Tom Talks

My very first newsletter!

INTRO!

Welcome to my first newsletter ever! Let’s start off as best we can. With a picture of the Roxy Dog and a bunch of wrestling toys.

Look at that puppy face! She thinks she’s a wolf, but she’s just a puppy! Sigh. It’s really downhill from here, but we’ll continue nonetheless.

As this is my first shot at this, and I’m sure there will be changes ahead, but generally speaking, I want to use this space to talk about three things: the past, the future, and the present; what just came out, what’s about to come out, what I’m currently working on.

As a comic writer who writes a lot of comics, I’m always sort of living in these three worlds simultaneously—trying to promote what’s out there, hype up what’s about to be out there, and finish whatever it is I’m working on to be out there eventually. So it seemed a good way to divide this letter to let everyone know what’s happening on the three fronts of my writing life.

I’ll then end every newsletter talking about what you all want me to talk about, that is answering questions and comments you have. I haven’t done a letters page since Vision and it’s awesome to bring it back here.

Enough intro, let’s get to it!

WHAT IS OUT!

First, foremost, best of all! Love Everlasting 2 just launched for all paying subscribers of this very substack! It is out for free for non paying subscribers next week! This issue is titled The Hunt for Love, and I’ll be writing a lot more about it in this space soon. They key to this issue (from my perspective) was to show how Joan’s journey is not a a passive one, how she is already in issue 2 starting to find a way to fight back inside the trap of this world. I hope you read it, I hope you love it. As always it is perfectly drawn by my partner in all things here, Elsa, spectacularly colored by Matt, and thrillingly lettered by Clayton. I couldn’t be more proud of this series.

Here’s a button if you want to subscribe and read the book now:

Second and also somehow foremost, David Marquez and I put out our first issue of our new Batman series: Batman: Killing Time. It is a Batman Year 2 story featuring Catwoman, the Riddler, and the Penguin (which incredibly coincidentally also describes a movie currently out in theaters). The idea for the book was to turn a way a bit from all of the psychological mining I did in my Batman run and tell a story that was all movement, all action: a heist, a chase, a fight, a war.

Making it a little more complicated and a lot more fun, the whole series is told slightly nonlinearly, jumping around and around in time from page to page—the title “Killing Time” has a lot of meanings as you’ll see going forward. Let me know what you think!

WHAT IS COMING OUT!

Next week we get The Human Target #6 by myself and Greg Smallwood! This is the big season 1 finale as we take a break to prep season 2, which’ll launch this fall right after a hardcover collecting the first six issues. Needless to say, this is one of those big issues where something very important happens that will change the status quo of everyone and anyone in this series and will have consequences beyond the end of the book. There’s a real -gasp- page turn in this one. You’ll know it when you see it.

The reason we’re taking the break if you’re wondering is just because this comic is becoming something incredibly special and DC recognizes it. They want Greg to have time to make the whole series his, and it’s the best decision they could have made. My personal opinion, when something looks this pretty, don’t mess with it. Let it come out when it needs to come out and then enjoy it as a complete work for years and hopefully decades to come.

WHAT I’M WORKING ON NOW!

This week I am writing the sixth issue of a six issue mini series that has yet to be announced. So I…can’t tell you exactly what it is I’m working on, just that I’m (if I keep writing) about to finish it. It’s a DC Comics thing (shocking I know) set in a fun world with a really fun voice. I think I know what the ending should be, at least I have it in my mind, but I’ll never know entirely until I actually write it and it feels right.

For people who don’t know, during the pandemic I switched how I wrote comics, writing whole series at once rather than dividing them up—writing them like a novel, rather than one issue here and one issue there. You have to be super far ahead to do this, but somehow I got there (mostly because I was locked in my house for two years). So something like Human Target I wrote over a year ago all at once. And when this comes out a year from now I’ll tell you all about it in the space above.

QUESTIONS!

As this is my first newsletter, I don’t have any questions to answer yet! DAMNIT. SO! You all have to give me some! So please if you want, post some questions below about anything and everything: be it comics or writing or writing or comics or actually anything and everything, and I’ll put some responses in the next newsletter.

But for now, thank you for reading this and look forward to talking again soon. And remember, all it takes is a quick scroll up to get another look at that Roxy puppy face.

—Tom