You Read These With Your Eyes (March 1st, 2023)
A quick feature about selling stories, featuring the week’s newest reads.
Hey, remember Friday Night Lights? The TV show? Maybe? Hard to do a call and response in a Substack that’s so specific to a niche within comics and expect a good consensus answer regarding a years old American TV show reference.
Minus twelve points Brandon. Also, you should be sleeping already, it is late when you’re writing this and it is Wednesday tomorrow.
Let’s get this done before I fall asleep at the keyboard.
MINI-SERIES | Clear #1 (Dark Horse Comics and, let’s face it, ComiXology/Amazon)
by Scott Snyder, Francis Manapul, & Andworld Design w/ editorial & design support by Will Dennis, Tyler Jennes, & Emma Price
There’s a lot that needs to be said about this comic, as well as the current state of ComiXology. The comic itself is quite brilliant. The state of ComiXology, not so much.
It was recently announced that as part of a big batch of layoffs at Amazon, that pretty much the entirety of the ComiXology team would be let go from the company on a rolling scale. Add to that the fairly abysmal state of discovering comics digitally with the app's migration to the Kindle-verse, and you have yourself a pretty awful stew.
That said, there was a time where the team at ComiXology was putting the work in, and getting some really choice ideas launched. Scott Snyder took a particularly robust deal, and set up a whole publishing slate with a bevy of different collaborators. Clear is one of the results from this deal (or deals), and it is something else.
THE PITCH | A murder mystery set in the very near future, where folks have the ability to overlay reality with whatever kind of look they want. From a black and white 50s feel, to old school westerns, to some high fantasy or whatever, the world can bend to your aesthetic ideals as everything truly crumbles around you.
This is a title that hit me square in the jaw. A reaction to the slow apocalypse that is slowly consuming us all, Clear plies the extremely clean and expressive full art stylings of Francis Manapul to a dark mystery plot. The brilliant and vibrant setting pulls against the noir tendencies of the story itself to build tension in the storytelling, and the whole thing just sings. If you have Amazon Prime, give this a taste for “free” - because all ComiXology Originals are available using that platform to consume. If you love it, or if you’re not a fan of digital releases, think about picking this up when you’re in your local comic shop.
That’s going to do it for today. I have… wow, five different things I want to talk about for Friday’s post, including the thing I wanted to put up here on Monday. This industry is wild, and I just need to share the madness with you so we can share in this experience.
Talk with you soon.
-B.
(I am loathe to add a “hey, subscribe or share this” at the end of posts like this, but Substack gets angry at me when I don’t, sooo….)
Love the Friday night lights reference!
Clear was so great, but much better suited for print.