Live from NYCC, Jace sits down with writer-artist Ben Wickey to dig into two projects: The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic (IDW/Top Shelf) and his decade-long passion piece, More Weight. Wickey recounts the surreal, life-changing email inviting him to contribute 50 pages to the Alan Moore/Steve Moore grimoire—working from a ~350-page script and layering his own meticulous research to craft comic biographies of occult and esoteric figures from antiquity through the 20th century. He describes the fun and challenge of "caricaturing" people with and without historical likenesses, maintaining visual continuity across eras, and even trading notes with living subjects like Iain Sinclair. Shifting to More Weight, he frames the book as a rigorously researched, human-scaled, historically grounded account of the Salem witch trials—told alongside a second thread featuring Longfellow and Hawthorne to explore legacy and atmosphere—aimed at cutting through myth, hysteria narratives, and tidy themes to show how factionalism, fear, and mundane grievances can spiral, with unsettling echoes in modern times. Wickey talks process (drawing out of sequence, extensive endnotes, distinct voices across timelines), the emotional toll of depicting real people (including a personal ancestral connection he discovered), and his goal to foster empathy by letting readers truly "meet" those lost to history—all while enjoying the buzz of NYCC and connecting with new readers.

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