What's Happening - December 2023

When I was a kid I was convinced that one of the lines in Deck the Halls was “Dawn we now our day of peril,” rather than the more festive “Don we now our gay apparel.” And I think it just says a lot about my world view that I just accepted that one of the most obviously jolly Christmas carols was actually about a group of people staying up till the wee hours of the morning to face some unspecified doom.

Welcome to my monthly newsletter, giving you updates on the things I’ve been lettering, reading and writing this month.

And even if you're not especially interested in any of those, still probably worth scrolling down to the last section to see some updates on the future of this newsletter.

What am I lettering?

This month? Not much! December isn’t much of a month for Kickstarters (especially not the week I’m sending this out) So I don’t have much to promote here. Be on the look out for the next edition of this newsletter in January when there are actually a bunch of things for me to promote. That being said, did still have a few fun lettering moments.

Some Fun Lettering

What am I reading?

Who Killed Sarah Shaw?

I watch a good amount of true crime, though most of it is not of my own volition. (Something about the ominous music lulls my wife to sleep, so she turns on the most trashy true crime tv shows so she can take a nap. And she takes a lot of naps.) Drawn by Adam Markiewicz and written by Frankie White, this series follows a pair of true crime documentary makers as they investigate the titular murder.

And it's a really good comic! Markiewicz's art is great, the character acting in particular is superb. A lot of the story revolves around characters retelling moments from their history, which leads to a decent amount of characters sitting around talking. Generally, not the recipe for the most exciting comic, but here it works. Things are framed in such a way that, even when it's just people talking, it's tense, exciting, and sometimes foreboding. I could (and have!) read page and pages of this team just showing people sitting around having fraught, uncomfortable conversations. One of the hardest things to do well in comics is pacing, convincing the reader to actually spend the amount of time you want them to on any given panel. If there’s one thing that Who Killed Sarah Shaw nails, it’s that pacing.

You can read all the pages that have currently been released on Adam Markiewicz patreon linked above. It's only a dollar! Very much worth the money.

The Word for World is Forest

Ursula K. Le Guin is a great writer (I had a draft of my newsletter saved with just this first sentence written, and I think I could have probably just left it here) and The Word for World is Forest is a pretty good book! It’s a pretty quick read, but there’s still a good amount to chew on. Not a ton to say about it, as it’s no where near my favorite book of Le Guin’s that I’ve read. But also, there are very few books period that come even close The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, or the Earthsea books. This is a book that could (and from a quick google search, absolutely has been) accused of being too preachy about Le Guin’s views on ecology and war. But it’s also a book about indigenous people murdering the hell out of their would-be colonizers. I think my favorite thing about the book is that, while it doesn’t shy away from the fallout of what happens in a large scale war, it also never once acts like the people resisting colonization aren’t fully within their rights to kill the people trying to take away their land and lives. And for some completely unrelated to real world events reason, this makes reading the book a somewhat cathartic experience. Also, like I said, it’s short! Always looking for a good book that won’t take me a month and a half to read.

Parasocial

Erica Henderson is an amazing comic artist. Her last book with Alex De Campi, Dracula Motherfucker (technically it has asterisks in the fucker bit there, but I refuse to use them) was a tour de force of stunning comic art. Since she's started coloring her own work, every project I've read from Henderson has been absolutely gorgeous and also completely different. And hey, when Parasocial works it’s because the art is gorgeous, and from page to page also completely different.

The story is just Stephen King’s Misery but for the social media age. I don't really need to go into more detail because that really is all that it is. Expect not even with the messiness that everybody forgets is actually in Misery. It's really just the social media age retelling of the pop-culture understanding of that story. And it's thin. I'm in a bit of a glass house here, saying this as someone putting the finishing touches on Into the Deep, which is just barely over 100 pages. But Parasocial feels like just a taste of a story, not the whole meal.

That being said, even if the story itself is pretty thin, it does give Henderson plenty of space to really go wild with the artwork.

Since this is a story about social media and celebrity, perception is everything. And the way Henderson changes her lines and coloring from scene to scene, page to page, panel to panel, really sells that. Genuinely great work. A book that is, at the very least, worth checking out for the art. And if you're interested in reading more about it, Tegan O'Neil wrote a great review in The Comics Journal that digs deeper into what works with Henderson's artwork.

What am I writing?

Into the Deep is SO close to being done. After Felipe finishes coloring the current batch of pages, there are just 11 pages left until all the artwork on Into the Deep is complete. From there, I just need to finish up the lettering, and we’re sending it out to print. Excited that, as long as nothing goes wrong with printing, we should hopefully be able to get this book out before the projected dates I put on Kickstarter. Really excited for this book to be in people’s hands.

And I’m really excited for what I have coming up next! I showed off the logo for Hero of Legend last month, and I'm really excited to announce that, based on our current production schedule, we're going to start serializing the first issue in February of this year. I’m working with artist Niccolò Ielapi, who is doing genuinely amazing work so far. My plan is to have 5-10 page episodes of this story going out monthly. Really proud of how this story has been coming together, and I think people are really going to dig it.

Here's the first page of our prologue as a little sneak peek:

(Shout outs to Jack Kirby, beginning with the Epilogue)

And hey, here’s another panel, just for fun:

Keep an eye out for this first episode of Hero of Legend, hitting your inboxes in February.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Now, with the addition of serialized comics to this newsletter next year, there are also going to be some other relatively significant changes.

The first is that I'm moving off of Substack. A number of reasons for this, but mostly it's the Nazis and the transphobes. Frankly, I feel like an asshole that I even started on here in the first place. I knew in August that the owners of Substack sucked shit and were actively paying people making the world worse for Trans folks. And now, unsurprisingly, they’re saying they’re cool with Nazi’s too. The allure of “networking” and “discoverability” and other comic creators being here was enough to make me forget my morals for the past 5 months. But being on Substack, as absolutely tiny as I am, is still just providing more legitimacy for a platform that actively pays and promotes some really, genuinely terrible voices. So, big change number 1, next month I'm moving this show over to the extremely spoooooky platform of Ghost. If, for some reason, me using Ghost and not Substack means you don't want to be subscribed, no worries! I say goodbye at the end of each of these newsletters for a reason.

Which leads to big change number two, I'm gonna open things up and give you all the very exciting opportunity to give me some money. Absolutely no pressure, but with Hero of Legend coming in the next couple of months, I'm hoping I can turn this newsletter into something that's not just a way to keep up with all the kickstarters I've lettered and the books I’ve read, but also a comic delivery service that you'd feel comfortable spending a dollar or two (hopefully two, since that's what I'm setting the price as) on each month. Everything is still going to be available for free, this newsletter and the upcoming comics. But hey, if you want to give me some money to help keep the lights on, who am I to stop you?

That's probably the biggest reasons for my move to Ghost. I just can't, in good conscience, let any of the 10s of dollars I end up making off of this get funneled to the Nazis. It’s one thing to use a free platform that allows unfettered hate speech (hey, I still have an active twitter account!) but it’s another to actively be making that platform money. But the move to Ghost also means that this will also no longer be free for me to host. Doing the math, I've set myself the extremely high bar of convincing at least 5 of you to give me 2 dollars a month, which would offset those costs. We'll see if it's worth it! If not, oh well. I've wasted more money on worse things. And really, what is making comic books if not a massive black hole at the bottom of your bank account?

Anyway, none of these changes should actually effect anything for you, my wonderful subscribers. But I thought it would be nice to give you the heads up that they're happening just in case anything goes terribly wrong.

And that's it for 2023?

Yep. Bye!