TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE August/15 - A FISTFUL OF PAIN Launches Tomorrow
Awesome Day One Bonus - wanna know what it is?
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2022 -- bounce.
A FISTFUL OF PAIN is coming!
We launch tomorrow [maybe night, due to US/time zones/antipodean nonsense] and you need to go here to click the Notify Me button so you get an email when we hit launch so you do not miss out!
I am just insanely excited about this book manifesting in corporeal form.
In fact, this might be the most exciting book launch of my life/career so far.
Why?
Because I love this book. I love the story. I love the detail ComixTribe are going into for the product. I love the fact I got to make something with one of my best mates, Louie Joyce. I love everything about this book, and I think readers will join me on that journey.
The book is about two sisters and their lifelong rivalry over who gets to control the family pet/responsibility, Gilgamesh, a massive and lethal dragon. From there, revenge will be had.
There are multiple options for your purchase - a standard softcover, an Eric Zawadzki variant/virgin cover, and a beautiful die-cut hardcover version!
You can get these a little cheaper for the first 4 days of the campaign, so definitely get in on that offer!
But there’s also a Day One Bonus, which is this sumptuous and informative and gorgeous Process Zine from Louie Joyce that contains so much exclusive back matter and art materials from our years of assembling this story!
This thing is most definitely worth your time!
Like I said, hit this link and click Notify Me so you don’t miss a minute of the first day of our campaign, and hopefully we can push this bloody beautiful book to be ComixTribe’s most success comic launch since my own book SHE brought in nearly 700 backers, and good mates Alex Cormack and John Lees raised over $36,000 for their DIG #1 one-shot release!
I mean, if the book and the beauty don’t win you over, maybe these exclusive enamel pins will :]
I’ll sound the klaxons of more specificity as we roll on, but for today, just gear up your engines for our launch and join us for the biggest day one launch we’ve ever seen at ComixTribe HQ!
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Stephen King’s Endings.
It’s in vogue now to espouse how Stephen King can’t write endings anymore. The kind of absolute truth that everyone silently agrees with I’ve even had parrotted back to me by someone of an age where they’d only read 3 King books, but they knew this to be true because it’s a truth universally known.
I know recently I was pretty let down by the ending to THE OUTSIDER. And when I read UNDER THE DOME I knew exactly what ending I thought would be the best and it went in a completely different way and completely botched things - until this week I was listening to The Kingcast podcast and a guest made mention of the fact that story is all about bullying, and under that context the weak ending [*SPOILERS*] of the antagonistic young aliens who had put the dome over the town suddenly reversing their decision made some more sense. It’s still not great, for me, but suddenly I *get it*.
Hell, I’d even go out on a limb and say IT’s ending doesn’t quite work for me - both as a narrative climax, but also for the very very very problematic scene that leads into it, but those are two different complaints. And I didn’t want to paint King with just one brush because mostly when I think of King’s endings, I also think of these absolute rippers, so let’s dive in. *SPOILERS ABOUND, NATCH*
THE DARK TOWER - might as well lead with the biggest of them all. This 7 book series was decades in the making and it became truly sprawling as it crossed realities and characters were brought into our hearts and then killed off, and each book seemed bigger than the last.
The final moments came - Roland’s lifelong quest for the Tower is achieved, he makes it up into the Tower, does he have the chance to set everything right in his dying world, as he’d hoped…
He awakens back at the start of Book One, his story reset, and I threw my copy of the book onto the ground. I *hated* this ending.
Hated it.
But then I let it stew. Which is an amazing feat for a work of fiction. I let it stew and my brain pieced it together and I realised it was a good ending. In fact, it might have been the only ending that would work. Because Roland learnt that time is a wheel, it goes around and around, we knew that alongside him for a very long time - hell, I should have seen this coming. Roland would need to complete his quest again, perhaps had been completing it [or attempting it] on a loop the whole time. Maybe learning things, maybe not.
And this time, he awakens, and something is different. Roland has the Horn of Eld, and so perhaps this time is truly going to be different. He might actually be one step closer. It’s a deep ending, but then the first book has a whole chapter that’s just purely philosophy between two characters, and it goes deep. This series, this long story, was always King grappling with his thoughts on the world, and he really sticks the landing on this one.
MISERY - I remember reading this in primary school and loving it somewhat purely because I couldn’t wait to get to the end because I’d been told it was far more intense than the film - and the film ends with the captured author, paul Sheldon, bashing his captor’s head in with a doorstop. So I got to reading, from memory, on a long family car trip, and I read up to Page 340 or so and then lost the copy of the novel somewhere and could not find it. The ending would need to be relayed to me verbally by my eldest brother, and then I’d find and read a copy again later in my teens, but the actual novel ending is such:
Paul writes the copy of the novel Annie Wilkes wants, and then burns a decoy copy of it. As she rushes to it, he bashes her in the head with his typewriter upon which a violent fight ensues [and in the novel she’d already taken off a foot with an axe, and a thumb with an electric knife, so she’s a credible threat] but Paul gets the upper hand and flees after locking her in the room. He’s wounded from the struggle and passes out after alerting the cops where he is [and that Annie killed another cop with a ride on lawnmower, maybe not the finest point of the book]. Paul wakes to police officers on the scene and you’d think he was safe and it was over, but then we discover Annie was found dead in the barn, she’descaped the room but then died from her injuries, and I think the cold, but she was in the exhausting act of trying to start her chainsaw because that’s what her plan was.
That ending blew my mind. The thought of Paul having been a coin toss away from being chainsawed up is horrifying to consider for the man who’s been captive all book. It’s a real High Horror ending, but one that still works within the confines of the theme of the story.
Unlike King’s original ending, when he thought it would be a short story, and Annie was going to bind his single copy of the new novel in Paul’s skin. Far more Creepshow than weighty novel.
HEARTS IN ATLANTIS - this novella within the same-titled collection might be one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve ever read. A story about love and teen discovery and not a slice of horror to be found. A bunch of uni students get hooked on the card game Hearts when they should be focusing on their studies because it’s the only thing keeping them out of the Vietnam War’s draft.
But really, who can study when the country is a mess, and perhaps peaceful activism is a far grander life choice. So we follow Peter Riley as he discovers who he is, what really matters to him, and who he’s surrounded by as his dorm falls into Hearts, and he slowly falls in love, and then it all falls apart, as transformative and transitionary parts of your life are supposed to.
The story ends with everyone moving on, their whole lives ahead of them - their whole stories ahead of them - but we can see the change this phase has wrought. Pete’s first love, Carol, leaves him, but stays in contact and reminds him of her life in protests, and Pete is obviously changed after seeing the good people left in his dorm rally around another student in need.
It’s not a huge ending, nothing as grand as a chainsaw in the barn, but it’s not that kind of story - it’s a real story, and the story ends in a real way in that life moves on and gets away from you, but you take what you can get from it and you never forget and hopefully you are one degree closer to facing the right direction.
Truly, one of my favourite pieces of writing ever [possibly helped by having read it right before I went to uni and lived on campus - though I could have learnt more of the lesson from this book - though I also suppose the lesson isn’t something you can learn from the book, you learn it from your own experiences only].
THE LONG WALK - another masterpiece ending, and one that can fuel conversation and speculation for years.
In this story, we follow Ray Garretty on The Long Walk; a gruelling walk over like 180 miles, that should take like 3 days straight, and whoever maintains their pace and gets to the end gets the prize of: a) not getting shot, and b) getting whatever they want. The end of the race is a life of ease for the solo winner, but it’s built on the backs of the other 100 teen men who die along the way.
We follow Ray on this walk and we learn about the other boys and where they come from and why they are walking and ultimately just how they all die. It’s a pretty decent allegory for the Vietnam War draft, perhaps, but in the end Ray wins and he’s fatigued, and he gets to the General [this very Nicholson presence who runs the race] and he pushes past him and finds the energy to run, and I think it’s towards a man in black.
It very much reads, to me, like Ray runs into the arms of death. Others believe it’s into the arms of madness, or perhaps it’s inspiring and he’s not even tired, he’s got the will to live into the rest of his life!
I love that it can be read multiple ways, but that they all work for whatever your take is on the meaning of this journey. The book is tight, King wrote it under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and it’s bleak [if you see the ending the way I do], but it’s also just captivating. The ending lands completely perfectly to leave you feeling like shit, as a story should after watching miles of young men die pointlessly.
Now I won’t try to say King only writes the best endings, but I also won’t say every ending of his sucks. I also dig the ending of The Shining and 11/22/63 and The Colorado Kind [low key love this ending, actually] and Pet Sematary and Christine while also thinking he dropped the ball on The Stand [in a way, though there’s room to critique and explore and appreciate a literal hand of god] and Joyland [ugh, the coda on that was rotten and retroactively spoiled the whole meal].
I think the guy contains multitudes, and he’s done enough brilliant work to give him a pass to always be considered in my books.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
DARK HEART #1 on Kickstarter - an Indigenous superhero comic made by a bunch of rad people on our West Coast. This story and world looks spectacular.
Jason Aaron’s Newsletter, Always Good - this past week he dropped a newsletter all about his writing schedule and it’s just a simple and pleasant eye opening [or eye reminding] experience about what this game looks like. His newsletter is always from the heart, and that it comes from probably the best mainstream comics writer of the past decade is incredible as we see how his brain turns [and his life works] while managing to put out books as varied as Scalped, Thor, Avengers, and most things in between.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
PREY - I really dug this flick. The action is great, the heroics build, and the script is tight. Everything you need to know about Amber Midthunder’s Naru is there in the first 10 minutes. Her solitude, her need to buck the tribe’s gender trends, why her perspective is different from the men in her tribe and why that’s going to help her [and all of them]. You might have seen people make the case for this being the best Predator flick of all time. It’s definitely top two - I have a huge soft spot for the original, it’s also a tight flick and a massively fun watch. Which is *better*...I don’t know.
Which will I share with my kids first when they’re teens? This one, 100%. The original one has a joke about someone’s wife’s pussy being so big it has an echo…yeah, that hasn’t aged well. At all. So for that, I’ll call it for PREY for a TKO.
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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?
I’m an award-winning Australian [in that order] comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, IDW, Mad Cave, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.
I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.
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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
I’ve been rereading The Walking Dead in between moments of life - I just finished the 8th trade, and it fits as a lazy read because I find I don’t need to focus because it’s a cruisy read, and I’ve read it before, so it’s good before bed fodder when my brain is foggy - and I’m kinda shocked by how this comic was such a phenomenon because it’s just such a depressing read.
I know I loved it when I read the first, like, 15 trades worth when they were coming out, but now I see how life is just a slog for these people. Kirkman and Adlard just find horrible ways to make life worse for them all.
But in rereading it, I also get how it worked, and still works for me now - it’s well crafted, and it’s operatic in the soap opera style, and you get really attached and riveted. But it’s always taken away, in progressively more gruesome ways, and that’s hard.
I only made it like 4-5 seasons into the show, but always marvelled at people talking about it as being salacious torture hype, when I knew all along that’s what the comic was, but revisiting it really accelarates that concept and makes it really harrowing.
I look forward to starting the 9th trade this week.