WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF LITTLE MONSTERS

A behind the scenes look at my upcoming series with Dustin Nguyen…

I first met Dustin Nguyen on a panel at Emerald City Comic Con sometime around 2011 or 2012. I had been a big admirer of his work for a while but had never met him. At the time, I was entrenched in the DC Universe writing books like Animal Man and Justice League Dark for their New 52 relaunch. I was also about halfway through the run of Sweet Tooth. Dustin showed up late to the panel, and I moved my chair over so he could squeeze in behind the table. The panel was up on a riser, and I moved my chair a little too far to the right, and I started to fall off the stage. Dustin grabbed me and saved me from embarrassment and possible injury. And I just knew that a guy with reflexes like that would be great to work with.

I was getting my footing as a “writer” of comics for other artists, rather than just writing and drawing the work myself, and hadn’t thought about doing creator-owned books with another artist yet. At that time, in my head, my work was easily divided into two distinct camps. There was the creator-owned work like Sweet Tooth and Essex County that I would both write and draw, and then there was the work-for-hire stuff at DC that I would write for other artists. It would be a couple of years before I started to realize that I could branch out to do more creator-owned work beyond the things I drew myself, other kinds of stories that I may not be suited to draw. Dustin was the first collaborator I thought of when I had this realization. We didn’t know each other that well yet, but I just felt like his style and the way he drew kids was so well suited to my own. So around 2013 or 2014, I emailed him about a possible collaboration at Image, and now, eight years and 50 issues of Descender and Ascender later, here we are.

Dustin and I loved creating the sprawling sci-fi world of Descender/Ascender, but as it drew to its conclusion, we started to look ahead to what was next. We both wanted to try something really different from the space-bound sci-fi of Tim-21 and crew. I am not sure where the idea for Little Monsters popped up, but once I got the idea of these kid vampires living a life of eternal childhood at the end of the world, things came together pretty quickly. I started working on the story in the Summer of 2020 and had several scripts done by the time Dustin finished up Ascender and our 3-part Robin and Batman series.

This book launches in March from Image, and we are really proud of it. Here for the first time are a look at Dustin’s early character sketches for the cast of kids as well as the first look at the two variant covers for issue #1. The first is by the great Doug Mahnke, colored by Dave Baron and the second is by yours truly.

Hope you enjoy and please consider pre-ordering the book from your local comic book store. All those pre-orders really help!

-Jeff