Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, howard chaykin, image, image comics, matt fraction, satellite sam

More Satellite Sam For Your $2.99, From Fraction And Chaykin

Published Tue, 27 Jan 2015 11:00:43 -0600

Matt Fraction has the end of his and Howard Chaykin's period masterpiece Satellite Sam in sight

The home stretch of SATELLITE SAM lies under my shoes; with luck, I will finish this week. Most of the issues of "volume three" (subtitled something like 'Satellite Sam and the Limestone Caves of Fire') span more than twenty pages; I suspect, as Howard and I say goodbye, we let ourselves get a little sentimental. The cover price stays put, though; that's the cost of sentiment, I guess.

The story will get collected in a trade and then all fifteen issues and all the special material generated for the issues and collections will get collected in a nice oversized hardcover with an amazing cover. #11 printed over the weekend and is on its way to stores now.

Finishing a book means freeing psychic space and brain cycles, it means opening up like five and a half feet of bookshelf and freedom from forever hunting for Yet Another Reference that adds invisible verisimilitude nobody but I see, it means I can put these characters and their nightmares and their endless voids to bed, if only for a little while, and go on to other things, other crises, other catastrophes walking around in fine-cut suits.

I won't miss Mike and Kara and the rest of the Le Monde gang, I don't think. This book, a dark ride even at its brightest, fought me in the writing, growing from a "six or seven" issue miniseries at its inception to a planned multivolume, multicity, history of modern entertainment, recovery culture, and the commodification of sex as an entertainment product. The closest thing to a novel I've yet to write, it felt like shit to live through and I wonder how it stands as a finished completed thing. These unhappy people, with their holes never filled and their anguish unarticulated (because pain needs understanding to be healed and to understand something one must survive it, yeah?), made for hard fellow travellers the last four or five years.

He talks about the act of writing, both emotionally and physically, stacking up his reference list for the comic, mostly as seen above. If you have any interest in Satellite Sam, it's must. Subscribe to the Fraction/DeConnick newsletter here…

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