Hollywood Reporter gushes over James Tynion's overrated venture

The Hollywood Reporter did a fluff-coated interview with overrated horror-thriller specialist Tynion, in which they claim he's launched the hugest horror comic title in the business, "Something Is Killing The Children", which is now predictably being adapted for broadcast on Netflix. Most laughable is the sales figures:

SIKTC sells upwards of 50,000 copies a month, with Slaughter selling around 25,000, according to sources, making the franchise the highest-selling creator-owned title out there, and besting a majority of comics put out by DC and Marvel. When Penguin Random House bought Boom! earlier this year, SIKTC was a factor in the acquisition. And Netflix, meanwhile, is in the middle of developing a series adaptation, with Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, the German creators of buzzy cult series Dark and 1899, writing and potentially showrunning.

Whether pamphlet or paperback, this is a laugh riot, though it's pretty amazing we have here, for a change, an actual citation of sales figures, considering how sites like ICV2 stopped providing them openly a few years ago. It does say earlier that SIKTC has already sold 5 million copies worldwide, but if that's the total figure spanning over 5 years, then it's absurd to say this is a literal success. A similar point can be made about House of Slaughter, which they say sold 500,000 for its premiere, but that suggests it was store level, of course, seeing how little it sells in pamphlets since. Interesting that Boom Studios, if that's where it's published, is now owned by a publishing conglomerate, which only perpetuates the sad staple of businesses selling off to larger owners, regardless of whether they're successful or not.

The comic was also a change from your usual writing style. How so?

At the time I was writing a lot of superhero comics and specifically I was writing a lot of superhero comics that had a kind of science fiction or magical edge to them. And there was something so refreshing to the world if Something is Killing the Children, which did have these supernatural qualities to it, but it was a very grounded world.

I remember it being incredibly refreshing in writing the first few. I think it’s the second issue has a scene that takes place in an Applebee’s. And I didn’t have to explain the structure of the multiverse in exposition to make a reader understand that we were in an Applebee’s. I just had to put them in an Applebee’s.

It untapped a type of writing in me that I didn’t set out to do. The book really kind of taught me how to write it.

When he wrote superhero fare, he did so with a woke mindset, perpetuating the severe damage to first Green Lantern Alan Scott, retaining the LGBT theme James Robinson forced upon him for starters. It wouldn't be surprising if Tynion also forced such propaganda into his Batman work. So what's the use of telling us all about sci-fi and magical edge in mainstream when he dampened the impact with wokeness? On which note, there's something laughable about saying the book "taught" him how to write it up, when this is somebody who was trained upon leftist propaganda.

Is there a value in doing an ongoing series that a mini-series doesn’t have?

I’m sitting in front of a wall of comic book trades and my favorite series were always the ones that ran for volumes and volumes and volumes that I was able to follow those characters stories over the course of years. And I think the most successful comics of all time, particularly in the corner of comics in which I work, have always been those long form stories and those big runs. And that’s really what we’re trying to go after with Something is Killing the Children.

The reason I ask that question is I think we live in a time of less ongoing series and lots of mini-series, and if there’s an ongoing series that is launched, by issue 10, it’s canceled and a few months later it’s relaunched again. So that seems to be a modern publishing problem.

I do think it can be shortsighted because the thing that Something is Killing the Children proves to me is that in the modern day and age, a series can build an audience over time. I think a lot of times now everything is positioned around the launch of a big number one. When Something is Killing the Children launched, it launched very, very strongly for the market. At that time, I think we were around 40,000 copies, but once we got into the teen issues, the series had multiple issues that were breaking six figures. It is rare that a series can double its monthly audience and beat it a little bit into the series. Now we have a very healthy monthly audience for the series. I do believe that if you’re building a really, really rich world and you trust that it can find an audience that there is an audience to find.

Well it's a shame the only kind of comics anybody's willing to enable the possibility of building an audience for is horror stories. And it's almost entirely the only kind of genre anybody's willing to market seriously and convince people to take a look at. So then of course, you have whole younger generations getting sucked into the void and indoctrinated with this kind of noxious brew, while the comedy genre is almost entirely abandoned out of PC. And what good does it do for Tynion to seemingly agree that there's a recent problem Marvel/DC have succumbed to in well over a decade, when he did nothing to improve the situation either? The part about six figures isn't clear either, and if they didn't sell over a million for a single copy, that only compounds the absurdity.

The other unique aspect to the comic is that in a time where one artist can’t stay on a book for more than four or issues before bailing, Werther has stayed with it since the beginning. Which is another factor in its success. People want continuity in the books they read.

As the creators of the series me and Werther we’re not going to let anyone else write the right or draw the story of Erica Slaughter. We’ve had a lot of success with our spinoff series, House of Slaughter, but that expands the world that Erica lives in. But if you are a fan of Erica Slaughter, you will get her entire story from start to finish in the pages of Something’s Killing the Children. And I will write all of it and Werther will draw all of it. There’s no compromising on that.

Funny the interviewer should mention continuity, since the mainstream shredded it long ago, and he did nothing to respect it either. Roy Thomas' creation, Obsidian, from Infinity Inc. was an early victim of contrived and forced contradictions, and I think Tynion stuck with what Gerard Jones led to as well, which only rewards a scoundrel for the harm he caused. In which case, what's that about not compromising?

The book has unique sense of pacing…

I’ve done a lot of time in superhero comics but I came of age in the manga boom of the early two thousands. Something is Killing the Children is really the first time I was able to lean in to that kind of manga storytelling. It’s a slower, more character driven pacing. It’s a slightly more decompressed. You linger in the character moments. You’re not trying to rush to the next action scene. That is part of what I think gives Something is Killing the Children its page-turner quality.

I wouldn't be shocked if he took influences from the horror genre as employed by mangakas too. But as for character driven stories, he wasn't doing it plausibly when he wrote superhero fare, and his failure to acknowledge he made mistakes is telling.

How do you and Werther work together? How complete are your scripts?

There are a few issues that especially if something’s more action driven, sometimes I’ll do the classic Marvel Method, the plot style, and just sort of lay out the kind of key visual beats and all that. And then I’ll go back over, do the dialogue after all of the art is complete. Then other issues are very dialogue heavy so I will write out the full flow of dialogue and I’ll have very, very loose panel descriptions throughout. But really the average script that I do is kind of a blend between them.

Sorry, but even that comes off as baloney, since if he wouldn't respect continuity and/or characterization as originally developed at DC, then no chance he respects Marvel's original developments either. His refusal to admit he wronged classic creations during his time at the mainstream is what undermines his arguments, because he was part of the PC system in doing so, and won't take accountability for the wrongs he enabled while there. And I have no interest in buying the products of somebody that pretentious, who can't even rise above the cliched obsession with horror thrillers. All he and his artists are doing is flooding the market with a form of propaganda that's come at the expense of more optimistic genres along with comedy. That he seemingly has a big success with SIKTC is nothing to admire.