Gerry Duggan

Thinking visually with the writer of all media

Dig Duggan

I asked Gerry Duggan to come record a podcast episode with me after receiving my copy of his collection of photography from the past 20 years, Timing/Luck (from which that Sarah Silverman photo above comes). In both his comic book work and these photos, Gerry has a knack for visual storytelling, and I hoped to dig into that to find out how his brain does it.

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As it happens, as with every chat I have with Gerry—over coffee, on the picket line, at cons—the conversation became something much more wide-ranging, covering art and movies, collaboration, and where both comics and TV/film might be headed. We also get into it about his comic book writing process, which is an interesting and iterative one, in which he writes a version of a script for his artist, receives initial art, then rewrites and rewrites and rewrites until his deadline.

Gerry was kind enough to share an example of this from his current Uncanny Avengers run. Below is the kind of pared down script he’ll send to the artist:

And this is (after some early sketches and more refinement) the eventual version that will appear in the book. Art by Andrea DiVito and colors by Bryan Valenza.

Next, the polished script that Gerry writes based on Andrea and Bryan’s art. The captions (“CAP”) in this script are Tony Stark’s POV as he’s writing his memoir.

Finally, here’s the finished page as it appeared in Invicible Iron Man #6 (2023):

Neat, right? I think so! Thanks so much to Gerry for sharing this stuff. You could do a lot worse than to subscribe to Gerry’s substack, where paid subscribers get exclusive access to brand new creator-owned comics he’s doing (like The Giant Kokjü and the currently running Paladin of Axes) as well as sneak previews of his Marvel and DC work. A great starting point is to read his “spider-bite origin story.”

Finally, here’s a photo that Gerry took of me, Mickey Fisher, and Mickey’s brother-in-law Greg Vojtanek on the picket line at Disney last Friday, the last day of picketing before we knew we had a deal! He used some bananas camera which takes Polaroid type instantly developed photos as well as digital ones. Technology!

What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?

I was home alone with the dogs-who-hate-me this weekend and it was perfect gray, cool weather in LA, and I thought, that’s it. We’re starting Halloween season now. As it happened, I received texts from my neighbor pals who had apparently all decided the same thing.

I wish I could explain the events that led to us sending each other photos of our televisions, but suffice it to say that they had long days with their respective children, I picked up sushi for all of us, and we ate and watched TV in the privacy of our own homes.

I love the trend, probably bolstered by social media, that’s come up in recent years of trying to watch 31 days of horror movies in October. I’ve done it in the past, but I don’t see it happening this year, as I’m just too busy (plus, I’ve got my #Spielberg2023 endeavor), but I’m still going to watch as many as I can.

Maybe you will too. So, I thought, in the next month of newsletters, I’d offer recommendations for a few horror movies that may have escaped your notice or that I think are worth re-investigating. I am, of course, obsessively tracking of my own October viewing.

I’ll start with the movie I rewatched this past weekend, in anticipation of viewing its sequel, both of which are streaming on Paramount+. Becky (2020) is a home invasion movie, a Home Alone riff that takes its violence seriously. It’s nasty, bloody fun, with a genuinely terrifying and unexpected performance from Kevin James. But the movie rests on the shoulders of Lulu Wilson as Becky, and she absolutely owns every moment. I joked on Twitter when the movie came out that I was ready for The Becky-verse. I’m thrilled that the movie did well enough to spawn this year’s Wrath of Becky, and I hope we get many more!

One of my all-time favorite overlooked horror movies is Housebound (2014). It’s a New Zealand movie that I don’t think got a lot of notice over here, from writer/director Gerard Johnstone who, most recently, directed the terrific M3gan, and if you liked that movie, you’ll love this one. Housebound is as funny as it is scary, no easy feat, but the humor works as a grounding element for this haunted house story, which gets weirder as it goes on. It strikes a perfect tone which maybe only Kiwis can pull off. Go in knowing nothing about this for the best experience!

Creature features are my favorite horror subgenre, but great ones are few and far between. So, my expectations were not high for Crawl (2019), which seemed a pretty straight-ahead nature-attacks movie. And it is. But it’s executed so perfectly that it’s impossible not to enjoy it. The script by Michael and Shawn Rassumussen is an absolute, uh, shark and worth studying for its structure. Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper—as father and daughter trapped in their flooding basement with alligators—ground it and give it heart. Director Alexandre Aja knows every lever to pull. This isn’t camp. It’s all taken seriously but not without a serious sense of fun. (It isn’t as gross as Becky but there’s definitely quite a bit of bone crunching and people-eating). Crawl is, weirdly, a movie I just am always in the mood to watch.

Okay, that’s all for now. Let me know your favorite horror movies! New, old, weird, not-too-scary, or way-too-scary. Always on the lookout for good stuff.

The only camp I’m interested in.