DISPATCH FROM THE FARM

Fishflies, Mazebook, Primordial and Ask Me Anything

Hey Everyone welcome back. Big week last week with the launch of both Mazebook #1 in comic shops and the first installment of FISHFLIES here on Substack. And this week Primordial # 1 also hits comic shops!

As I teased in a previous update, Andrea and I are finished with all 6-issues of Primordial and have moved right into our next multi-part project. We’ll likely start announcing that around Halloween this year. Just a quick note that I signed a whole bunch of copies of Primordial #1 and its variants and those will be available in my Substack store along with signed and sketched copies of the Gideon Falls hardcover in a month or so. These will be available to paid subscribers only.

Okay, enough housecleaning…some comics stuff.

This morning I woke up to find all the pencilled art from Dustin for Robin & Batman #3 in my inbox! Robin and Batman was a project with a long gestation. I originally pitched it to then DC Black Label/Vertigo editor Mark Doyle as a series I would both write and draw for Black Label, but it never got off the ground and I was always busy with other things. It got shelved and then last year, as Dustin and I were wrapping up Descender/Ascender we had the idea to do a short DC thing before launching into our next creator-owned book. Dustin loves Batman, so I dusted off the pitch to Robin and Batman and we got the greenlight pretty quickly.

It was really great to be able to tell this story. I had it living in my head for a couple of years. I’ve always loved the character of Dick Grayson and wanted to do a deeper dive into his early years. With Robin and Batman a focus of mine was to explore Robin’s dynamic with Batman and how they were learning to work together. Dustin’s work on the book is stunning. Here are a few of those pencilled pages I received just moments ago!

The book launches in November and each issue is double-sized. Then Dustin and I dive right into our next Image book. More on that in a couple of months.

Robin and Batman will not be my last DC or work-for-hire project released. The same time I wrote this series I also wrote another 3-issue oversized Black Label book for one of my all-time favourite artists, Doug Mahnke! That one will be announced this coming month and when it is I’ll get more into it here.

Those will likely be my final two DC or work-for-hire books for the foreseeable future. I loved my years working for DC and Marvel. I got to collaborate with amazing artists. I got to play with incredible characters that I grew up reading. But after a point, the excitement of that wears off. And the truth is things at DC and Marvel have changed dramatically and are no longer really a place where I feel like I can do what I do well.

I did almost do one more DC thing last year though… for a short time I was attached to write Green Lantern for their 5G initiative. We were going to do it as a horror book and it would be the flagship title in the horror line for 5G. But the more I worked on it, the less excited I got and the more things seemed to be in a constant state of flux with the whole initiative. And then Dan Didio was out at DC and I jumped too, not wanting to deal with all of it anymore. It was a near miss and honestly sort of my last flirtation with doing anything significant for the Big Two.

At some point I want to start going through all the near misses at DC and Marvel over the years. Meaning all the books I was attached to, or pitched, that for one reason or another, never happened. There were a few cool ones like Shazam, Robins, Cyborg. I’ll dig up a bunch of those old pitches and post them for subscribers in a month or so.

ASK ME ANYTHING!

Next week I would love to answer some of your questions about any of my projects, or my work process etc. So, if you want to ask me something, leave your question in the comments section here and next week I’ll answer as many of them as I can.

SUBSCRIPTION INCENTIVES!

One last thing, many of you have reached out to ask when you will know if you were one of the subscribers who made it into one of the incentive tiers. We are working hard to get everything sorted and organized and will contact you soon to let you know. Thanks for your patience on this!

And if you are still on the fence about a paid subscription, the Sweet Tooth prints we dropped last week are almost sold out but I think we have a dozen or so left! And on that note we still have a few slots open in the top 500 annual subscriber’s tier to get the incentives as well. So you can still get in on that for a short time.

We have decided to add one final incentive. Anyone who subscribed for the annual subscription before the end of this month will get a cool DESCENDER ENAMEL PIN and a MAZEBOOK TEMPORARY TATTOO! (If you already subscribed annually you will get one too!) You will also get a 15% discount on my original artwork from Cadence Comic Art for the next month! Art from Mazebook #1 will drop soon.

Thanks, see you later this week for a more behind-the-scenes of Mazebook and the second installment of FISHFLIES!