Alex: So, having just done the link thing, I’m going to write about writing this a bit. I decided to keep myself out of the article as much as possible which means I’ve got a lot of messy personal feelings I never committed to paper (or Word doc, whatever). Prepare for a heavy dose of the first person.
I’ve been talking with Polygon about some version of this piece for three months now. Naturally, it all ended up coming together in a weird rush. I sat down with Jamie + Kieron last Friday, wrote the whole thing in one 12-hour sitting on Monday, and it went up on Wednesday. As someone who does most of their work for print magazines these days, I am very much unused to that kind of turnaround.
At the start of those three months, I was planning to make this my official retirement from comics journalism. For assorted reasons but mostly because, y’know, drama.
It would have been a nice circle. When I read the first Phonogram, it was at a time I was falling out of comics a little. It’s a common cycle, I think, and I would probably have wandered back – but Phonogram ensured I was paying close attention.
I first met the lads Gillen & McKelvie at the end of 2006, I think, over a table at a slightly shabby con in my hometown of Birmingham. I told them off for getting me hooked on Kenickie, and Kieron – bless him – basically splurted out his plans for the comic that would, nearly a decade later, become The Immaterial Girl.
The setting for this interview was a little different. We were on the fifty-second floor of the Shard, a few floors away from Baal’s apartment and temporary Pantheon HQ. McKelvie was fresh off a flight, in town for one night only to celebrate the comic being done with the London division of Team WicDiv. Gillen was wearing the trademark skull suit because, in truth, the Imperial Phase never ended.
(Honestly, it was a little like the three of us doing a cosplay recreation of one of the Pantheon Monthly interviews from #23, right down to the couple sat next to us attempting, with zero subtlety, to figure out who these rock stars were with a twitchy journalist pushing a recorder into their faces.)
Anyway, they kindly gave me two hours of their time. Team Phonogram Team WicDiv have always been good like that – the whole ‘lowered stage’ thing – even if I’ve never quite figured out how to navigate it, the odd thing of being acquaintances with someone you also know incredibly personally through their work. And that’s before you throw in a professional relationship – I don’t think there’s anyone, in comics or games or any of the other things I write about, that I’ve interviewed more than Kieron, mostly because he’s normally stupid enough to say yes.
Also, me doing this job is kind of their fault in the first place. Constantly checking Gillen’s blog to find out when the next Phonogram was coming out led me to Rock Paper Shotgun, the PC gaming site he co-founded the next year. Reading that site was thing that convinced me I had to be a games journalist.
It was only during WicDiv’s life span that I started writing about comics. Professionally speaking, anyway – I’ve been running my mouth off about everything I watch/play/read/etc since roughly the first moment I met the internet.
It was writing this blog with Tim which convinced me I was good enough to knock on the hallowed doors of ComicsAlliance. I got there just in time to become comfortable before the whole site was demolished.
It was that closure which led me to other venues, taking in refugees from the ComicsAlliance exodus. CBR, where I tried and failed at being the populist word-machine that site requires, and Polygon, where comics editor Susana Polo was open to stuff that was a bit weirder. The first article I ever wrote for Polygon was a piece abandoned during the ComicsAlliance closure. It quoted Kieron, naturally.
So, yeah, calling this my last piece of comics journalism would have been a nice way to close the circle. And frankly as I keep alluding to, I’m crazy busy at the moment. I tried to write the piece in that mindset, treating it like my final word on comics.
It would have been a good retirement. But honestly, rushing this piece out was just too much fun, and I’ve already started to think of the next thing I might want to write. This is good, I think – making life decisions based on the pretty patterns they’d make is exactly the kind of thing that WicDiv is designed to talk us out of.
