Never enough

Free Planet #2 in stores now, Jackson Crater, process notes, more

Trying something different this week: A themed newsletter with a more rambling structure than the regimented missives you’ve come to expect. But before I get into all that…

Free Planet #2 is in stores today, maybe even right now depending when you’re reading this. We gave you a full five weeks to read, reread and ruminate over the entirety of Free Planet #1, which is likely necessary due to cocreator Jed Dougherty and my approach on the series: It’s never enough.

Research, design, thumbnails, prose captions, backgrounds, tones, characters, colors, essays, illustrations, and letters; in Free Planet, nothing is every enough. At every stage of development, we endeavored to layer in more: more complexity, more detail, more richness, more everything. Just look what acclaimed cartoonist, penciler and writer Phil Hester had to say about the Shape of Comics to Come:

In issue #1, our “Never Enough” ethos was evidenced not only in the inclusion of Dr. Aldous Foyroushi’s essay “Dumuzid: Breadbasket of the Alliance” but in its discussion of my absolute favorite Free Planet character, Jackson Crater. Your read of issue #2 and, crucially, the good doctor’s first backmatter essay, will determine how you feel about the “red-eyed demon” and his controversial tactics.

Jackson Crater is a man of extremes, of convictions, a man for whom, when it comes to pursuing freedom, nothing is ever enough. And that’s exactly why I love him so much; he’s a true believer, a zealot, a consistent actor for whom compromise is unthinkable. Because he believes a simple truth: That his tactics, his actions even, are all justified by their adherence to his ideological bedrock.

Jackson Crater’s approach resonates with me. More than that, it’s familiar to me. I know it intimately. I’ve written about it in this very newsletter, discussing my tendency to care too much about achieving my goals and not enough about how I should achieve them. It’s another “Never Enough” approach; identifying what you want, then pushing as hard as you can, fighting on every front, working every angle to make it happen. It’s never served me well.

Until Free Planet that is. Geopolitics, philosophy, religion, anthropology, class analysis, charts and graphs, essays, conflict terrestrial and celestial, romance, and more; Free Planet is everything. We crammed everything into it, we filled it to the brim with visual information, and we did everything to promote it and get the word out: ComicsPro, retailer calls, social media, press calls, podcasts and this weekly newsletter.

It was, simply, never enough and, as a result, Free Planet has become the biggest success of my career, with a sold out first issue and universal critical acclaim. Now, I’m working ahead on later issues and, in keeping with the “Never Enough” approach, am hard at work at new techniques, new approaches, completely new ways to entertain and challenge you. Stay tuned for news on that front…

In the meantime, a new issue of Free Planet means a new opportunity to discuss The APPROACH. The process, as ever, starts – before I even write the script – with thumbnails, which, as you can see below, are always exceedingly rough, as I do them solely to force myself to think about each page, not as a piece of a story, but as a blueprint for a physical artifact worthy of study.

I conceptualized the page around a pair of news articles describing a) a brand-new building, and b) the building’s destruction by Jackson Crater. Written by a journalist sympathetic to the Interplanetary Development Alliance, the articles are juxtaposed with two scenes, jumbled about the page, in the hopes that – in concert with the historical captions – readers will piece together their own truth.

It’s important to note: I never send my thumbnails to Jed and these newsletters are the first time he sees them. Reason being that Jed is the absolute best in the business and, not infrequently, comes back with something completely different than what I envisioned and far, far superior. To wit:

Rather than my messy montage idea, Jed went with something more regimented: A series of tall vertical panels that read as McFarlane-esque to me. Rather than a hodgepodge that leans into confusion, Jed opted for staccato, cramped beats to build the tension until it was, fittingly, ready to explode.

The layout works exceptionally well, especially with Jed’s synergistic approach to in-panel composition and lettering placements. I found the layout so very effective, I earmarked it for future usage and immediately began thinking about how it could be deployed in thematically relevant ways. Keep an eye out for it in future issues.

One of the strengths of Jed and my thinking about every single Free Planet decision from every angle is that, eventually, all that’s left is to execute. As always, Jed did so magnificently, actually improving on the chosen approach through the addition of inks and tones, using light and dark to further drive home the path your eyes should take through the panels.

When it came time for Vittorio to color the spread, there was a motif – red as violence – already in place, with a plan for it to once again, contribute to Jed’s already exquisite eyelines. The most notable change from Jed’s original layouts was shifting captions 2 and 3 to the left. This choice was made based on the strength of the panel with the bomb and a desire that readers take it in as its discoverer did: In silent, mounting horror.

While it’s appropriate and useful while working on Free Planet, that’s not the reason why I’ve had the refrain “NEVER ENOUGH!” running through my head for the past week. Rather, it’s due to the jawdropping new album from Turnstile, who are massively popular and absolutely don’t need my promoting them to you, but here we are anyway.

Turnstile continues to impress me, a reformed former hardcore kid from Richmond, Virginia. That’s because they’ve turned their backs on the things I hated most about hardcore: The rigid, conformist expectations of what the music should sound like and a mean-spirited, aggressive cruelty. By contrast, Turnstile – without ever abandoning hardcore breakdowns and riffs – is expanding the genre and its audience and it makes me want to do a spin kick.

Some philosophical musing, a process breakdown and a new music recommendation; not a bad newsletter if you ask me! A few more things before I release you to go actually read Free Planet #2:

• Already read Free Planet and want to talk about it? Head over to the Atlantis still sunk chat. With the state of social media, I’m eager to foster a community of conscientious, engaged folks ready to chat about Free Planet as well as the larger issues it explores.

• Free Planet #3 will feature the debut installment of “Questions and Clarifications,” a letters page with Dr. Aldous Foyroushi. If you want to be included in issue #4, send us your questions about Lutherian history.

• The absolutely best way to support the Shape of Comics to Come and ensure we can continue making it for years to come is to subscribe to Free Planet at your local comic shop. Find yours here.

• And, of course, you can always get signed copies of my work – including packages of Free Planet #1-6, retailer exclusive covers, and exclusive sketches by Jed – head on over to my friends at Collector’s Paradise.

Aubrey