greysgonnawrite
Grey Might Write
The side blog where I write things and hopefully people read them.
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⊱ℵaomiKatε⊰
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telling a joke on tumblr is fun but watch out! if it gets over 1000 notes your joke is automatically exposed to people who have never once heard a joke in their life.
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“how dare you say we piss on the poor” is perhaps THEE best piece of vernacular to come out of tumblr dot com in the past decade. along with “what were you doing at the devils sacrament” (cheeky. inspired. relevant in every context) and “harold, they're lesbians” (timeless. funny as hell. gay)
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One of tbe brilliant things about mlp:fim is that the main cast aren't wayward children or highschool students they're just a bunch of young adults. Like. Twilight is a postgrad forced by her supervisor to go find friends. Apple Jack has responsibility of gaurdianship of her little sister. They're all employed. They pay rent and taxes. Fluttershy has to deal with her deadbeat underachiever older brother who can't seem to move out by himself when she visits her parents. She also has anxiety she hasnt grown out of since high school. Rainbow Dash spends most days getting high and goofing off on her minimum wage job. Pinkie Pie has a culinary apprenticeship and lives with an older couple after she left her small mining town when nobody there was as into psychadelics as her. Rarity balances running her slowly growing etsy fashion bussiness with going on tinder dates with the worst men you've ever seen. They all vote. They have to pick up their own medical perscriptions. These are 26 year old girlies going through first quarter life crisises. So, yea, that fanart of Fluttershy smoking forever weed is highly accurate.
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Nahhhh not a therapist saying this what do you think you get paid for
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Look at this cool new t-shirt I made for fans of Abraham Lincoln! I made it on my own time, with my own resources, and without any affiliation to existing public or private institutions concerned with history, education, hospitality, culture or retail. You can find it at my new Threadless shop or directly at bit.ly/imissabe
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judy hopps is a cop who leverages a strangers felony tax evasion to get him to put his life in danger and work around the clock so that she can keep her job
she then presumably helps him cover up his crime to get him a job on the same police force
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At long last, publication day.
You can buy here: https://www.smbc-comics.com/bea/ and my sappy essay on it is below:
Good morning, friends. It is publication day for Bea Wolf. I’m feeling overwhelmed with thankfulness, and I thought I’d tell you a little about this book and why I’ve been genuinely astonished by how well it’s been received.
I had the idea for Bea Wolf in Christmas of 2017. I thought it’d be fun and funny to do a kids’ Beowulf, and by a stroke of luck I immediately hit on the idea of replacing all the death in the original with conversion from kids to boring boring adults.
I say lucky because if you’ve ever tried your hand at writing, you know sometimes ideas that seem deep turn out to be shallow, while ideas that seem like puddles, occasionally, turn out to be oceans.
Having loss of childhood as equivalent to death was originally meant as a joke on adults - almost a throwaway. But later, when I started telling the story to my daughter, I also began researching the Beowulf poem - not just the original poem but the corpus of writing around it.
Beowulf’s trials are often remembered as “three monster fights.” This is structurally nonsensical, since the monster fights aren’t even close to evenly-spaced. More importantly, a pretty plain reading, and one favored by Tolkien, is that the poem is elegiac - a lament for things lost, and in particular for lost loved ones.
When kids in Bea Wolf are turned into adults, it *is* (I hope) funny, but it is also big and sad. Turning Bea Wolf into an elegy on childhood, rather than just a sort of mock epic, led to so many beautiful things. One reviewer talked about how in Bea Wolf even a snack takes on the tone of epic.
This is intentional - if you are an adult now, there are places you can never go, drinks you can never drink, friends you can never have. You can drink the same milkshake from the same restaurant you remember from childhood, but because you’re an adult it is now just food, not a whole world. You can at best feel nostalgia.
Anyway, once I had this framework, a story that was merely goofy became, I think, something special. Something I lucked into. Scholars debate whether Beowulf is an epic hero or merely a hero, and this has to do with whether Beowulf is a cultural icon or just a very powerful man who has adventures. Bea Wolf is, however, proper epic.
Proper epic, to my mind, means someone is struggling and their struggle embodies what a culture most values in itself. Bea Wolf is, to my knowledge, the only verse epic about kid culture. About struggling against all hope for what is great in being a kid.
But, to come back to the ground, it’s also 600 lines of unrhymed alliterative verse - a form that hasn’t been popular in a good thousand years, and which to my knowledge has never been attempted for children. I thought it was good - perhaps the best thing I’ll ever write - but I didn’t know if we’d get a publisher.
I was even scared to show it to my agent, the wonderful Seth Fishman. So, I took the unusual step of trying to get an artist first. My hope, which I gave about a 5% chance of coming through, was that I could get Boulet.
I’ve found people *think* I must’ve been very hands-on with this comic book, but really I just gave Boulet a column of words. I know now he was way too busy for new work, but to my everlasting joy he not only liked it, he really understood it.
He understood that it wasn’t just goofy kids (although it is quite goofy) but that it’s a poem to be read by children and adults, so that they can look at the same passageway from different sides. So, when he agreed to illustrate, I practically danced down the street.
Boulet is the best living cartoonist, and I would say in the running for best cartoonist living or dead. And he made the most glorious sketches to create a pitch packet. However, I still thought there was a good chance my agent would say “you’re insane, there’s no way we can sell this.”
In publishing, even for a somewhat known artist like me, it is hard to do something radically different, and which doesn’t fit nicely in a category. That’s not because publishers are bean-counters - in my experience they’re always enthusiastic book dorks. But, they know that companies survive on profits and that risks are, well, risky.
The first miracle for Bea Wolf was when Boulet came onboard. The second was Seth saying something along the lines of, “I love this, it’s wonderful, I don’t know if I can sell it but we will try.”
I don’t want to get too in the weeds about what followed, but the short version is by a bizarre coincidence (miracle number 3), Calista Brill, who had edited a previous book of mine, had written her senior thesis on the topic of adapting Beowulf for comics. She understood the book completely, and First Second agreed to publish it.
And so we began, years ago, to build this book. All of this crossed covid, deaths of loved ones, births of new children, but slowly a beautiful thing emerged. Boulet was like a director more than just an illustrator - he gave the book so much more tone. Simultaneously more terror and more gentleness.
Once it was done, we started privately showing it to people, and too my shock we got blurbs written by Neil Gaiman, by Lemony Snicket, by Mary Roach, and also by some of the best Beowulf scholars, including Kevin Kiernan and Jennifer Neville!
This was all no doubt good for business, but my emotional reaction was “People who are good at writing UNDERSTAND WHAT WE’RE DOING!!”
But I still had days where I would walk around here on the farm in a troubled mood, thinking “what in the hell did I do? Why did I rope all these people into a book that nobody will understand?”
And then a funny thing happened.
We started getting reviews early this year and they were not only positive, they were effusive. And, more importantly, they understood! That it was meant to be funny, but it’s also a real poem for kids - it’s an attempt at literature. Not moralizing, not giving lessons, not trying to make you a better person. It’s just a poem about something real.
And the good reviews began to stack up! If you know how publishing works, you know the coveted thing to get is a “starred review” from one of the big reviewers. In my two previous big books, I’d gotten a total of… one starred review. Bea Wolf got five. Probably the majority of stars I’ll get my whole career.
This was all so genuinely shocking it has altered my worldview for the positive. See, I’m an old English major. I love these dusty old books - Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Dickens, Gaskell, Aiken, and so on. They’re my companions. I love them. I especially love poetry, and the epic tradition in particular. And, I thought it was dead in our culture.
It’s certainly dead compared to a century ago, when regular people might exchange poetry in a letter, or when people like Byron or Kipling could shake the world with a turn of phrase. My honest belief was that in Bea Wolf, we’d made something genuinely good, but that it came during the wrong century.
Not to be too dramatic, but I thought often of a quote by WP Ker, which Tolkien was fond of: The last word of the Northmen before their entry in the larger world of Southern culture, their last independent guess at the secret of the Universe, is given in the Twilight of the Gods. As far as it goes, and as a working theory, it is absolutely impregnable. It is the assertion of the individual freedom against all the terrors and temptations of the world. It is absolute resistance, perfect because without hope.
It turns out, in my attempt to expand this culture of poetry, I should never have felt without hope. So many people, it seems, were here for this kind of work.
So, thank you. Today some incredible number of people, together, will be reading verse epic - not because a teacher made them but (I hope) because they feel the same affection for this mode as I do. And, perhaps, some of them will say it is the best of things - a good book.
<3
Zach
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“i wish we could see adaptations where sherlock holmes hates the rich and is allowed to be kind to those around him and uses his abilities to support society’s underdogs” elementary was doing this back in 2012. this was only episode 4.
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Alright I've finally decided. THESE are my top 4 favourite comics I made last year!
If you like my stuff and want more stuff (like all my bonus panels & other comics) check out my patreon! 💝
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