Month: September 2016

When I first left my staff editing position to go freelance, I wrote that one of the reasons for the move was a few outside opportunities that had presented themselves.

One of them was Mayday.

Just over a year after my last day at Dark Horse, Image officially announced the series. Mayday is a smart, sexy Cold War thriller following young Russian spies on a violent, psychedelic mission to recover secrets brought to America by a defector. Lots of intrigue and double-crosses, lots of over-the-top drugs and sex, as you’d expect from Grindhouse, No Mercy, and Archie vs. Predator writer Alex de Campi. Artist Tony Parker, of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and This Damned Band, and colorist Blond, of New Suicide Squad and Red Hood and the Outlaws, are delivering heart-racing action and realizing the Bay Area of the 1970s with amazing detail and wit.

When Alex asked me to edit the series, I couldn’t say no, and a year later it’s my first Image series as editor (I proofread a few others), and one I couldn’t be prouder to be kicking off this phase of my career with. I’ve been telling people it’s so good I quit my job to edit it, and that’s true. If I weren’t the editor, I’d be anxiously awaiting this one, and I hope everyone else loves it as much as I do.

For more, check out the press release at Image.

And there’s a preview up at ComicsAlliance.

 

The last time I got so drunk I threw up was Monday, August 31, 2015. People just kept buying me drinks, and I didn’t think to ask any of them to buy me food, or to buy it myself. My office had already been completely cleaned out the previous week, and I had spent the day handing off the last of my projects and negotiating the terms of the freelance arrangement by which I would finish a handful of them. The only thing I was responsible for getting home that night was myself, and the 33 bus line, not yet replaced by the MAX Orange Line, went almost all the way there.

My going-away party took place at Duffy’s, an Irish pub a few blocks from Dark Horse, chosen because in seven years of working in Milwaukie, I’d somehow never set foot inside. I headed over after shutting down my company computer for the last time and was soon joined by a steady stream of people from different departments coming in and out for the next several hours, one of the pre-press team dealing blackjack on the other side of the bar. We reminisced, gossiped, talked about my future plans, and drank the whiskeys that didn’t stop coming. Eventually a few of us found our way back to Portland and stopped at my local bar for sandwiches, the first and only time I’ve ever been there and not gotten a drink, and also the first and only time I’ve urgently excused myself to its bathroom to kneel in front of a toilet.

On September 1, I woke up badly hungover on my couch, having surrendered the bed to a friend who ended the night as blind drunk as I did, the fact that it was her first day on the job somewhere else scoring her as many free drinks as I got. The hangover passed as my blog post about my new freelance career and a few articles about it went up and congratulations began to pour in on Twitter. I had written the post in Los Angeles the week before, while visiting animation studio Starburns Industries, the makers of Rick and Morty and Anomalisa, about developing a freelance relationship with their nascent comics line. The trip was hastily planned after I let them know I had given my two-weeks’ notice at Dark Horse, since I was the connection between the two companies. There I also registered my domain name, applied for a credit card that accrued frequent flyer miles, and generally began to think of myself as a business. Continue reading “Freelance Year One recap” →