Jason Franks's Blog, page 29

In 2013

What do I have in store for al you horrible little boys and girls in 2013?

Well, I’m glad you asked, my evil children.

The first issue of McBlack volume 2, LADY McBLACK, will appear in February. This will be a black and white book, written and pencilled by me, inked by Dave Gutierrez, with cover art from Rhys James. There will be a backup feature as well–maybe two.

THE SIXSMITHS VOL.02 is well and truly underway and I hope that it will be in print in the second half of the year. I have a wonderful and surprising selection of artists working on this book with me and I think it will be smarter, funnier and scarier than the first book.

Delayed from 2012, UNGENRED, a collection of my ‘non genre’ comics stories, should be out this year as well. About 50% of the material int he book has never been published. These are travel stories, social realist drama, comedy pieces, satires, autobiography and sentient robots. (You wanna argue about what a genre is? Huh? Huh?)

Lots of other projects in the works as well. I am presently trying to sell my second novel, Faerie Apocalypse, and I’m pitching three new comics miniseries: KENSUKE, a samurai fantasy horror with Tom Bonin; THE LEFT HAND PATH, a horror/police procedural with Paul Abstruse; and BUCKET OF GLASS, a high school drama with Joe Pimienta.

Hopefully there will be some more short stories in both prose and comics and some other new projects up to kick off. I also hope to have my third novel, XDA ZAI, ready for submission by the end of the year.

I’m hoping for a bigger year than than 2012. Wish me luck!

2012

So, 2012. I got married. I travelled overseas. My new job is fun and challenging. I published some comics: Criminal Element and Terra Magazine for Black House Comics and McBlack Two Shot under my own Blackglass imprint.

My first novel, Bloody Waters, from Possible Press.

I’ve written a bit more about my year over on Matt Emery’s excellent Pikitia Press blog. Click on over; Matt’s grilled more or less everybody in the Australia/New Zealand scene and it’s great to see what everybody thought.

Jason Franks is the author of the graphic novels The Sixsmiths and McBlack. His occult rock’n’roll novel, Bloody Waters, was published by Possible Press in 2012.

The End of the Earth

Folks, if you haven’t figured it out yet… Terra Magazine is cancelled. Many thanks to everyone who supported us during our brief moment.

Particular thanks to the contributors: Nic Hunter, Ben Michael Byrne, Christopher Sequeira, Jan Scherpenhuizen, Yuriko Sekine, Hazz Purnell, Jason Fischer and Tom Bonin. Thanks to those of you whose stories never saw print: Gavin Thompson, Ruairi Coneely, Julie Ditrich, Richard Butler, and Emmet O’Cuana.

A valiant effort, folks; it was an honour and a privilege and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your time and energy. I wish it had turned out better.

Many of the stories from the book will hopefully be continued or completed as one shots or graphic novels. Tom and I are actively pitching Kensuke around and I have some completed Gourmand Go material that has never seen print, so I think you should certainly expect to see more of those two features at some point. Nic and I have already completed half of Shadowmancy and I’d love to see that one through to fruition as well. I’m sure that Tusk will rise again, like a psychic elephant who has the midnight runs from eating too many cabbages. I also know that Julie and Richard are still developing their story, House of the Smiling Dead, which you haven’t seen yet but which is amazingly disturbed and funny.

I’ve taken down the Terra website and the twitter feed and I’m going to take the facebook page offline tomorrow.

See you round, like a Froot Loop,

– JF

BLACK SALE

Folks,

Blackglass Press is having a Black XMas Facebook Sale. 15% off all Blackglass Press books, including all current McBlack titles, if you use the coupon code BLACKXMAS.

Get on over there right the hell now:

http://www.blackglasspress.com/

Shipping within Australia is free.

I know this isn’t facebook, but if you go over there and like the McBlack page I’m sure nobody will know the difference…

– JF

Camille Paglia vs Angela Gossow

In an article for the Hollywood Reporter this week, Camille Paglia claims that Taylor swift and Katy Perry are ‘destroying feminism’.

Paglia compares  Perry, Swift and their ilk to the vapid 50s  personas of Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. She describes their music ‘monotonous’ and ‘keening’. I’ve recently taken my own shots at the pop music world and I’m right with Camille… up to this point.

Camille loses me when she gives Beyonce and Rihanna favourable comparisons to the ‘white girls’. I presume that this because they seem more authentic, given the way that R&B evolved into today’s dance-pop–Paglia makes a big deal out of their ethnicity–but the truth is that their music is pretty much indistinguishable.  These pop stars are not chosen for musical ability; they are dancing models chosen for how good they look in the music videos. Beyonce and Rihanna are products of the same cynical marketing machine. They’re just there to widen the sales demographics.

More interesting, perhaps, would have been to see Paglia talk about P!nk, who again sounds very similar to the other pop divas, but who now looks like a couture designer’s impression of a punk rocker and who sings about wanting to be a rock star. I think P!nk wants  be something else, but doesn’t know how.

Paglia talks about the way that her Baby Boomer generation won themselves free of oppression and that these young girls are ruining her hard work, but there were plenty of  smart female role models in Generation X. Remember the 90s? Courtney Love, Melissa Auf Der Maur, L7? Remember the ‘Riot Grrl’ movement? I admit that I’ve missed them, and I have vocally complained about it. But guess what? They’re still around. Joan Jett has been out there for as long as I’ve been alive, kicking ass and taking names.

And Generation Y? Maybe Angela Gossow doesn’t have the mainstream profile of Britney Spears, but for my money she’s a better feminist icon than all of Paglia’s cited heroes–Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Natalie Wood and  Leslie Caron–combined.

Paglia’s Baby Boomers do not have a monopoly on feminism. Surely Paglia doesn’t think that women are that foolish and impressionable? Who will teach them how to be free once she and her generation of revolutionaries are gone? To claim that a generation has been ruined by such miserable exemplars of corporate marketing as Taylor Swift and Katy Perry is insulting and arrogant.

There are plenty of smarter role models out there for girls, and if they weren’t, they’d do what children have always done: they’ll make their own.

 

Jason Franks is the author of the graphic novels The Sixsmiths and McBlack. His occult rock’n'roll novel, Bloody Waters, was published by Possible Press in 2012.

Next Big Thing

Hey folks,

The excellent Andrew J. McKiernan has tagged me in the Next Big Thing, which is a promotion chain in which authors promote each other through their various networks.  Each tagged author will reply to the following questions and then  tag somebody else.

1) What is the working title of your book?

My current book is called BLOODY WATERS. This has been the title for as long as it’s had one.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

I was looking for ideas for a short story to submit to an anthology about witches and I became interested in the way that the term has been colonized by the Wiccan community. What would happen if a Wiccan crossed paths with an old-fashioned Satanic witch? What if it the Satanic witch was a rockstar? What about it it happened on a TV talk show?

I wrote the story and received a glowing rejection letter from PD Cacek, the editor of the anthology. But I had so much fun with the principal characters, Clarice and Johnny, that I decided to write another story about them taking on the pop music industry. I was halfway through a third before I realized that this was a novel.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

I guess it’s ‘horror’ is the best fit, or perhaps ‘occult’, although most horrific moments in the book are more to do with awful pop music than with monsters or gore. You could probably call it ‘urban fantasy’ as well.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I’ve taken a lot of care with how the characters are physically described in the book, but beyond the general build and perhaps hair style I don’t give you much. I’m a bit reluctant to cast them as actors–I don’t do it in my head when I’m writing and I don’t really want my readers to be doing that, either.

so I’m going to cast musicians, not actors. If this was a movie they’d have to play instruments, right? So here goes.

Russell Marsden from A Band of Skulls as Johnny Chernow.

Mark Lanegan for Rex Munday. (I prefer solo artist Mark, but you might know him better from the Screaming Trees or the Queens of the Stone Age.)

Clarice herself is tough to cast, but I’m gonna go with Kim Pryor from Melissa Auf Der Maur’s touring band.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A young black-listed guitar virtuoso makes a different kind of deal with the devil for a second chance at the career she deserves–but the devil has different plans for her.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’s published by a new Sydney-based publisher, Possible Press.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I wrote the first short story in 1999 and I think the first draft was completed in 2003. So, four years.

It took another six years for me to get the book into a shape where I could sell it (cutting 40,000 words) and then two more years of guided editing (trimming another 10,000) to deliver the lean, mean guitar-playing machine you see today.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

That’s a tough one, because the book sits across a number of genres. The best match I can think of actually comes from outside the horror genre: Bill Flanagan’s A&R has a similar, although less-angry treatment of the music business. It’d go nicely beside your Metalocalypse DVD box set.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Hard to pin the inspiration on a single source. I was angry with the way the music business is run. With the fickleness of public taste. With the lack of integrity displayed by both the fans and the practitioners of a scene that had made integrity its founding principle. So I wrote a book about a band who could overcome all of that.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Bloody Waters isn’t really a comedy, but it has a definite satirical slant and I think if you know anything about the business of pop culture you’ll find some good laughs in it.

And that’s me done, except for the tagging. Justin Woolley, you are up!

The Ebook Route

A lot of people have been asking me why we ‘went the ebook route’ with Bloody Waters.

Well.

In the two or three years that has elapsed between Possible Press agreeing to take on the book and the book finally seeing publication the ebook world has changed drastically. I bought myself a reader at the start of 2011 and I haven’t looked back. I can have just about any book I want, immediately, and generally for less? Sign me up!

I love physical books. I have a house full of them–but that’s just the problem. I have a house full of books and I’ve long since run out of space to put them. Nowadays I’ll only buy hardcopy a book is special, or if there’s no other way to get it. Ebooks take up a lot less space.

The other noticeable thing about ebooks is that they seems to be part of an almost separate economy to print books. If you compare the bestseller lists for ereaders to those of ‘regular books’ it’s striking how different they are–and how much better represented indie publishers are on the former.

It’s tough for a book like Bloody Waters–sold by a small publisher, written by a first time author–to compete for shelf space against established names and big companies with marketing budgets. Those companies fight for space in Walmart; smaller publishers fight for space in independent bookstores. There’s a lot of competition for not a lot of sales.

It just felt like the best opportunities for Bloody Waters were in ebook form, where none of that is a consideration… and it appears to have paid off. I don’t have numbers yet, but based on reader feedback I’ve sold a lot more copies of this more quickly than I have of just about anything, with the possible exception of The Sixsmiths… and that’s not a regular Book Trade book; it’s a Direct Market graphic novel, where almost all of your sales for the life of the book are based on pre-orders.

Traditional publishers have noticed this different market and are now scrambling to produce more ebooks. Some of them might eventually see print, but they are packaging and publishing a lot of riskier material as ebooks first.

The same is true of Bloody Waters. It feels like the book is a success already and it’s looking like we will in fact go to print next year–but no promises. If you want to see it happen, I can only recommend that you buy a copy of the ebook now and let everybody know how much you dig it. That means tell your friends, write us up in your blog, and review us on Goodreads and Amazon.com.

– JF

Via Pikitia Press: 2012 in Review

The excellent Mat Emery, of Pikitia Press, asked me some questions about how 2012 has gone:

http://pikitiapress.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/2012-in-review-jason-franks.html

I’m sure there will be more similar responses to follow. There’s already one up from Dylan Horrocks:

http://pikitiapress.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/2012-in-review-dylan-horrocks.html

 

Volume 2 Art Lineup: Jan Scherpenhuizen

It is with tremendous pleasure that I present the next Volume 2 artist to you, my evil brethren: jovial Jan Scherpenhuizen!

I’ve known and worked with Jan in various projects and in different capacities in the few years I’ve known him and he’s a talented, passionate, versatile and knowledgeable artist and writer.

Here’s a page out of his Sixsmiths chapter:

I think it’s immediately obvious why I’m stoked to have Jan on board. Jan has worked all across publishing in his career as a writer, an artist, an agent and an editor. He worked on Wolverine for Marvel Comics and his creator-owned horror graphic novel The Twilight Age was serialized by Black House Comics. Jan is the master of numerous different art styles and at least three of them will be on display in The Sixsmiths volume 2.

Welcome, Jan!

 

Female Characters

The first thing you’ll probably notice in this essay about Strong Female Characters is that I omitted the word ‘strong’ from the title. I don’t think there is any problem with the ‘strength’ of female characters in fiction–the problem is with the word character. Fictional women–particularly in genre fiction–most frequently serve as motivators or set decoration, rather than as actual characters.

The qualifier ‘strong’ implies that women, by default, are weak. Women are anything but.

Female characters need to be treated as interesting characters with personalities and interests beyond clothes, men and jewellery. When I hear that some book or movie  or comic has ‘strong female characters’ I know that, nine times out of ten, that means the story features models in fetish outfits who jump around kicking the heads off their problems. These Spinny Killbots are not much of a step up from the ever-popular ‘hero’s dead girlfriend’.

When I started writing Bloody Waters it was not my intention to write about ‘strong female character’. I wanted to write about a female guitar hero because I’ve never read about one before.

There are precious few female guitar specialists in reality. Why is Joan Jett such a singular figure in the rock music biz? Lita Ford? It’s only in recent years that we’ve seen some real chops-guitarists come to the fore–Marnie Stern, Orianthe, Kaki King–and I can still count them on one hand. Angela Gossow is not a guitarist, but she’s doing what something female rockstars have been allowed to so far. There are still definite boundaries for women in rock music.

When I started looking for ideas for a story about witches (which I was then aiming to sell to an anthology), I already had Clarice floating around in the back of my head. But I didn’t want to dilute Clarice’s abilities as a guitarist, so it’s her boyfriend/rhythm guitarist, Johnny Chernow, is the witch in Bloody Waters. Johnny’s a strong supporting character, but Clarice is firmly the lead protagonist. I don’t think she is a character that you can easily visualize dressed in a chainmail bikini, roundhousing monsters in the face.

I did give Clarice some ju jutsu skills, but there are only a couple of instances where she uses them in the book. Even then, her violent behaviour has serious consequences, despite it being in self-defence. You can’t solve a lot of problems by breaking somebody’s nose, whether you are a spinny killbot or not.

A number of readers have told me that they shouldn’t like Clarice, but they do. I’m particularly proud of that. If you’ve read much of my work you’ll know that I usually cast antiheroes–if not outright villains–as protagonists and Clarice is certainly such a character. She’s smart and talented and formidable, but she’s also arrogant and selfish. She sticks to her principles, but those principles are all inwardly-directed. Clarice puts her own pride and honour before anybody else’s.

If you read the book carefully you’ll notice that I never tell you that Clarice is attractive. I tell you what colour her hair is and she’s obviously quite athletic. She surely has some rockstar glamour, but beautiful? Pretty? Irrelevant. You can’t even tell from the cover art. When the editor and I were working with artist Rhys James on the image, the most difficult part was working out how much of Clarice’s face we could conceal in shadow.

It seems to me that most compliments directed at women–especially young girls–are about their looks. We compliment them on their skin or their hair or their eyes. Boys, on the other hand, are told that they’re strong and clever and smart. Look at those biceps!

Clarice is not there to look pretty; she’s there to play guitar and kick ass. If you take away ‘guitar’ bit you’ll find that applies to most women.