like, seriously, I looked up once and it was 5AM and then I looked up again and it was 10AM. I keep getting too ambitious about the city I’m building and then managing to kill out the entire population, which would be funnier if it wasn’t a metaphor for my relationship with myself re: my workload. It is a very nice game where you build complex cities for beavers to live in. There are a bunch of good YouTube videos of people building really cool beaver cities. If all of a sudden I disappear from the world and all of my comics stop coming out, it will be this game’s fault.
I finished THE POWER BROKER last week. What a compelling book, and for all of its length and complexity, Caro never loses sight of the core themes of the piece. It’s fascinating to absorb it all. Seeing how one man gained so much power over one of the most complex cities in the world, and literally reshaped it in a way that we’ll be dealing with for generations. It’s satisfying reading a story about a driven man who wills things that should exist into reality, but that’s only the first third of the story. Seeing his callous need for power grow, and his ideals fail until he becomes this fully monstrous figure is harrowing. Honestly, I’m glad to be reading this at this moment in my career. I don’t want to say that I relate to Moses in any fundamental way, but there’s a sideways way to look at myself as a bit of a reformer and a builder myself. I look to bypass faulty systems or absorb them in pursuit of manifesting what I want to exist in the world. I enjoy doing that. I mean, I wasn’t FULLY kidding when I named this newsletter THE EMPIRE OF THE TINY ONION. There’s a game to it, and the game is thrilling. But the game can never, ever be the goal in and of itself. That’s not who I want to be, or who I want to become. What matters is the work and the people I make the work with, above all else. The game is noise, a distraction.
Next up, I’m starting FIRE IN THE VALLEY: THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE PERSONAL COMPUTER by Michael Swain and Paul Freiberger. I’m dropped my 1.7x speed from THE POWER BROKER down to a more manageable 1.5x speed. Going to see if I can go from knocking out my last audiobook in 3 months to knocking this one out in a week. Which honestly, shouldn’t be all that tough.

Okay. That’s plenty from me this week.

By the way - I’ve heard we’re getting some messages in that the Blue Book Ch 7 downloads were giving folks Blue Book Ch 6 instead. We fixed this on the website itself, but if you’re just looking at your email you’re getting an old link. Paid subscribers can download the correct version here.

James Tynion IV
Miami, FL
2.7.22