The tough guys are back in town

An edition about lovely brutes in comic-books and movies

Apr 17, 2023

WELCOME TO A NEW EDITION OF MY NEWSLETTER

First of all, a reminder of my latest release: Elixir is on sale!
A young-adult dark fantasy written by Frank Barbiere and Ricky Mammone.

The Dark Horse page:
https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/3010-945/Elixir-TPB

You can read an interview and a preview here:
https://www.cbr.com/dark-horse-elixir-frank-barbiere-ricky-mammone-victor-santos-interview/

UMKB

I didn't want to talk about this subject until it was solved, but maybe you noticed that I have not mentioned my book Until my knuckles bleed for a long time. I produced the first miniseries published by Behemoth Press (with a very warm reception and reasonable good sales) and later a one-shot titled One-deadly-shot. This one-shot story was going to be the prologue of a new miniseries I had already written. But the series didn't continue. There were some reasons, we had some disagreements about the payments and sales statements, and I perceived a lack of communication (a sign: I never received comps of any of these comic-books). Things had worked (reasonably) smoothly when we worked on the first issue but things went downside since then. But even then, the relationship was polite, I still valued the total freedom I had doing the book. But the series was stopped, I wanted to solve these problems before continuing. Behemoth was bought by discographic company Sumerian Records, and I'm not sure what part of this fact was responsible for my situation but in the end I decided I wanted to move the series to another place. I don't want to bore you with the process, I was expecting some struggle (I was a little scared thinking about the cases of other authors in the past) but talking with the people responsible of the former Behemoth and from Sumerian, we solved the problem easily and on good terms. Summarizing, I own the rights again (ALL the rights, this include movies, TV, etc… of the series).

So right now my plan is to find time and a home for this new miniseries of three or four issues. I always wanted to put together this first series, the one-shot (which hasn't been compiled) and this last series in a very nice book of almost 200 pages, making a complete story. Not sure where or when it will happen, but be sure I'll finish it.

NEW COMMISSION

A Polar commission, because it's always comforting when people ask for your own stuff.

If you are interested in getting a commission, I have a commissions section in my website you have prices, sizes,etc…

RECOMMENDATIONS

And speaking (once again) about tough guys, here I bring you some movies from Japan and India I have been watching lately.

At last I got to see Bad City from Kensuke Sonomura. I previously wrote about my admiration for Sonomura in a previous newsletter. Bad City is an old style police vs yakuza movie with the usual alliances and treason between clans, hard-as-nails detectives and original raw action set-pieces. And it’s in the action where Sonomura shines, because like in his previous movie Hydra, he uses a style based on projections, grips and MMA fights instead of the more classic and spectacular (and canonical) acrobatic kicks and punches. But he really makes it spectacular!

I have also been watching some action Indian blockbuster movies. I love their combination of martial arts, heroic bloodshed codes and a brilliant sense of color, totally opposed to the Western cinematography, where photography seems to be becoming more and more gray and muddy. So I enjoyed movies like Ek Tha Tiger, War (surely the most homoerotic action movie ever made) or Pathaan. Pathaan is surely my favorite, something like one guy with a lot of money saw John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2 and thought “We can take this to another level”. The funny thing is all of them belong to a shared universe called the YRF SPY UNIVERSE (the initials of Yash Raj Films) and I didn't notice until the main character of one of the other movies appeared in the Pathaan movie to give a hand to our chunky protagonist against the forces which want to destroy India.

Anyway, the idea of a shared universe of spy-action movies blew my mind. It was like Marion Cobretti from Cobra, John Matrix from Commando and Nikolai Rachenko from Red Scorpion belonged to a Marvel-style cinematic universe. Or Jason Bourne, Mission: Impossible and James Bond recent movies, if you want a modern example.

I loved this idea, and previously I had played with it in my Polar books. All the books were conceived not as a series of volumes in sequence, but as a kind of movies made by the same producers with a permanent cast and playing similar roles, but they don’t fit exactly. I always use the example of the Sergio’s Leone Dollar Trilogy, where you have Clint Eastwood playing the same “Man with no name” character, but his chronology is strange. And you have Lee van Cleef playing two different characters in the 2nd and 3d chapter of the trilogy visually very similar but on opposite sides of the moral spectrum.

And that 's all! If you are creators, don’t be obsessed about creating universes. Focus on finishing good stories and that personal universe will take shape itself. Sometimes we work “world-building” too much and forget that this fictional environment is only a vessel for the characters, and this is where we should save our efforts.

BROKEN ENGLISH Victor Santos’ Newsletter

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