Britain a Prophecy Update
Thank you to everyone who has supported our new project Britain a Prophecy. We’re a little less than 50% of the way to our $800 a month goal, and I’m optimistic that we can make it. If you haven’t had a chance to check out what we’re doing, I hope you will. I’m very, very excited about this.
A quick roundup of some of the things I and others have been writing about it. First, Sean Dillon, who many of you know from the blog comments, did a big interview with Penn and me for the Comic Book Herald. It’s a big deep dive on the comic and our process, and a lot of fun. Here’s a highlight:
El: One of the appealing things about comics to me—and I think the reason they ended up being the medium that finally broke through my strange resistance to the idea of writing fiction—is that they’re a medium that rewards a kind of analytical approach. I certainly don’t want to say that this is the only way to approach them, although I think if you look at the writers I’m drawn to you’ll find a certain tendency towards formalism, but one way that writing a comics page can work is to think of it as an amount of space that you have to divvy up appropriately. An issue has a finite number of pages, a page can hold only so much stuff, and you have to successfully figure out how to use that space. There can be a puzzle-solving aspect to it, and that’s been helpful in getting past some of my unfamiliarity with this kind of writing.
Obviously there’s more to it than just the puzzle-solving. But I think comics allow for a degree of forensic, analytical thinking that, in prose fiction, would risk becoming unpleasantly cold and clinical. I don’t want to say it can’t work, because, like, I think it’s pretty obvious that Alan Moore approached Jerusalem pretty analytically, but you’re probably setting yourself up for failure if you come out of the gate trying to write Jerusalem. That’d require some hubris. Whereas we, being paragons of humility, are coming out of the gate trying to write V for Vendetta.
We also got a frankly ridiculously kind writeup in Kieron Gillen’s newsletter where he said, “I am intrigued and, having read the script of the first issue, know much more awaits you. It’s confident big swing stuff.” We blush appropriately.
I’ve also done a couple Twitter threads about it, with more to come in the next few days.
- Why you should back Britain a Prophecy if you like TARDIS Eruditorum
- A writers commentary on the first five pages
If you haven’t checked out the preview pages yet, they’re up on the Patreon too. I think you’ll really like them.
