Comic artist Ian McGinty has worked on Adventure Time, Hello Kitty, Fraggle Rock and many other titles, for publishers such as Archaia, BOOM!, Dynamite and now Z2. Ian is making his creator-owned debut with Welcome to Showside at Z2 Comics 28 October, 2015.
Not only that, but Welcome to Showside has also been developed into an animated series, with McGinty serving as showrunner and one of the voice actors. I wanted to e-interview Ian to chat about his successes.
Thanks for the chance to chat, Ian! You must be crazy busy in these last days of October!
Haha, yeah it’s definitely been pretty insane on this end, but it’s also been super rad and exciting to see everything coming together. A lot of hard work on many people’s parts have gone into Welcome to Showside, both the comic and the animated show, and to finally be seeing the end result, it’s like, damn, you know? I never expected such a great response from people, and it’s still sort of sinking in.
“Houses of the dead” Illustration by Pauline Baynes
“When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover” — Shakespeare, Sonnet 5
I was in the middle of writing up a review of Goosebumps, which I wanted to finish this week while it is timely — it is the number one film at the box office. But I find myself sidetracked by a real encounter with fear, and so today I shall not write about a fun, sanitized entertainment but instead about the terror I felt last night.
Beneath all fears — the greatest fear of all, as Lovecraft so eloquently informed us — is fear of the unknown. The most primal fear for any of us creatures both blessed and cursed with the ability to think is the thought of our own annihilation. Running deep below the fear of how we might be taken out — running like the impenetrably black, charnel waters of the River Styx — is the fear of the fact that we will be taken out.
Like Winter, NaNoWriMo is coming and aspiring writers are even now planning to do a Frazetta on the whole business of writing a novel. This is great — momentum is all — but it’s way too easy to grind to a halt or lose time going round in circles trying to reinvent the wheel.
I wrote a book on all this, but some of my previous blog entries might also help you avoid dead ends and rampage through your novel to the very end — I promise you both an affirming and life changing experience.
So, here they are in digest form:
Some Writing Advice That’s Mostly Useless (And Why): The following writing advice is mostly useless — “Work on your motivation,” “Revise, revise, revise,” “Have a chaotic life,” “Just write,” “Know grammar and critical terms,” “Practice skills in isolation.”
World Building Historical Fiction using Military Thinking: Don’t fall down the rabbit hole of research or worldbuilding. Instead use a layered approach, focussing your world building as you descend from Strategic (villas exist and can be raided for supplies), through Operational (this villa sits on this ground amidst these fields), to Tactical (here is the ground plan of the villa and here are the people guarding it) level.
“Aliosha Popovich” by Kate Baylay, from a collection of Russian Fairy Tales. Used by kind permission of the artist.
Back in the age of print magazines, I made my first professional sale to a fellow named John O’Neill who published a gorgeous quarterly called Black Gate. We went through three deep revisions on that manuscript, a process we both enjoyed enough that, after I finally produced a version of “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” good enough for John to buy, he asked if I had anything else featuring that heroine. And I did. To our surprise, my novella “The Imlen Bastard” needed only a little polish to be ready for print. And so it took its place in the publication queue. Forthcoming from Black Gate, I said of it in my author bio all over the internet, for a few years.
Those years were hard on print magazines, and they weren’t much kinder to online fiction markets. “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” appeared in BG‘s last print issue. Ultimately, John stopped publishing fiction online before “The Imlen Bastard” could make its debut here.
But to me it’ll always be a Black Gate story.
So when I found an artist, Kate Baylay, whose work felt like my favorite old BG print covers — luscious, menacing, full of subtle story implications — I knew I’d found the right cover artist for “The Imlen Bastard.” Everything else I wanted to do with the self-publishing project that has grown up around the novella came together for me quickly after that. Best of all, Kate Baylay embraced the manuscript, and we’ve had so much fun going over the story together to find the most iconic moments for interior illustrations.
Then I enlisted superstar editor Betsy Mitchell — now retired from Del Rey after a career of editing people like Naomi Novik, Michael Chabon, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler — to give the novella an editorial boost. I figured, there’s a difference between standing as the longest piece in a magazine issue and standing alone as a book. I’m still kind of amazed that she took me on as a freelance client, when she’s in a position to work only on manuscripts she really enjoys. So that boded well.
At first, we all agreed that I’d launch a Kickstarter campaign over the summer, but then I got shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. I held off on self-publishing for a few months so I’d know whether to say Finalist or Winner in my promotional material. After the award, I needed to readjust my hubris levels — a story that’s done me the kindness of coming to me to be written deserves the best promotion I can give it, and now I had to work up more brazenness than ever before on my stories’ behalf. Brazenness is harder than it looks. This month, with the thank-you notes for the award all written and sent out, and a trophy to feature in my Kickstarter video, it was finally time.
I clicked on the launch button at noon. You can find the campaign here.
Here we are again, friends, with a passel of new heroic fantasy tales to extol. And September was a splendid month for new stories. In fact, one is in contention for my favorite of the year so far…
…and I’ll start with that particular story: “Poor Bright Folk” by James Lecky in the latest issue of Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine, #44. Elathan is a bard of the Aos Si (more commonly called the Sidhe, or fey folk) traveling through the once brightly-colored land of Orialla. On entering a forest glade he meets a woman whose very appearance unnerves him:
Her hair hung in a long braid almost as far as her knees, deep lines marked her cheeks and forehead, yet she stood straight as a staff, her movements fluid and easy. Her clothing – a straight dress and a short cape – were a patchwork of various colours and materials, some smooth and strong, others coarse and faded.
The sight of her disturbed me in a way I could not give voice to and I wished for nothing more than to be away from this place and this strange woman.
Her name is Mual and when she asks him to play for her at her home he finds himself saying yes in words that seem to come from outside himself.
In Mual’s castle Elathan discovers she is working a vampiric sort of magic over her servants and now him. To escape her clutches and free his fellow captives the bard must use his wit and wiles. Lecky didn’t try, thankfully, to emulate some sort of old-timey style with his prose, yet “Poor Bright Folk” has the feel and resonance of the best fairy tales from out of the deeps of time.
NOTE: The following article was first published on February 21, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.
Much of what has been written about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon focuses on the novel as groundbreaking in its realistic portrayal of detective work. More in-depth literary studies tend to focus on the significance of Hammett’s shift in protagonist from the incorruptible and nameless Continental Opof his earlier work to the jaded self-portrait of the author as Sam Spade. In my view, this transition is primarily noteworthy in that Hammett’s protagonist changed from an idealized conception of the man he might have become had he remained a Pinkerton Operative (the Continental Op is based on Hammett’s boss during his stint with the Pinkerton Agency) to a more self-reflective portrayal of a man mired in moral conflict. Hammett’s own moral crisis would color his fiction from this point until he resolved his dilemma and settled into a life alternating his celebrity status with reclusiveness – a life whose one constant was Hammett’s complete lack of creative output for his remaining 27 years.
Many have speculated why Hammett’s creativity dried up when he and his muse and mistress Lillian Hellman had settled comfortably into something approaching unwedded bliss as the Nick and Nora Charlesof the real world. My own opinion has been that once freed of the conflict of whether or not to walk a path of integrity or give in to the encroaching corruption that constantly assailed his world, Hammett had nothing further to draw upon for inspiration. Resolution was tantamount to becoming a spent force and Hammett was finished as a writer. The fact that he realized this dilemma was inescapable lies at the heart of both The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key in their pursuit of empty dreams incapable of satisfying the characters whose lust is so great they are willing to die for or kill in their futile quests.
As I mentioned two weeks back, I’ve been contributing blog posts here atBlack Gatesince 2006, and it’s time for a change. Linked below, you’ll find the second installment of a brand-new serialized novel, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.
A number of you will already be familiar with my Tales Of Gemen (“The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone“), and if you enjoyed those titles, I think you’ll also find much to like in this latest venture. The pace picks up in this latest installment (Maer’s in serious trouble), with action aplenty and a wider world beckoning just around the corner.
Remember: this as an experiment, a kind of in-process tight-rope walking, sans safety net. I haven’t written to the end. I’m not offering you something that’s already complete. Instead, I’ll be doling out the breadcrumbs of story just as fast as I can tear them from the fictive loaf, and when we reach the end, we’ll get there simultaneously.
Welcome to adventure, In the Wake Of Sister Blue.
Tell your friends. Off we go — and if you’re just discovering this portal, don’t forget to begin at the beginning.
Read the first installment of In the Wake Of Sister Blue here.
Back in July, what seems to be the most popular ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ post appeared here at Black Gate. I looked at what I think went wrong with season three of the BBC’s Sherlock. I included the just-released ninety-second, ‘first look’ video for the upcoming Special, to be aired around Christmas. And I pointed out it seemed to be full of the “Look how clever we are” bits that I lamented in my post.
Now, just about everyone, including myself, loves that the Special is set in Victorian times; unlike the episodes in the first three seasons. Cumberbatch and Freeman would be given their first (and quite likely, only) opportunities to play Holmes and Watson in the Doyle mold. I view it as a chance for the show to get back on track and reclaim the multitude of fans it lost during season three.
That trailer was a fun little look at the Special and a second trailer came out earlier this month. “Fun” is not a word I would use. This is clearly not going to be a cute little Christmas episode, or a hunt for the owner of a goose and a hat (not a goose with a hat). In fact, it’s not about the yuletide at all. As you can see, it’s going to be some very serious business.
The Wrath of Fu Manchu was a 50-page short story serialized in five installments in The Toronto Star weekly supplement from January 26 to February 23, 1952 under the unlikely title Green Devil Mask. It was given its current title when Rohmer scholar, Dr. Robert E. Briney made it the centerpiece of a posthumous hardcover collection of previously uncollected short fiction, The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other New Stories first published in the U.K. in 1973 by Tom Stacey. A U.S. mass market paperback edition from DAW Books followed in 1976. It was subsequently reprinted in Allison & Busby’s Fu Manchu Omnibus – Volume 5 in 2001. Titan Books will reprint the original collection as a trade paperback in March 2016.
The story was initially published only in Canada due to a copyright loophole. Rohmer had recently sold the option to the television rights to the Fu Manchu characters and was prohibited from publishing new works about the characters in Britain or the United States until the courts resolved a dispute over whether the literary rights transferred with the agreement. This situation persisted for the next five years until the literary rights were eventually restored to the author. The character was an easy money-maker for Rohmer at a time when his bank account was suffering. Rohmer’s desire to fly under the radar with the Canadian publication of the story likely accounts for his original decision to avoid using the name Fu Manchu in the title of the story.
This week Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru conducted the first successful test flight of a working hoverboard over a pond in Quebec.
Duru broke the world record for the longest hoverboard flight — more than 250 meters, five times the previous record — at Quebec’s Lake Ouareau in May of this year, but he’s been working on a “secret, next-generation version” of his device for the past five months. On Wednesday of this week, the 31-year-old Canadian inventor and his company, Omni Hoverboards, invited Reg Sherren of the CBC to witness the first test of the new prototype in Quebec. Watch the one-minute clip above for the results, and read all the details at the CBC website.
All I can say is: It’s about time, 21st Century. And now I know what I want for Christmas.
Comic artist Ian McGinty has worked on Adventure Time, Hello Kitty, Fraggle Rock and many other titles, for publishers such as Archaia, BOOM!, Dynamite and now Z2. Ian is making his creator-owned debut with Welcome to Showside at Z2 Comics 28 October, 2015.
