ARCANUM: What's with this Hiatus, Then?

This technically doesn't happen until Arc Two ...

Basically, I neglected to quit my day job.

When Leverage wrapped, I had two projects to occupy my downtime: the Thrillbent 2.0 launch and the founding of my own production company, Kung Fu Monkey Productions. It takes a good year of development to pull any projects together for TV development, so I figured I had some room to spend exclusively on Thrillbent.

Arcanum is a difficult comic series -- it's meant to duplicate a TV series, which means breaking 13 full interlocking stories per arc, rather than a single serialized story. There's also, for a fantasy series, a ridiculous amount of research. Savvy readers will be able to figure out from the real-world clues already dropped under exactly what location the Arcanum facility is constructed. The full timeline of all the plot links stretches from historical figures of the mid 1800's through World War One to modern times. This is my Big Swing, so to speak. But, as I'd just gone from "A Show Eating My Life" to "Relatively Unemployed", Todd and I jumped in with a certain comfort in the lead time we'd built up.

What I did NOT anticipate was rapidly closing the deal with my friends at TNT for a new pilot or two, my friend Dean Devlin getting the rights to a dream project we'd talked about for years, and the fine folks at Cinemax giving me a call for ... something. Never mind the ruthless efficiency of the young people who work at my company, who scared up about 20 projects I'm NOT writing for development. Essentially, my TV career post-show did not suck at quite the volume I believed it would.

All that to say there was no way we could keep jamming the art through as my Arcanum scripts got farther and farther behind. We needed a gap for me to get the first batch of stories fully completed and give Todd and Troy a chance to do their best work. I'd also like to start doing what the Eighth Seal lads are doing -- offering Arcanum issues on Comixology ahead of their Thrillbent release. 

And so Arcanum takes a rest until September, with the exception of some concept art and research notes we'll post occasionally. In the meantime, the Monday slot will be filled with Todd and Geoff Throne's great indie action book, Prodigal. Supernatural treasure hunters who punch stuff, fight ninjas and dragons, and banter. It was this book which made me ask Todd to come on to Arcanum, and of course you all know Geoff Thorne from Leverage, so I'm sure you'll dig the series as much as I do.

Thanks for your tolerance as we screw around with our little publishing experience, and be sure to check out Thrillbent's other titles.

ARCANUM: The Sausage, as She is Made.

Rather than take all the fun out of the fiction, I thought I'd give you a quick background on how Todd, Troy and I put together Arcanum. Everyone works differently on Thrillbent, but this is the general production template.

I write each episode, defining each slide and generally calling out the panels.  Every now and then I'll just suggest something, not detail it out.  The fight between Cole and the Elven Swordsman in Episode 002 -- or #102 if we're using standard TV episode numbering, which probably makes more sense in this format -- was originally scripted as "Give me as many panels as you think interesting, across as many slides, to show me Cole using stick-fighting to take this asshole apart."  Sometimes I'll call a editing pattern, which Todd then translates into page space. In today's installment, for example, I called for a 50/50 to mimic a cross-cut between Subject Zero and the door to the vault opening. In my head they were side-by-side, but Todd designed it as a top-and-bottom spilt, which worked even better.

Todd then sends me layouts, a sample of which appears as the header for this blog post. I approve, he then does the full art digitally, combining colors and inks and what-have-you, whatever guys like him do to make the pretty pictures. It all seems very difficult, frankly.

When Todd delivers the color pages, I tend to re-script.  Not a massive re-write but sometimes I look at an action or an expression and realize I want to adjust. Sometimes I see that thanks to Todd's art, I don't need certain dialogue.  It's a much more fluid process than print production, a bit more of a conversation.

With the script properly adjusted, each dialogue line being numbered so the letterer knows what goes where, I take Todd's art and export all of that week's installment into a single pdf document. I load that pdf into Goodreader, my iPad doc reader and editor of choice. Using a stylus I lay-out where each dialogue balloon goes, or at least suggest it. Mark taught me how to do this, but I'm a sad dilettante compared to him. He can see the page layout instantly, has an almost musical sense of how comic page storytelling should work. I kind of galumph along.
 

This often leads to further tweaks to the script. With all that done, I upload the script, lettering-guide pdf and the original color art to our FTP server. Troy Peteri, our in-house letterer and general file genius, letters the comic, does the final image prep, and dumps it back onto the server.

On the appointed day Lori Matsumoto, our general site coordinator, makes sure the comic goes live, sends out the appropriate texts, emails and tweets, and off we go.

We're a little more complicated than most similar sites as we're coordinating a giant chunk of continuous, new material. But I find it boggling and impressive that most webcomics are a one-person show, a single person tackling all that, often three times a week. There's a reason we use them as our distribution/production model rather than print. That sort of hustle is what you need to move the model forward. Time will tell if we've learned the right lessons. Go ahead and read today's installment here.

ARCANUM: Immortality is So, So Creepy

Even pseudo-immortality, the thousand-year lifespan, has a nasty ring to it.

Not just because of what it might mean for the individual who's rocking the forever-life, either -- and there have been plenty of discussions of that idea, both in the vampire myth and in science fiction. One of my favorite authors to tackle this idea is Richard K. Morgan in his Altered Carbon series. In this universe people are implanted with tiny upload hardware, almost impossible to destroy, allowing your persona to be transferred from body to body. Not quite the traditional view of immortality, but the tone -- the weary, noir sensibility of an endless dream-like loop -- is spot on.  People who've lived too long in the AC universe are fundamentally wrong in an alien way. They have seen and done too much. They've gone past nihilism. There's an ... absence where the fundamental connection to other humans should be.

No, what's even creepier to me is what a society of such people would be. Look around us now. Boomers are freaking out over millenial values, just as their Greatest Generation parents freaked out over theirs. I have people working for me who've never even seen a dial telephone.  Change hurtles ever onward, and the only thing more corrosive than the fact that the future isn't evenly distributed is the fact that there are plenty of humans who don't want this future at all.  It's all too much change, it may be literally too much change to process for human hardwiring. Many older humans are living future shock, right now. It was ever thus.

But the difference now is that those people are alive.

In 1900 the percentage of the American population over the age of 45 was 17.8%. In 1950 it was 28.4%. As of the last census the share of the US population over 45 is 36.4%. Hell, the 65+ share's gone from 4.1% in 1900 to 13.3% in 2010. More and more people still in the society, with greater and greater influence, still constructing societal and legal norms based on emotional, psychological, cultural and technological frames of reference that are less and less relevant.

We'd all like to think we'd reinvent ourselves, re-assimilate, learn and grow along a constantly regenerative learning curve. But most of us wouldn't. We're just not cognitively wired for it. We crave stasis, because our lizard brains crave safety and security.

Now, am I bashing older people in general, painting them all as regressive? No, of course not. But the law of averages is the law of averages, and people are people, and the vast majority of we humans formed our core values in our adolescences, locked our social and political opinions in our early 20's. Grudges dig deep. To call out a specific example: no matter who you voted for, wasn't it a little goddam tiring in the 2000 election to still be refighting the 32-year old Vietnam War records of the two candidates for the US presidency?

Now imagine it was the Civil War.

Imagine it now.  A functional lifespan of, say 200 years.  Working with people who owned slaves.  Trying to negotiate international trade treaties to deal with global warming by reconciling voters who watched their brother's head get spun into a fine red mist by a Boston infantryman or a Georgian cavalryman. Getting funding for stem cell research from voters who grew up believing not only were black people a genetically inferior race, but other versions of white people were, too.  200 years is what Bruce Sterling posits in Holy Fire, a gerontocracy, and it's a goddam mess.

Now make it 500 years.

Nothing ever forgotten. Nothing ever truly passing.

The death of history and the birth of the Long, Eternal Now.

So when you posit a race of beings who stare at us pitilessly, as so much mortal cannon-fodder in the midst of their centuries-long feuds, I do not fantasize about meeting them. I want them to sod off post-haste to the Grey Havens, good and gone.  The prospect of them returning, and dealing with them as an enemy with reality-bending powers and millenia of strategic experience, does not fill me with elfin glee. That's horror, to me.

A new installment of ARCANUM, as usual, can be read here.  And you can browse our other comics, from continuing series to quirky short subjects, here.

ARCANUM: Clarke's Law, Harry Potter and ARCANUM

Or at least Clarke's 3rd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I have a physics degree from McGill University in Montreal, where several well-meaning humans -- with the exception of a Thermodynamics professor who intentionally posted incorrect office hours -- attempted to instill in me an appreciation for the order of the universe. The problem is, of course, then if you learn to speak the mathematical language of physics, the "order" gets pretty damn weird. Or, as my Quantum Physics professor said on the day we ground out the math for quantum tunneling: "This is the bit where people's brains begin to crackle."

It's hard to understand, as we wander around with cell phones in our pockets, the disruptive effect quantum mechanics -- the physics of the unknowable, or at the very least the physics of the best-guessable -- had on the scientific world in the beginning of the 20th century. Einstein's famous "God does not play dice with the universe!" quote comes out of this era. To put it bluntly, the smartest people on earth were, on a daily basis, losing their shit.

ARCANUM is born out of two impulses. First, blending body horror with fantasy, much as Charles Stross found the inherent harmonies between Chtulhoid Horror and Cold War sensibilities in the Laundry Series. We'll discuss that later. But it also comes out of my love of science fiction, specifically my amusement at how the most important, disruptive moment in most alien invasion movies is tossed over the movie's shoulder. The aliens have come from beyond the stars, they have come for our ...

 ... wait, what? No, they don't want our seawater, they don't want our brains, whatever you -- THEY CAME FROM BEYOND THE STARS?! Assuming that's not a generation ship or some self-replicating/self-perpetuating nanobot swarm, those aliens just BROKE PHYSICS.

Except, of course, in the (mainstream) alien invasion story, they didn't break physics. In every (mainstream) alien invasion story they're here. We can shoot them, and talk to them, and be dissected by them, they're wandering around in our physical universe and so are beholden to the same physics, Newtonian or Quantum, that we are. So that fictional universe has rules, the aliens just ... apparently ... know some better ones than we do?

But faster-then-light travel mucks with such fundamental boundaries of our physical universe that if they can circumvent that, they can damn well circumvent any of the boring rules which would allow us to interact, or perhaps even perceive them. There's an inherent paradox -- if the aliens are interstellar, they are certainly not walking our streets in hacked-together HALO armor gunning down humans. Unless that's, like, a thing they get off on. Which would be double-plus unbad now that I think about it.

For chrissake, in the 21st Century one country is untouchably pounding the hell out of terrorists and unfortunately placed Afghani weddings with remote-piloted drones operated by kids from half a planet away. And we don't even leave our local gravity well except for special occasions.

Those aliens would not be fight-able. They would be unknowable. They would incomprehensible. They would be soul-shatteringly terrifying. They would be terrifying sky gods who rain down destruction on a helpless human populace as if by ... magic. 

So why not jump straight to magic?

This is tied to one of my pet peeves in the Harry Potter universe (stay with me). I am always a little disappointed that Hermione Granger (the hero of the series) at no point says "You know, I rather like science. Has anyone noticed that none of what we do obeys the laws of physics, and yet we co-exist with the world of Muggles where the laws of physics hold sway? I mean, shouldn't we talk to some clever Cambridge blokes about the fact that we gesture and point with a stick and manufacture objects out of thin air --"

 -- THEY MANUFACTURE OBJECTS OUT OF THIN AIR?! Assuming that's not a self-replicating/self-perpetuating nanobot swarm, those tweens just BROKE PHYSICS.

You see what I did there. (After all, the Harry Potter Universe is Secretly Terrifying).

The structure of Arcanum is derived from my instinctive love of that paradox. There are multiple alien invasion styles to choose from, of course. To emphasize the horror aspects, I'm patterning our magic invasion on the slow-burn secret invasions of UFO or The Invaders or the criminally short-lived Threshold. If anything even vaguely resembling alien tech were discovered, you'd see the US government immediately put two programs in play: 1.) a Manhattan project to unravel the broken physics of said tech and 2.) a secret military/intelligence agency to keep tabs on it. Just substitute "magic" into those sentences and you have Arcanum.

Next time: immortality is so, so creepy.

In the meantime: Catch this week's Arcanum here.

Start from the beginning here.

Read Mark Waid's Insufferable, his awesome super-hero meta-story -- what if you were a dark detective of the night, and your teen sidekick grew up to be a douchebag? -- starting at the beginning here. The latest arc, Volume Two, starts here.

Read our gritty, true-life crime thriller The Damnation of Charlie Wormwood here.

And sample all our comics, from our continuing series to one-shot experiments to shorter (8-10 week) series, from the THRILLBENT HOME PAGE.

ARCANUM, Thrillbent & Digital Comics

So my new comic, Arcanum is up at the new, relaunched Thrillbent 2.0 site. Let's tackle things in order, General to specific.

DIGITAL COMICS

For about three years, Mark Waid and I would go to lunch and have the same conversation. Or rather, the same two conversations simultaneously:

1.) John: You need to BRAND YOURSELF. You are value-added, you need to be doing more creator-owned stuff!

2.) Mark: Digital comics are THE FUTURE-BALLS!

He may have phrased that slightly more elegantly. But Waid's had close to 30 years in the comics business, and he'll tell you himself the growing cost of shipping paper around was affecting not just bottom lines but creative decisions at the big publishers (This was before the fine folks at Comixology even existed). Waid wanted to experiment  with digital delivery at some of his other gigs, but the will -- and financing -- wasn't there.

At the same time, he'd become fascinated with the new story-telling techniques being shown off by guys like Yves Bigerel. Waid was really churning a lot of interesting ideas about the economics and the storytelling form.

At the same-same time, I was on my 4GM hobbyhorse -- although by that point we may have crossed into open-source warfare theory. Comics, even the slightly fancier ones Waid was plying with, were dumb files. We all had computers and tablets in our homes. The Coasean Floor was in theory next to nothing. What the hell? Where were all the creator-owned comics being delivered straight to a willing and eager audience?

The answer, of course, is that they were just called "Webcomics" and were already wildly successful. Well, some were. Others weren't.  Same's true in any business. But they were out there, and they weren't paying the distribution cost for 7000 pamphlets to be sent out to 2000 physical stores in order to tell their stories and reach fans.  They were paying very reasonable hosting fees and reaching THE PLANET EARTH.

So we started scrawling on napkins. Little words to live by, like: "Everyone already has a wide-screen" and "Motion comics are the devil" and "The Reader controls the flow of information" and "Information must be dumb." We talked to the webcomics people, trying to figure out what we could use from the single-page comic model in long-form storytelling. Mark made some speeches that pissed everyone off. We put a little money aside, we called some friends. That led us to ...

THRILLBENT COMICS

Mark created a new comic in the wide-screen format we'd come to believe would serve as a shorthand industry standard, and structured it in a pulp update fashion. One page at a time seemed like too little narrative, particularly for a weekly update structure. I'd like to give full credit to Warren Ellis's webcomic FreakAngels here -- we glommed his 6-page format as our base, and tweaked it to be 8-10 "slides" in our format. As usual, Warren's about five years of everybody else. Luckily his drinking inhibits his world-conquering instincts. Various versions of the comic reader we use have existed, this one is just tuned to my obsessive notes about skeumorphics and the physical artifact of the page turn ("No mouse, arrows=page turn" reads on of my blurry little scrawls).

That's a big thing to understand. We're not saying we're "creating" anything here. The webcomics people built the model, Warren created an early model of the narrative structure -- no, we're synthesizers and advocates. We're the guys who are tugging on the sleeves of our friends in long-form storytelling and saying "You could do it this way."

The question, of course, is how you make any goddam money doing it.

We don't know.

That is the sound of my business manager's head exploding.

That's not to say there's no way to make money at it. The trick is, now we have to go figure it out. Comics are learning that, just like music learned and TV is beginning to learn, there's no future in taking the check and just doing your job within the existing structure.  

That's not to say there's no work out there in the established marketplace. I just had lunch with an agent who said "Look, there's a good living in being the Executive Producer who babysits cash-rich network shows." Not everyone's cut out to be a marketing human. But there's something new here, something cool and challenging, that may cost you in time or money but the trade is freedom. It's going to come form the edges, of course -- established people like Waid in comics, or Rob Thomas and Veronica Mars Kickstarter in TV -- but those humans will be good test cases and have the social capital to burn.

Comics in particular is a weird case. The mainstream comic companies have so few people writing so many titles, it may in fact be easier to become a writer on a television show than to become a writer of comic books, by which I mean to say still very goddam hard. But for a medium with far fewer capital requirements, that flies in the face of sense.

So, how to make a living doing this type of digital comics? We're going to try ... everything. Our collections will be on sale on Comixology, of course and we'll have a storefront up soon. All our for-pay installments will have a little extra, some DVD bonuses, as it were. We've got a Thrillbent app in development that will do some very cool stuff, allowing you to read the comic, look at the inks or read the script over layout, all when you buy one issue of the comic collections. 

Most of our titles, when they hit enough readers and chapters to make sense, will Kickstart to physical collections. I've participated in a few successful Kickstarter campaigns now, and I'm impressed at how a particularly well run on can both invest the current fans of a property and create new ones. 

We may also experiment with time-shifting: the weekly installments are always free, but a collection of the next month's or so will be for sale, giving you both the spiffy collected portable version and a jump ahead on your favorite stories.

This may evolve as the site ages and we scribble numbers on index cards with Sharpies and frown -- you know, business things. We may go to a subscrpition model for some content, we may find ways to do ads within the comics reader ... we don't know. We'll be looking at a lot of different solutions, and anyone who has a bright idea, or even some success with their own model, should definitely drop us a line. I'd say "swing by the forums", but we're still arguing about whether we should have forums.

At the same time we're still putting up the pdfs and cbz of each installment for free. Grab the first week of Arcanum on pdf (link down there on the bottom right fo the page), toss it in your favorite reader on "full screen" and "slideshow" setting in the View menu and rock out. We like the "Get it free, but the more convenient form is for a little money, plus it helps us out" model.

We're even making a pretty radical jump with this version of Thrillbent: embeddable comics. Embedding/sharing is what made videos and music go viral, and as I said our comics are dumb files. Share 'em. Put them on your site. Make our content part of your content. As I said at WonderCon, nothing's more important than treating your audience like partners instead of suspects.

ARCANUM

Mark's carried the bulk of the content weight, time for me to share.

Arcanum is a partnership with Genre19 artist Todd Harris. Those who watched Leverage know I'm fascinated with systems. How they break, how they react, how they both define and are defined by the people within them. I wanted to combine one storytelling world system -- counter-terrorism/intelligence -- with one that it was not equipped to handle.

Also, my mind was fried by the UFO-conspiracy show U.F.O. when I was a kid. I LOVED the idea that instead of a giant alien armada invasion, there was a pitched, secret battle going on between one government agency and the mobile, untrackable forces of an enemy who struck in small, subtle ways in order to disrupt our lives, all while refusing to play by the "rules" of modern combat. Anyone who's gone through a TSA line lately will tell you this story has some modern-day relevance.

But what if the enemy literally didn't play by the rules? What if they were so totally alien as to be beyond alien? As a lifelong fantasy fan, I was always struck by just how comfortable we've become with the Tolkien tropes of fantasy. There's even a thriving sub-genre of urban magic where elves and dwarves and other fey live right along in the human world, some secret some not, but integrated.

Call me crazy, but if confronted with a big-brained biped who solved interstellar travel but otherwise obeys all the laws of reason and phsyics or immortal creatures who can bend the laws of time and space at will, I find the damn magic users more terrifying. 

To borrow from Charles Stross's excellent blend of Cold War tropes and Cthulhu (read the essay in The Atrocity Archives), I think the alien invasion story spot-welded to the most traditional fantasy tropes I could find will create some fresh horror. Because Arcanum is a sci-fi horror story. It's going to get very dark. Consider yourself warned. This is a covert war against a hyper-intelligent enemy which shares neither our biology nor our morals.  With all that entails.

Here's the first installment of Arcanum. Click on the image to advance it. You can also check it out, along with other cool stuff, over at Thrillbent.