The writer Alex Paknadel likes to insist to me that Gotham City is Chicago. I tell him he's wrong, that it's bloody called Gotham, and Gotham does and always has meant bloody New York. It's a nickname born of Gotham in England, a village
Living 3000 miles from where I was raised, Britbox is my portal back home. A streaming service that's not jammed full of adverts, but instead loaded up with British television. I get my money's worth out of it, more than most others. It's full
As a writer, you can't learn much from David Lynch. I mean, you can do whatever you want, but I wouldn't advise it. And yes, I've read Catching the Big Fish. I've read Room to Dream. I enjoyed them, but I mean
Skipped last week's newsletter as I really hit a point where I had to take "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all" to heart. I opened Microsoft Word to start composing a rough draft, and it tried to shove AI generative writing
Bless my cotton socks, this book seems to be coming out fast. Nightwing #122 week. This issue features an extended flashback to Dick Grayson's days as Robin, which I enjoyed writing. It also gives us the first clear look at the overarching villainy we've been pitting
Are we all feeling rested? Very good. I spent the holidays in Wisconsin, which means I saw my first white Christmas in probably a decade. Once snow appears on the ground, my Spotify inevitably becomes riddled with black metal. It's snowy music, but it isn't very
The Wound Man is a medical diagram that first showed up in the Fourteenth Century. It is meant to be something of a how-to manual for surgeons; designed to show every malady the human body could encounter, it was often the index page of the texts in which it appeared,
Hello. It's been a minute, hasn't it? I've been so swamped I took a bit of an unexpected hiatus from writing to you. I feel guilty sitting down to noodle with one of these letters when there are fires that need put out. But
Wrote the below a good few years ago on a trip to Rome, and found it in my files today. I still quite like it, and I'm still playing catch up after NYCC; so here you go. The room in which John Keats died is a claustrophobic box.
If you're looking to understand and study character, I'd highly recommend entering the savage world of UK Channel 4's Come Dine With Me. For the non-Brits: Come Dine With Me is a reality TV show in which four or five (depending on the season)
What's even worth saying? Writer's block does not exist, but tell me that at 2 am the day before a deadline- when the pile of scenes in front of me refuses to accrue into a story and I'm all out of Malbec- and I
Continuity in comic book worlds is an endlessly thorny subject, with hundreds of different valid takes. There are readers who would prefer everything be set in stone. That a superhero's stories (cos let's face it, we're mainly talking about that) should be tick-off-able on
Last Friday DC announced Batman: Dark Patterns. This is very much a passion project, the book I've wanted to make since I started working with DC. 12 issues of Batman solving grisly, street level crimes. I've been quietly working on it with editor Arianna Turturro for
I've been thinking about longer form story structures recently. The nature of the current comics market leans towards the miniseries, so that's primarily what I've written over the last few years. Four-to-six issues and done, then on to the next thing. The amount of
Hello. This is coming to you far later than I would have liked, but periods of intensive work tend to send me into a lockdown mode which leaves little room for much else. Now here I am, coming up for air. Hoping the surface world is still where I left
I think of the writers who made me want to write. Many of them seem to have died in ways that resemble their works and preoccupations. Samuel Beckett wrote often of people who found their selves whittled away. Going blind, unable to move, to speak, losing sensation and coherence. Beckett
Woke from a short spell of sleep paralysis. Dreaming I was in bed with my wife, looked up to see the reflection of two indistinct figures pacing towards us. Before I could turn and see them for real, they were dragging me from the bed, tangled in the sheet so
"Techno-optimism is the metallic silver frosting on the deep-baked cake of sadness on which we chew like a cud in a doomed bid to ignore the loudly howling void." Enjoyed this sentence on why Silicon Valley tech bros act the way they do from Dominic Pettman and Eugene
"During the course of a few violent weeks in Nashville, Steve was handed three dismemberment cases. The detective working one of the cases pointed to a notch in a bone and asked Steve to tell him about it. Happy to have a chance to display his expertise, Steve drew
Today it's been announced that I've partnered with Kinetic Collectibles for conventions and signings and all those good things. I've been rather slack with appearances of late- the last year in particular I was traveling so often and sporadically that it was impossible to
When Caspar Wijngaard sent me the first two issues of his The Power Fantasy with Kieron Gillen, I tweeted that it felt like we are moving into a new era of what superhero comics look & feel like. You can see it in that book. You can see it in
Hello. Dan Watters here. If you don't know me, I'm a comic book writer, currently writing Nightwing at DC, Doctor Who at Titan, and Destro for Skybound's Energon Universe. The internet has become a strange sort of wasteland in which to peddle one'