(Yes, yes, I know. That’s a wretched pun. What can I say, I’m all out of clever titles for Locke & Key related posts. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel and I admit it, okay? Can we just move on now?)
A bunch of Locke & Key related items have piled up, and I figured I’d throw the whole bucket of ‘em into one big post. First, revel in the unadaulterated Bode-ness of Gabe’s alternate cover for issue 3:
Issue 3 will be out in early February, and includes an extended preview of the new novel, HORNS.
There were a couple nice things for me under the Christmas tree this year, but my favorite present came from Skeleton Crew Studios:
Does it work? Wouldn’t you like to know.
Israel also finally spilled the truth on another subject: the ghost door is a real and actual door and can be found in my new office. It was handcrafted out of Awesome, and carefully painted in shades of Morbid and Grim. The ghost door was not a Christmas gift, but a birthday present; I’ve been meaning to blog about this since last summer but never got around to it. At some point here (oh yeah, suuuure…) I’ll tell the whole story of how the door came to be and post some photos, but Izzy already has a few pictures up on his site if you don’t want to wait.
Finally, there’s been a gush of further love for Locke & Key in the last couple weeks.Kind things were said on Major Spoilers and Ain’t It Cool News (scroll down). Locke & Key was also on Comic Book Resource’s list of the best comics of 2009 (at #34), while the Comic Book Club picked Locke & Key as their 3rd favorite comic of 2009. The Totally Rad Show took a look at Locke & Key as a whole, beginning with the very first trade, and running right through to the current issues, and said some really embarrassingly generous things about the series. (If you follow the Totally Rad Show link, look for the Locke & Key clip around minute 41).
I’ve got a lot to post about just now, so I figure to be a little more active here on the blog in the coming weeks. Yeah, yeah, try to contain your excitement. Hope everyone had a great holiday.
… is for Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows to be the Pick-of-the-Week on Fresh Ink, and now it is, which makes Blair Butler better than Santa Claus in my book.
Even if you’re already sold on the series, and don’t need a dose of Yay-Locke-&-Key in your week, this episode is much worth checking out for the other recommendations, which include the hefty and impressive looking George Sprott, and a series called Underground which sounds like a great entry in the admittedly small genre of spelunking thrillers.
And if you aren’t sold on L&K – well, check it out, maybe Blair Butler will argue into giving it a try.
… the website reemerges after being down for several days. The site had a security breach and the issue took a while to sort out. No lasting damage was done, though. Some of the visuals that went with a few of the more recent entries have vanished, but I’m in the slow process of replacing them.
Also, I’m glad to note that the links to the BIO and LINKS page have been corrected. The BIO page has been updated, and some other out-of-date pages (LINKS, COMICS, OTHER FICTION) will soon be updated and tidied up as well. I admit to being a very shoddy, irregular blogger, but in the coming year I’m going to try to keep the site as a whole in good working order and to make at least weekly updates.
In other doings, Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows #2 tumbles into stores tomorrow, but you can start reading right now with this preview over on Comic Book Resources. While the response to the first issue was generally very good, some noted that it was a tough starting point for people completely new to the characters and story. While I still think complete newbies would be better served by beginning at the beginning (with the trade of L&K: Welcome to Lovecraft), #2 is a clean standalone, and there’s no real need to have read any of the other issues to understand it. So it’s a fine place to dip a toe in – just be aware that the water is very, very cold.
I thought since we just started the new Locke & Key arc, I might post some responses to the first issue, including the following video, where Blair Butler shows L&K some much appreciated love. Links to other reviews follow.
For the most part they’re extremely good ones. Broken Frontiers and Ain’t-it-Cool-News both raise one reasonable concern, however, suggesting that new readers might find Crown of Shadows #1 largely mystifying. That’s not a terribly unfair criticism; while I do think most first-timers can probably suss out what’s going on, it was probably easier to jump in cold back with Head Games. I’ve raised a lot of questions in the first 12 issues, and I think it would be bad form not to begin to answer them. But if you don’t know what the questions are, the answers aren’t likely to make a lot of sense.
That said, newcomers to the series will likely find the next issue (and the issue after) pretty accessible stuff. Understandably, I think readers would be better off starting at the beginning, with Welcome to Lovecraft, but if you just want to dive in to what’s happening now, you could do worse than to take a plunge into #2’s very cold waters.
Also: another reviewer mentions that he’s heard the series might run 68 issues. It won’t. A lot of numbers have been thrown around since Locke & Key got started (I don’t remember 68 being one of them, but I guess it’s possible), and the truth is some days I feel like I could write about Keyhouse forever. Still, I don’t believe any story should go on one sentence (or one panel) longer than it needs to; the current plan is for 36 issues. Which means that issue 6 of Crown of Shadows will be the exact halfway point. And considering what happens on the last page of that issue, I think that’s about right.
The first issue of Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows is out today.*
It’s full of drunkenness and ghost-rasslin’. Who doesn’t like a little ghost-rasslin’ now and then? For those who want to start reading right now, io9 has a preview of the first five pages.
* Or should be – today is the scheduled release. But it is Veteran’s Day (a particularly sad Veteran’s Day, given what happened at Fort Hood), so it’s possible it won’t be widely available until tomorrow, or next Wednesday in some markets.
I was in a lousy mood last night, for no particular reason (it was actually a pretty good day), and I hauled my ugly attitude over to Twitter, just looking to kill a little time. And I hadn’t been there for more than two minutes before I discovered that Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft made SFX Magazine’s short list for Best Comic. Which pretty much wrecked my plan to be a bad tempered pisser for the rest of the evening.
My good news has me in a mood to hear other people’s good news, so whyn’t you tell me? What’s the best thing to happen to you lately? Put it in the comments thread, let me know about it. I asked this over on Twitter and got some great stories.
Love for Locke & Key over at io9, where Graeme McMillian included it on his list of 5 Comics You’re Not Reading (But Should Be). Course, if you’re hanging out on this website, you probably are reading Locke & Key; still, McMillian’s article is worth a look, just ’cause of all the nice things he says about L&K, and also to see what else is on the list that you need to know about.
The kind words are great; even better, though, is a new cover from Gabriel Rodriguez, this one the variant for Crown of Shadows, issue 2:
And don’t forget that issue 1 of the new storyline will be out next Wednesday, about which I only have one thing to say: ghostfight!
… For not posting about this sooner, but Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft #1 is now available as a standalone iPhone App, and will be making its way to other mobile platforms in time, spreading like poison sumac to infect your favorite electronics.
I’m quite a fan of comics on the iPhone: IDW has published a number of terrifically entertaining iPhone comics, and both iVerse and ComiXology have designed compelling, user-friendly comic book readers. My own most satisfying eBook experience to date has been P. Craig Russell’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s Thief of Always; I burned through it on my phone over a period of 48 hours, and found it a completely natural and fun way to read the story. Comics are built to be read in panel-sized chunks, and the iPhone screen is exactly the size of an average comic book panel. It just works. And did I mention most comic downloads for the iPhone are .99 (when they aren’t free?). So that works too. Remember when you used to be able to get a comic for less than a buck? When you least expect it, history repeats.
It is in the nature of comics to quickly adapt to and adopt any new medium – they’ve always been a rapacious form, climbing into newspapers and onto the back of cereal boxes and leaking into novels (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Tenth Circle, etc.). I’m excited to see how comics will pervert mobile devices and the various eReaders to serve their unwholesome purposes. I think if comics can get a good foothold on devices like the Kindle, the iPhone, the upcoming Apple tablet, the PSP, and other portables, it could return the field to a kind of widespread dominance it hasn’t had since the days when comics were cheap, everywhere, and popular titles sold a million copies a month. A comics fan can hope anyway.
Apologies for being the worst blogger in the world and just letting the website hang for a couple weeks. For what it’s worth, when I do go dark here at joehillfiction, it’s usually a good sign that I’m pretty fully involved with a project (or two), and that’s the case here. Aside from prepping HORNS for its February release (I’m reading over what are called the First Pass pages now), and polishing the last issues of LOCKE & KEY: CROWN OF SHADOWS, I’ve got a couple new things which are coming along well. And I’d brag all about ‘em except I’m superstitious; talking about work in progress is just never a good idea, at least for me.
I’ll try and be a little more active over the next month or two, though, and if you’re really missing my blab, you can always catch me going on about this or that over on Twitter.
(Update: Oh, and yeah, the other issues of Welcome to Lovecraft and Head Games will be making their way to the iPhone as well. And Crown of Shadows will also be available eventually, although I’d expect some lag time between their release to stores and their release on the App store.)
No sooner did we find out about Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft scoring a British Fantasy Award then we heard some even more remarkable news. The Chilean-North American Cultural Institute has honored artist Gabriel Rodriguez with their annual literary prize, the Walt Whitman Award, for his work in the field of graphic novels. It’s the first time they’ve ever bestowed the Whitman on an artist.
I’m so fucking happy for Gabe I could split; he works his balls off on Locke & Key, and the story lives on the page because of the imagination, energy, and heart he puts into it. He’s a kind and generous guy – I’m proud to call him my friend – and he’s made working on the story of the Locke family a real joy.
I’m happy for the comic, too, of course, but more than that, I’m happy for comics as a whole. It pleases me any time comic book artists are recognized and honored as storytellers practicing a unique literary form. (For me the high point of Locke & Key remains the final pages of the very first issue from Welcome To Lovecraft, when Bode discovers the ghost door. Take a look and see if you can spot what’s missing. Yeah, right: no word balloons.)
Gabe hangs around here quite a bit, so if you have a moment, pass on your congrats in the comments thread. Thanks guys… and thanks, Gabe.
Last night, the British Fantasy Society passed out their annual awards in Nottingham, and threw a big hot sticky bucket of love all over Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft, giving it the prize for Best Comic Book/Graphic Novel. I’m awfully pleased; I know everyone who worked on L&K: WTL is high as can be on the news. My thanks to the BFS, and I’m sorry I wasn’t at FantasyCon in person. It’s always a good time.
‘Course the 2nd Volume of Locke & Key, Head Games, is just out, and if you want a signed copy, you can still call in an order to River Run Books (603 431-2100). More information here.
Some of my favorite writers and artists walked away with British Fantasy Awards last night; a list of the other winners appears after the jump.
