TINY UPDATE 3/14: I Will Show You Terror In An Eyeful Of Teeth

“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

Every now and then my sleep schedule gets tossed out the window.

I spend a week fighting it, and I get incredibly irritable and fall behind. Then I kind of lean into it and accept my new vampire hours and start clawing my way back on top of a stack of deadlines. That’s where I’m at right now, deep in vampire country. Our Daylight Savings “Spring Forward” didn’t help with, thank you very much. At some point this week I’ll probably try for some kind of all-nighter reset of my sleep schedule which won’t exactly work, but then by next week, I’ll probably be getting up early in the mornings again. Emphasis on probably.

I’ve spent the last couple of months slowly stumbling into my first real forays in scripting for a medium other than comics. I’ve got two things moving on that track with my boots on the ground writing, and it’s frankly intimidating. Consequently, I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing in the abstract.

When you shift gears to another medium, you figure out a lot about where you’ve been relying on the shapes and limitations of what you usually write. Comics have a lot of limitations, and a lot of them come to me as second nature at this point. My first drafts of comic scripts are usually dialogue flows, with no panel descriptions, which all live in my head. It’s not that I’m charting without a map, I usually have a rough outline I’m working from, and I know the key beats that need to happen in an issue. But, writing for me has always been about finding a flow of language and emotion, and using that to build tension to crescendos of horror. Once I find the emotional flow of the piece, I write quickly and fluidly. I don’t think, I just write. When I can’t find the flow at all, I usually throw out the outline and see where the characters and tension take me. I learned very early on that it’s better to throw out the larger story map to make a single issue better than allow a weak issue to save a beat for later. But that whole system only works because I have this rough sense of the container I’m writing toward. It’s like driving a car you’ve driven a hundred times before. You know exactly how big your car is, how to weave through traffic, how close to make a turn. It becomes unconscious.

But now, I’m writing to a whole different container, and it’s the first time in a long time I’ve been genuinely intimidated by a blank page.

I know what I don’t like about my writing. I’ve never had that polished quality I admire in other writers. That feeling that every word has been perfectly chosen, and placed in a precise, deliberate order. But when I’ve tried to work at polishing my writing it loses the raw emotional quality that I’d like to think is its strength. If anything, I’ve found more success in leaning into the unpolished side of my writing. I really, truly love writing dialogue. Humans don’t talk to each other in polished soundbites, so I can lean into a more conversational tone that feels natural to me. The more I’ve moved away from superhero comics, the more I’ve been able to dictate how I can pace my issues. I also don’t need to worry about action sequences, which if I’m being honest I almost never enjoyed writing. I have a good sense of when I want one of my comics to read denser, and when I need quiet. And I feel like I know horror. How to twist the knife.

I’m trying to carry what I know over into a new medium, with its own rules, and its own tools. It’s exhilarating and deeply terrifying. I’m approaching the task like a student. Absorbing everything I can, and trying to synthesize it into an approach that I hope works for me. Which brings me back to my sleep schedule. I’ve been spending a lot of time watching movies and pilots relevant to my current projects, with a notebook in hand, noting when certain things happen, and trying to zero in on the feeling I’m trying to capture in each of the projects. And then I stay up at night, thinking and pacing, trying to hold the raw essence of something I haven’t captured on paper yet in my mind. So when I’m ready to sit in front of the blank page, it all just flows out of me.

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I don't have any comic books releasing in comic shops this week, but this is going to be a BIG comic book week here at THE EMPIRE OF THE TINY ONION. This Wednesday, we’ll be dropping the second issue of my three-part horror novella, THE CLOSET. And heck, I’m excited enough that I’m going to unveil the cover to that issue right now!

We’ve got some other exciting news about THE CLOSET dropping this week, that I’m hoping I’ll be able to discuss when we drop the issue itself on Wednesday. I’m so damn proud of the work Gavin, Chris, and Tom have done on the series so far. And then, this Friday, we’ve got the big conclusion of season one of BLUE BOOK by me, Michael Avon Oeming, and Aditya Bidikar!

THE CLOSET and BLUE BOOK are both available to read for paid subscribers to this newsletter! So if you want to read a good forty pages of horror and true weird comics this week, you should go on and subscribe to the newsletter now!

Also: In case you missed it last week, there is now a brand new Substack App for iOS, with an Android App soon to follow. This app makes it a whole lot easier to keep track of all of the amazing Substack comic creators who are doing really incredible stuff on the platform. Have you read the first two issues of Chip Zdarsky’s phenomenal PUBLIC DOMAIN? Or the first two issues of Tom King and Elsa Charretier’s LOVE EVERLASTING? Have you been following ND Stevenson’s phenomenal journal comics? Or read the first pages of the NSFW Brian K. Vaughan/Niko Henrichon project, SPECTATORS? It’s easier than ever to keep track of all of these great comics without a million emails cluttering your inbox.

The kind folks at DC Comics are letting me debut the full spread of variant covers and incentives to the first issue of my new series THE SANDMAN UNIVERSE: NIGHTMARE COUNTRY, which has its Final Order Cut-Off (or FOC) this Sunday, March 20th.

I spoke a bit about the series back when it was announced, in a post you can read here. The long and short of it is that THE SANDMAN is the reason I’m writing comic books today, and THE SANDMAN UNIVERSE: NIGHTMARE COUNTRY is the comic where I’m going to try and demonstrate how and why that’s the case. SU:NC is a horror comic, centered around The Corinthian, who I think is one of the most terrifying horror images ever created in any medium. The story takes its core influence from THE SANDMAN stories that centered real human characters living in a vibrant contemporary world, who discover bits of magic and horror lurking around its edges. I’m also writing the book as an entry point into this incredible mythology. If I do my job right, you’ll be able to enjoy this book without having ever read another SANDMAN comic book (though I hope you do). Each issue is going to feature what I’ve been calling a “Nightmare Sequence” by a rotating cast of phenomenal guest artists. The main art on the series will be done by the incredible Lisandro Estherren, with colors by the phenomenal Patricio Delpeche.

I am immensely proud of the book, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. So… Now let’s dig into the meat of why I brought you here today. A jaw-dropping spread of covers and variant covers you can snag at your local comic book shop. The standard cover is $3.99, with the card-stock variants at $4.99.

I’ll start you off with the cover you’ve seen before, by series regular cover artist Reiko Murakami, because it bears repeating!

Next Up: We’ve got a fantastic open-to-order variant cover by the amazing Yanick Paquette and Nathan Fairbairn, who will also be illustrating the first “Nightmare Sequence” in the series.

We’ve got a phenomenal 1:25 incentive cover by a legendary artist, and THE SANDMAN original series alumni, Kelley Jones with colors by Arif Prianto!

Then, we’ve got a 1:50 incentive cover by my NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE partner in crime, Álvaro Martínez Bueno!

And we’ve got a showstopper of a variant for our 1:100 incentive by the always incredible Jenny Frison!

I can’t get over how gorgeous these covers are, I really can’t. If you want to get your hands on the book, this is the last week you can guarantee a copy at your local comic shop. If you want this on your pull-list, tell your local comic shop today. And Comic Shops… If you want an easy entry-point into The Sandman Universe on your shelves when the Netflix TV series hits sometime this year, this book is designed to be picked up by people who have never read a Sandman comic book before!

There are two other covers to the book that I’m not going to reveal just yet because they’re the ones you can only get through by being a Tiny Onion Subscriber. One is going to be a Gold Foil exclusive to members of THE ONION CLUB, and the other will be unveiled with the ONION DROP on the first Wednesday of April. If you don’t want to miss out on these, you should hit that subscribe button today!

• I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for the last two years and did a full re-read of SAGA by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples over the weekend. Spoilers, it’s really fucking good. More than that, on this re-read, it just hit me how perfect a serialized comic it is. Every issue gives you an image or two that will linger with you. It’s got soap opera, it’s got sex, it’s got action, it’s got incredible character and world design. No other book in the direct market better embodies what long-form serialized comic books can and should be. I only meant to read for a couple of hours the other night, but with the help of this weekend’s “Spring Forward,” I put down last month’s Issue #56 at 5:30 AM. And then I just sat there for a bit, marveling at what I had just taken in. I can’t tell you the last time I just got swept up in a long-form comic like that. The most striking thing for me after reading it is just recognizing how inhospitable the direct market has become for long-form serialized comics, despite us ALL knowing that it’s what our version of the medium does best. And the comic that does it the best is probably the most successful comic of the last twenty years (except for maybe The Walking Dead, which was ALSO a long-form serialized juggernaut of a comic). Sometimes I get in my head about my inclination for sprawling long-form stories and think that I should be shooting for more miniseries and shorter runs on titles, but there’s a kind of connection with a reader you can only build on a long-running title. That’s the connection I'm always trying to chase. It’s nice when you read something reaffirming like that.

• I knocked out two audiobooks last week thanks to my dear friend, the 1.5x speed on Audible. They made for an exceptionally odd pairing. One was the classic HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE by Dale Carnegie, and the other was THE FOURTH TURNING by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The first feels a little quaint given that it’s almost a hundred years old at this point, but there’s still some good business truisms. I don’t know how relevant all the advice is in the contemporary world, it all seems much more in tune with the post-war Widget Economy where everyone was selling more or less the same thing, so the job was more about being a better salesman than selling a better product. THE FOURTH TURNING was a more unnerving read. I’ve been familiar with the theory for a long time, especially after reading how much of Steve Bannon’s worldview was influenced by it in the mid-2010s, but it is incredibly unnerving reading a book from the mid-1990s predict the next twenty years with such remarkable accuracy. Like so many pop-sociology histories, it’s better food for thought than it is prescriptive. But I was more captivated by it than I was expecting to be. The good news is that according to the core theory of the book, the Fourth Turning will end at some point this decade, and a more stable era will arise from it. The bad news is that it’s more likely to be a more conformist era as people turn away from twenty years of crisis, which is never all that great for those of us that don’t fit neatly into a conformist world. Anyways. Like I said. Good food for thought.

• I was not familiar with Ayesha A. Sidiqqi before reading this interview with Charlie Markbreiter, and I haven’t read the Sally Rooney books that the interview was technically about, but there are a few answers here that really got me thinking. As a self-absorbed, ennui-riddled Millennial artist, I like to think about what it is to be a Millennial a bit too much, and this was exceptional food for thought, particularly in contrast with my listen-through of THE FOURTH TURNING. Discovered via Sean Monahan’s 8Ball which keeps pointing me in interesting directions.

• I can’t stop listening to the Michael Giacchino soundtrack to THE BATMAN. Getting this and Hans Zimmer’s DUNE soundtrack within six months of each other is a real embarrassment of riches. I think both of these are going to be in my rolodex for a long time.

Alright. That’s enough from me this week. I didn’t brew this late-night pot of coffee to write me some newsletters. I have comics and lettering scripts and all sorts of stuff to knock out before that bastard sun rises up, and I’m banished to my vampire coffin.

See you on Wednesday for THE CLOSET #2, and this Friday for BLUE BOOK Chapter 10! Be good to each other.

James Tynion IV
Brooklyn, NY
3.14.22