Gideon Falls, Volume 1: The Black Barn - October/November 2024 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

Also, Some Thoughts on Twist Endings

Happy spooky season, everyone! I’m on vacation in England this week, but I scheduled this newsletter to go out before I left. My apologies if it reads a bit rushed, but I wanted to make sure I stuck to the schedule as best I could. Maybe I’ll share vacation photos like I did last year. We had a good meeting, though somewhat sparsely attended because of various competing obligations. The bar where we meet started their Trivia Night earlier than usual, so we got cut short.

In this issue: What We’re Reading - Shameless Self-Promotion - About What We’ve Read - Some Thoughts on Twist Endings

Well, they can’t all be winners. Despite the awards we knew it had won and some excitement going in, Gideon Falls turned out to be pretty unpopular. I can’t speak for anyone who wasn’t present, but most felt Gideon Falls could have used more time to percolate. The main descriptor was “half baked.” One person described it as derivative and overly reliant on tropes. There was some discussion about how it fit into other comics written by Jeff Lemire, such as Essex County and Trillium, with small-town life and upside-down pages being hallmarks of those works, respectively. One person who couldn’t make it texted me that “the story overall” hooked them, but that the ending irritated them. That ending was a major point of contention! I read the second volume to try and make sense of it and when I related what I’d learned, one person said they were less impressed with the book. Oh, well. Everyone appreciated the experimentation with the panel layouts, so that was something. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, November 20 to discuss Earthdivers, Volume 1.

What We're Reading

November 20 - Earthdivers, Volume 1: Kill Columbus by Stephen Graham Jones and Davide Gianfelice

December 18 - Parasocial by Alex De Campi and Erica Henderson

January 15 - A.D.: After Death by Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire

February 19 - My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris (tentative)

We had enough people to technically qualify for a quorum, so we planned out the next couple of months based on what was suggested last month and the responses to the last poll. I had suggested taking a month off so everyone would have time to read My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two, but there are five weeks between the January and February meetings, so that might be enough.

Shameless Self-Promotion

The official debut on Thursday, October 3 of the Nonprofitable animated web series I created with Onicia Muller was a complete success! I’ll have a formal write up about it later next month. Much like when CyberSync was released, I want to celebrate the major entries in this section with Wednesday posts. I promise you’ll get to watch the show.

I wrote another comic for The Comic Jam! This time, the theme was Analog Horror, a term I needed to have explained to me. Lol Even then, I wasn’t entirely sure if the script I came up with qualified, but I was assured that it did. “The Vault of Monsters” is about a group of kids finding a cursed VHS tape. Despite that premise, it has more in common with some old pulp horror stories I read as a kid than The Ring. The ending is probably more ambiguous than I intended.

Ryan “Dougal” Devine did a great job with the character design, hitting exactly the kind of Goosebumps-inspired vibe I was going for. I was happy to work with Kylar Merrell, whose work through Foreign Press Comics I’ve long admired.

I will have significant updates for Project: Weird Wild West and Blackout after returning from vacation in November. There’s a lot of progress being made in terms of lettering and design, and I can’t wait to share more with you!

As always, CyberSync is available for purchase. The next anthology I’m going to be in is still in pre-launch, so click through to follow. I still think we can get up to 100 followers before the campaign starts!

About What We’ve Read

Gideon Falls won the Eisner Award for Best New Series and Jeff Lemire was nominated for Best Writer in 2019. Dave Stewart won the Eisner Award for Best Coloring in 2020. You can read Jeff Lemire’s newsletter here on Substack.

Multiversity had a regular column devoted to the creator-owned work of Jeff Lemire and spoke to him about Gideon Falls when issue #4 came out. He also spoke to Entertainment Weekly about his influences for the series and the horror genre in general. A television adaptation was announced back in 2018.

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in three weeks, since I’m on vacation. I’m sorry for the delay.

Some Thoughts on Twist Endings

I’ve gotten a bit heavy in this space the last couple of months, so I thought I’d lighten up. The ending to Gideon Falls, Volume 1 got me thinking about what makes a twist ending work, since they’re a staple of genre fiction, especially horror and science fiction. There are plenty of essays on this topic—probably whole books—but I thought I’d add my two cents.

For me, from most to least important, a good twist ending meets three criteria:

1. It has to be subtly but not obviously foreshadowed.

2. It has to make sense within the context of the story.

3. It cannot impair the re-readability of the story.

That first one is probably the hardest to pull off. Make the twist too obvious and you risk boring the audience; make the twist come out of nowhere and you make them angry instead. As Bob’s Burgers taught us, “a lie isn’t a twist.”

I’m reminded of two different stories from pop culture. When George R. R. Martin was asked whether he would change his plot points in response to readers correctly guessing them in advance, he said he would not because it “screws up the whole structure.” Instead, it gets to be a reward for a close reading and he can maintain the integrity of his vision.

Conversely, when readers correctly guessed the identity of the Big Bad of DC’s “Armageddon 2001” event, the publisher scrambled to change it and settled on someone who had died earlier in the storyline, which not only made no sense but left fans enraged and bewildered.

Part of what made the ending to Gideon Falls, Volume 1 unsatisfactory for many of us was how it appeared to violate the first two rules simultaneously. We were promised a certain twist that was telegraphed almost immediately, but then the final panel created a completely different twist that confused us more than anything else. (I’m trying to avoid spoilers.) I read ahead to Volumes 2 and 3, and it turned out most of our theories about that ending were incorrect, but that wasn’t satisfying either because we felt there was a lack of setup.

Obviously, this is all very subjective. When I posted that we were reading this comic, a friend of mine commented that he enjoyed this book, which makes me feel really, really bad about how much the Comics Book Club didn’t enjoy it.

I included the third point above because some stories are nothing but their twists and once those are spoiled there’s no point in revisiting them. Say what you will about the work of M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense holds up on repeat viewings! The best genre in this regard would be mysteries. Some of those are worth reading or watching again even after learning who the murderer is because the characters are so fun or the story is so complex.

By way of conclusion, here’s a compilation of Futurama’s recurring gag The Scary Door. So many twist endings are accused of ripping off The Twilight Zone because that show invented most of what we consider clichés now.

Thanks for indulging my lighter side! Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. What’s your favorite twist ending? Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you next month for Earthdivers, Volume 1: Kill Columbus by Stephen Graham Jones and Davide Gianfelice!