Refilling the Tank

This year I have achieved the writing goal I had to be hired to write six projects. All those projects have been to work on pre-established intellectual property, and that’s been awesome. I have gotten to write for characters and properties I have loved my whole life, and I have plenty more I want to contribute to. However, as of the writing of this Newsletter, I have yet to crack another one of my writing goals: to get a creator-owned comic book project green-lit.

For those readers less familiar with the vernacular of comic books, a creator-owned project is an original comic you create, and own a stake in. The Walking Dead, Invincible, Kick-Ass, Paper Girls, The Old Guard, Spawn, and Scott Pilgrim are some examples of media properties that began their lives as creator-owned comics. So much of what I did when I was a teenager with my friends was make up new comics, it’s something I want to do very much.

The truth is I have ten years of experience working in intellectual property, and when I get to work on one I know incredibly well, I do well, I know the rules, I know the worlds, I can set up shop there and come up with a lot of ideas that feel in the tone of that property. It’s something I got my ten thousand hours doing editing and writing at DC Comics.

Coming up with original ideas is just something I haven’t had as much practice with, I’m not going to give up, but I did have to take a break after dealing with a few very polite rejections and not knowing which course to take next in that endeavor. And that’s okay. Sometimes you need to give yourself some time to recollect so you make sure you’re not just running into the same brick wall again and again without making progress.

One thing that was especially necessary at this time was I needed new influences. Looking at my ideas I felt like I was going to the same wells over and over again, wells I love, but wells that were not giving me the water I needed. So I sought out new movies, new TV shows, books I hadn’t read, and comics I had not read.

On the movie front, I reactivated my Criterion Channel streaming account. I have plenty of other streaming service subscriptions and there are wonderful movies on all of them, but I love the curation of the Criterion Channel and how easy they make it to find things. I have been averaging around a movie every day for the last month and I went back to being a younger version of myself. I didn’t go in to break down, critique, or overanalyze what I was watching. I just wanted to take in as many things that I hadn’t seen as possible. Works by filmmakers I had a familiarity with and ones I didn’t.

During this time I also didn’t put pressure on myself to write any new ideas. I needed to honor the break, and just be a sponge. Just enjoy things and not worry about making them. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t writing, I had some assignments in front of me, and this newsletter has been an outstanding way to make sure I am working on multiple writing projects at once. I just wasn’t forcing myself to come up with the idea that was going to change my life.

I got a lot out of the new comics, new shows, and new books I was reading but opening my heart to as many new movies as possible was the thing at this time that brought the most joy and got me out of my creative rut. I would watch these movies and love them, and then I would look up their histories and see that some were very successful at the time, some weren’t, and some were barely given the ability to be seen when they came out. (I’m looking at you Elaine May’s brilliant Mikey and Nicky.)

It made me relax. It made me just want to take joy in being a creative person and seeing what came out of my mind naturally. It’s also a good reminder that you may think that you have taken in all of the great art in the world. You have your influences, you have the geography of who you are as a creative person in place, and it’s not going to change. And I think that’s a bad take. There are always going to be great pieces of art you have not seen yet, that haven’t changed your life yet, and dare I say that haven’t reshaped your imagination and heart. When you feel lost, go find something new.

For me after a few weeks of just taking new things in and touching some grass, new ideas that I was excited about started to come to me. A few weeks back I took one of my notebooks and I just wrote the titles of every original story I have been percolating in my head the last couple of years. My goal before the end of the year is to write at least a page or two about these projects, give them all form, and put them all on paper. I had a couple dozen when I was done.

Are they all going to become published works? Probably not. And the ones that do are going to morph and change a lot before they do become what they are supposed to be. But now I am in a mental state where I can enjoy that process.

Something that also isn’t lost on me is that moving forward, I’m not going to have the luxury of being discouraged for long periods, life is too short for that, and too many opportunities are going to pass by me if I’m too busy looking down at the ground in disappointment. Ideas are going to be rejected. Projects are going to go away. And I’ll have to accept the ones that don’t happen, and thunderously celebrate the ones that do.

When we look at people’s careers we only see the projects they did that were fully finished, we don’t get the bibliography of projects that they started and never finished. Everyone has them. Some of my favorite people have talked about so many projects they wanted to do that never came to fruition that there are whole websites dedicated to documenting those things that never came to be!

Also in addition to writing these pitches, I am working on one with an artist I have worked with before and have a great report with. I’m hoping the pitch package we are putting together will be ready before the end of the year. I hope the pitch becomes a wildly successful comic book that changes the course of my and my collaborator’s careers forever, but for now, I am just enjoying that I am taking a risk and making something of my own. Even if all that comes of it is the five pages and cover we are putting together, at least I had the bravery to make it, and will learn from the experience of having done so.

“Wait, Dave, what movies did you watch, I’m dying to know!”

I am going to try to watch a few dozen more movies and then closer to the end of the year I will do a whole post about my Criterion Curiosities. I promise.

LA Comic Con

A reminder: this weekend, I will be at LA Comic Con 2024 from Friday, October 4th-Sunday October 6th. I will be in the West Hall at Artist Alley Table WP19. Please come through and say hello! Bring your Man-Bats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Black White & Green #3s, and various DC anthologies. I will sign all of them with joy. I will also have many books at my table I will be selling. I could not be more excited about this. I’m very nervous, but that is largely coming from a place of excitement!

Speaking of excitement, I turned my kitchen table into a mock version of my Artist Alley table. Dorky, but I wanted to envision what things would look like. Thankfully the Artist Alley table will be longer than my table.

Crisis Aftermath

Yesterday DC’s I Know What You Did Last Crisis came out, my first short story back at DC Comics as a full-time writer. I could not be more proud of how it turned out. As I wrote about previously the story is an addition to the Grant Morrison, JG Jones, Carlos Pacheco, Marco Rudy, and Doug Mahnke classic DC event Final Crisis. It was a challenge and a delight to add to.

The best part of the story was the creative team I got to work with. Sid Kotian is a fantastic artist and one of the best collaborators I have had so far, I hope we get to make many comics together. Patricio Delpeche is a brilliant colorist and one of the great talents in the comic business right now. Tom Napolitano is an outstanding letterer, a wonderful creator, and a terrific friend. And of course, I got to work with the great editor Andrew Marino again, whom I could work with on countless projects and I am sure I would always be proud of the outcome.

If you read it? Thank you! If you haven’t yet? Give it a chance. I think you’ll dig it.

Housekeeping and the Month Ahead

For the rest of the month, we are going to be talking a lot about Batman: The Brave & The Bold #19 and 20, which feature the two-part Wonder Woman & Plastic Man team-up story I did alongside artist Nikola Čižmešija, colorist Rex Lokus, letterer Steve Wands, and the editorial team of Ben Meares and James Reid.

Batman: The Brave & The Bold #19 has its FOC on 10/28/24 and is on sale on 11/27/24. Batman: The Brave & The Bold #20 has its FOC on 11/25/24 and is on sale 12/25/24.

I have previously described the story as an episode of Justice League Unlimited if it was written by brilliant crime writer Elmore Leonard. We’re going to lean into those things for the newsletters we have coming up this month. Here’s what you have to look forward to!

• 10/10/24: My Top Five Episodes of Batman: The Brave & The Bold The Animated Series, not Justice League Unlimited, but the amazing DC cartoon that featured A LOT of Plastic Man appearances. And we’ll talk a little bit about how LA Comic Con went!

• 10/17/24: Five Crime Movies I Love. Crime fiction has a big influence on this two-part story, and I want to shine a light on some crime movies I think deserve a look.

• 10/24/24: An interview with Nikola Čižmešija, my artistic collaborator on the two-part story, we’ve already conducted it and it’s going to be awesome. And it might feature some artwork! There also might be another project that is going to get announced I will be ready to talk about that week…

• 10/31/24: My favorite Halloween TV episodes, because we can just have fun here sometimes, folks.

I am dedicated to making sure this Newsletter runs regularly from here on out. I enjoy writing and sharing it, and I want other people to enjoy it too. Thank you for reading these posts when they come out. Please share and recommend with friends if you can, I would love to double our subscriber count by March 2025. There's no particular reason for that date, I think it’s just nice to have goals!

With all of that being said, see you next week!

Stay safe!

—Dave Wielgosz