I love comics.
Not in the “everything is magical and perfect and smells like fresh roses” way. No. Comics will break your heart, eat your wallet, confuse your friends, and make you explain panel gutters to normal people at parties.
But when they hit?
When a story lands. When a page rumbles. When a comic crawls into your chest and starts moving the furniture around?
That’s the dragon I’m chasing every time I open a book.
When I owned a comic shop, we didn’t have a giant statue garden or some museum-quality cathedral of collectibles. What we had was a bar, walls full of art, and six studios in the back where comic artists were working, talking shit, showing pages, making things, and living inside the madness. We praised comics like a religion and rolled around in the dirt with them like maniacs.
That’s still how I approach this.
Which means, yeah, I get disappointed. A lot. Maybe I expect too much. Maybe I want comics to punch harder than they want to. Maybe one day I’ll write the memoir of all of it, just to show how insane this whole thing gets when you love hard and keep coming back anyway.
Because when you love comics, well…
You’re doomed.
And blessed.
Usually in the same panel.
LOVE HARD FUCK HARDER
1. Back to the Page, Back to the Work
This week I realized I need to get much more serious about assigning priorities. Not ideas. I have ideas. Ideas are everywhere. Ideas are the cockroaches of the creative mind. You turn on the light and seventeen of them run under the fridge.
The problem is getting them on paper.
So the sketchbook has been on fire. Notes are stacking up. Calendars are being stared at like ancient maps. I’m trying to look at everything honestly and ask: What needs to be done first? What actually moves the work forward?
FWACATA #4 is almost done. It’s mostly spit, polish, and final assembly now. FWACATA #3 is done and out.. After that, the big question becomes: do I launch the Kickstarter for #4 in September, or wait until October?
September gets complicated because I’ll be working and jsut getting back from Spain with my wife while she performs over there. And as much as I love Kickstarter, I do not love the idea of being in another country checking my phone every five minutes like a raccoon addicted to analytics.
So maybe October.
Maybe.
Also: putting the phone down.
That one keeps coming up. Time to stare at walls. Time to stare at paper. Time to stare at the work instead of the glowing rectangle that keeps eating everybody’s soul.
2. FUGLY, Zombie Years, Banner Exchanges, and Fighting the Algorithm with a Stick
First up: Zombie Years.
I’m working on the reissue redesign of the first five issues into regular comic book format. I’m on page 4 of issue 1, and it’s moving, but there’s a lot of editing, rebuilding, formatting, and making sure it reads the way I want it to now.
The goal is to bang out issue 1 this month, issue 2 next month, and keep rolling from there. Maybe an October release. Maybe a Kickstarter for issue 1. I’m still figuring it out.
But I keep coming back to one thought:
To defeat the future, you may have to go old school.
FUGLY issue 1 is done, and I need to see about putting that together. This’ll be a doozy as it’s the first issue and you really do want it to shine, so I gotta get my desktop publishing cap on and really put something awesome together. Kickstarter? Presale? Hmmmm
I did an old-school banner exchange with Ganzeer recently, and between that and seeing what some YouTubers like Dan Does are doing in the toy-making/crafting world, it got me thinking: maybe we need something like that again for Substack, webcomics, and indie creators.
Because let’s be honest: the algorithm is not our friend. It is a weird casino machine wearing a skin suit.
Substack has tools to recommend other Substackers, sure. But what about outside of that? What about building a small webcomic network? What about creators pointing to each other without waiting for platforms to bless us?
Remember webrings?
Can we bring those back?
Can we build a weird little underground highway for comics again?
I think we might have to.
Comics as a solo creator is a rough field. It’s you and the page. You and the screen. You and the work. You are the writer, artist, editor, marketing department, shipping department, caterer, janitor, and unpaid motivational speaker yelling at yourself in the mirror.
If anything happens, it’s because you made it happen.
And that’s exhausting.
But it’s also the deal.
Right now FWACATA is hovering around 1,800 subscribers across the old WordPress site, Instagram, Substack, Patreon, and other places. Thank you. Seriously. Every single one of you helps keep this thing alive.
And yeah, I’ve had bumps. Big ones. Since 2015, I’ve felt like I got knocked off whatever little comics pedestal I thought I was standing on. Comics changed. The world changed. I changed.
And yet here I am, crawling back like comics are a bad lover with great taste in boots.
3. Am I Too Old for This? Probably. Am I Stopping? No.
Here’s the ugly little thought that shows up sometimes:
Am I too old for comics?
Not too old to read them. Never that. I mean too old as a creator. Too old in my art. Too old in my approach. Too old to get the kind of attention younger, slicker, cleaner, more algorithm-friendly artists get.
Sometimes I feel like I’m getting polite nods.
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Good for you.”
“Still doing comics, huh?”
And then nothing.
No engagement. No spark. No real conversation.
So, as I’ve asked before: Am I the asshole?
Maybe. Very possible. The evidence is not great.
But I also watched this, and it hit a nerve:
I wish I could have a studio again at least a space to fully do and leave my work being done! Soon, hopefully, I have to get out of this lava pit I’m in now to make it.
Then, while writing all this, I read something from Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter about Picasso:
Picasso may have been a nightmare, but one of his lessons was always to make something new every day. He HATED getting up in the morning, whined and complained about life and work and fuck this why even bother, everything is terrible... and by two in the afternoon he’d be painting.
Picasso spoke to other artists about this, and his position was always the same. Every new drawing represented an opportunity: a sale, an idea, a door opening, the beginning of something. So you should do a new drawing every bloody day.
And you know what he said about his work? “I too often tell myself: it’s not quite there yet, you can do better.”
The only way you can get somewhere new is to do something new. The only way to create new opportunities is to do something new.
Fucking Amen.
4. Computer Daemons, Actual Demons, and Other Totally Normal Thoughts
I’ve been trying to reconcile this idea of daemons in computers—those background programs running while you’re not looking—with actual demons.
Print queues. System tasks. Invisible little processes doing their jobs in the dark.
Now imagine that idea pushed into horror.
What if all this AI panic isn’t just about machines getting smarter? What if it’s about something older using the machine as a foothold? What if the “denizens of hell” don’t need a pentagram anymore because they have server farms, APIs, and venture capital?
Yes, yes. Let me adjust my foil hat for a second.
But before you call it a conspiracy theory, relax.
It’s probably just a plot point for REZ as I work through issue 3.
Probably.
This article got the gears turning:
And then sometimes I read stuff like this and feel a tiny bit less insane about how hard it is to get anything seen online:
The systems are weird.
The platforms are weird.
The future is weird.
Only the sun can save us.
5. Gardens, Love, and Chewing with Your Mouth Closed
My wife’s garden is getting huge.
We’ve got tomatoes coming in, jalapeños and beans starting to give, apricots showing up, some kind of desert kiwi fruit planted, and plans for watercress. All from this little 6x6 patch she started this year.
It’s ridiculous.
It’s also beautiful.
My wife is amazing. And yeah, everyone says that about their person. Fine. But mine is a juggernaut of fun, ideas, strength, and necessary bullshit detection. She makes me better. She stops my nonsense in its tracks. She keeps me from being a total asshat.
She can kick your ass, move a couch, and give the best kisses.
Find someone like that if you can.
Someone who makes the work better. Someone who makes you better. Someone who tells you when you’re being full of it, but still believes in the version of you that can get the thing done.
That’s love.
That’s gardening.
That’s comics too, weirdly enough.
You plant things. You water them. You curse at them. You wait. Some things grow. Some things die. Some things surprise you.
Then you get back to work.
Also: close your mouth when you chew.
I cannot stress this enough.
I will scissor-kick you in the face if I have to.
I cants stands its.
And that’s the thing I keep coming back to: the work is never just the work. It’s the proof that we were here, that we cared, that we kept reaching for something even when the world got loud, dumb, expensive, and mean. Every page, every sketch, every weird idea scribbled on a Post-it is a little flag planted in the dirt saying, I’m still here. I still believe in this. I still have something to make. Maybe that’s all comics are in the end: a stubborn little garden of ink and paper, growing against the odds, fed by love, frustration, bad coffee, and the refusal to quit. So here’s to the next page. Here’s to the next panel. Here’s to all of us still making something out of the mess.
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