3 min read

I'm Al Ewing, And I Write Comics.

A car is not a riddle, Edward.
Part of the cover for DEFENDERS #4.
DEFENDERS, by me and Javier Rodriguez, is published by Marvel Comics. The collected edition of the first volume, THERE ARE NO RULES, is on sale now.

I write comics - mostly for Marvel, but I'm about to wrap up WE ONLY FIND THEM WHEN THEY'RE DEAD with Simone Di Meo for Boom! Studios - and now I write newsletters too, or I try to. I'm going to aim for once a week around the weekend. I'm going to tell you what's out by me every week, and to sugar that pill, I'm going to write other things. What am I going to write? I don't know, Ray. I don't know.

You can subscribe here if you'd like  to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published. Could be anything. I've attempted blogs before - never been able to stick to it. I hope this time is different, but...

So why am I doing this? Honestly, it's time for me to get with the modern world. I'm the only writer without a newsletter at this point, and social media - ah ha ha ha ha, we'll get to social media.

I need a website of my own, or something close to one - a place to tell people what I'm working on, to tinker with interactive fiction, to post links to my Hitman 3 contracts, to fuse the Pagliacci Joke with the Monster Mash, to talk about the wild world of comics and their increasingly ancilliary media. In Arkham Knight, why did the Riddler make you drive your own car? That's not a riddle, and if it is, it's saying more about you than about him. Maybe that's the point - that's his revenge, shoving you the folly of your own terrible bat-excess. Riddle me this, Batman! Why would a bat even need a car? That's it, that's the riddle. Your own car. Do you give up? Yes, thinks Batman as he crashes like a drunken hippo into yet another of those goddamned green platforms and he sinks into the fetid sewers like a rat in a gigantic titanium turd. Yes, I give up. You win, Edward, my parents will rot unavenged, just don't make me drive my own car for one second more.

The Joker from a deleted scene in THE BATMAN.
"Deep down, you're not sure he's wrong. About your car."

But the biggest reason I'm taking this step is that Twitter is about to die. If it doesn't sink shuddering into a sea of misinformation because The Greatest Mind Of His Generation - so I have been told - is either dumb as a rock or a fascist-sympathising chaos agent or both, then it's going to just blink into the 404-verse sometime soon because The Most Successful Businessman Ever - so I have been told - fired half the staff in a blazing fit of brain geniosity and that included the people who knew which bits of code were load-bearing and how to keep bodging them. Not that it matters on my end, because I never got that blue tick and I don't intend to pay His Nibs for one - so you'll find me, well, never again pretty soon. I don't know if the plan is to actually stop us following each other so we can all follow @diamondhands1488 or @ForYouTommyTheWarIsOver or whoever's telling him he's got real hair, but I honestly wouldn't put it past him, so... here I am, for as long as it lasts.

Let's see what I write next week. Then let's see if I can make it a month. Baby steps.

On shelves now: VENOM #13, with art by Bryan Hitch and Andrew Currie, features Eddie Brock taking a sideways trip into somewhere very strange...  with DARK WEB at the end of the quest. It's an issue that was an un-Venomly amount of fun to write, and things only get wilder and weirder from here.

The cover to VENOM #13.
"Th' tar in this flask hath turned homunculus!"

See you in... probably less than a week? At a certain point, we'll pick an actual day for this.

-Al Ewing