Hard Sci-Fi That F**ks

A book that sticks in your teeth.

You Read These With Your Eyes (March 15th, 2023)

A quick feature about selling stories, featuring the week’s newest reads.

It was a very light week for first issues, which can be a blessing and a curse. The blessing comes from the fact that there are truly too many comics on the stands these days, and it’s nice when there’s a bit of reprieve. The curse comes from the way this industry has tied itself to forms of instant gratification - and a lack of heavy hitting first issues can make for a light week of sales.

That said, I’m a huge fan of weeks with less noise, because you can really dig into something fresh and give it a lot of attention in the store. To that end, this week, we’re talking about the return of Greg Rucka to the stands, with an all star creative team.

ONGOING | THE FORGED #1 (Image Comics)

by Greg Rucka, Eric Trautmann, Mike Henderson, Nolan Woodard, & Ariana Maher w/ editorial support by Alejandro Arbona

When we cracked open the boxes this week, we were shocked to see this book. Not because we didn’t know it was coming out, but because it arrived in the magazine format.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise - the book’s trim size was included in the solicitation information. That said, the way Image currently communicates that information is an absolute mess.

Here’s a look at how the company used to present information about their upcoming books.

It’s a good look. Nice and clean, communicating the information needed clearly, and efficiently.

This presentation ended with books scheduled to be released in December of 2022. Starting with their January 2023 solicitations, the information presentation started looking like this:

This is an absolute mess. Off the top, the vital information of sale date, page count, release frequency and price gets no focus - it is dropped in with little emphasis. The design itself is hard to read and breaks a very basic design rule, as it mixes serif fonts (like the one used for this Substack) with sans-serif (a “smoother” style without the affectations of serifs).

This was a very clear downgrade in the way Image communicated vital information to retailers - and I’m not going to lie, it has effected the time and the care I take with ingesting their solicitations. It makes it easier to miss things like the trim size of a comic when you’re going through hundreds of pages of similar information.

It might not seem like much, but things like solicitation design effect how a retailer engages with the information being offered. While some folks might not be able to pick out why something doesn’t look right, the brain can always tell.

There’s a reason why folks get paid a lot of money for design work. Aesthetics push past a lizard part of the brain, making the information being offered more digestible. And if a hack like me can pin point a huge drop in quality, you have a pretty big problem.

That said, all of this has little to do with the actual book we’re talking about. The Forged is absolutely outstanding, in so many ways - and a big part of it comes down to design.

Co-creator on the book Eric Trautmann has been in Greg Rucka’s orbit for quite some time. I first noticed his name when Rucka teamed up with him during his Checkmate run at DC (think Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but in the DC Universe). In interviews, Rucka would talk about how Trautmann was his key into pulling in many DC universe elements into the stories he was telling, acting as a deep-cut expert of sorts, while working synergistically with Rucka’s more “logical” approach to storytelling.

In recent years, you’ve been seeing Trautmann’s name in the pages of another Rucka book called Lazarus, building a lot of the in-world design components that are both in the comic story itself, and in the back matter or back covers. He’s not incredibly flashy or slick with his design work, but he’s perfect at building elements that feel lived in, and function as part of a whole. The Forged is not different.

After the main story wraps, there’s a back section filled with content. A map, some in world information, pictures of dogs… it all sits as something consistent. That is an important thing, because you don’t want something to pull people out of the story they are experiencing.

And speaking of that…

THE PITCH | I spoiled my quick pitch with the title of this post. This, is a hard sci-fi book that f**ks. It is a surprising flavour from someone like Rucka who doesn’t tip toward the salacious, but that said, this works incredibly well. After the solicitation information for this issue runs through a fairly paint-by-numbers bit with some boiler plate sci-fi stuff,¹ it gets to the interesting bits at the end, telling readers and retailer that the book is an "over-the-top pulp adventure of sex, violence, and sci-fi inspired by Conan, Heavy Metal, and other comics you tried to hide from your parents."

With Conan and Heavy Metal being mentioned specifically, you can see how the magazine format is in line with the design and the presentation with this tale. Both have long histories of presenting interesting and complex stories that f**k in the magazine format. It is a feeling and aesthetic the creative team is shooting for, right down to the trim size of the book. That’s an attention to detail.

Outside of that, the book is incredible. The extra page space gives Henderson a lot of room to move and he utilizes it to instil the story with a sense of grandeur. His very kinetic style also gives the proceedings a momentum, so when things get wild, they really move.

The story also hits a perfect balance in what it is trying to accomplish. The Rucka and Trautmann of it all means that the world has a structure - and that structure is not explained to you. You are thrown into this world as it exists, and there aren’t any characters popping around to give you exposition. But the story leads you down the paths you need to figure out how the world functions, all while setting up the points of tension.

This is all before you even consider how sexy this book is. There’s a part of the cover that contains the words “cabal of sensuous space witches!” This is, in fact, a very important part of the story, and world structure. On the face of it, such a concept could play cheap. Here, it is a functionality. Sexuality is power in this book, and the power doesn’t come cheap. It comes from strength, something that is built into the design of The Forged themselves.

Media doesn’t f**k anymore. That might sound like a weird thing to say, but I believe it to be true. Take a look at some of the biggest movies of the past… I dunno, decade, and point out to me the ones that f**k. You’ll mostly find things that are meant to make you laugh, or things that take away agency. There aren’t many projects that feature sexuality as (I believe) it is meant to exist - a form of shared power, of give and take, and of strength. Of understanding and consent. Of raw fucking energy.

The Forged is filled with it. Some of it is at the edges. Other parts are more blatant. But the whole thing brims with the tension of sexuality, and delivers it with a hard sci-fi shell.

It is something else - and it deserves your time this week.

Thank you for reading. Talk with you soon.

-B.

1. To quote the solicit: “In the 11th Millennium of the rule of the Eternal Empress, a squad of planet-smashing super soldiers find their routine mission to be anything but. These are the Forged. They take no prisoners.” It’s a flavour for sure, but there’s no heat there.