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Today is a triple shot of Ben Kahn and Bruno Hidalgo on Comixology! I’ve been very lucky to work with this team on two series now, and we have issues of both releasing for New Comic Book Day.

First, Gryffen: Galaxy’s Most Wanted returns with the start of the series’ second half. Admiral Hunter will never stop chasing the Al-Haytham, so Gryffen and crew begin a journey to where it all began: the edge of the galaxy, where Gryffen originally disappeared.

GRYFFEN: GALAXY’S MOST WANTED #7 (of 12)

Ben Kahn (Writer), Bruno Hidalgo (Art and Color), Sal Cipriano (Letters)

September 11, 14p, 99¢, Digital-First

On their way to the edge of the galaxy, site of Lyla Gryffen’s final mission for the Reach, the crew of the Al-Haytham discover a world that the Reach has newly colonized. Naturally, a stop to incite some anarchy is in order! Plus: more clues to just what Gryffen’s whole deal is.

Issue #7, like all previous issues, is just 99¢, and the serialization is exclusive to Comixology. Published by Starburns Press.

Then, Heavenly Blues gets its first-ever digital release, just in time for this weekend’s Small Press Expo, where the series is nominated for Outstanding Series! Illicit Press is teaming up with print publisher Scout Comics to bring you two issues a week for the rest of September.

Tired of eternally torturing sinners and ready to spit in the face of judgement, the souls of the greatest thieves in Hell are teaming up to pull the ultimate heist on Heaven! Betrayed bank robber Isaiah Johnson is aiming for one last shot at greatness. Pre-teen scam artist Erin Foley is desperate to lash out at the judgement system that damned her. When a disreputable angel comes offering a deal too good to be true, this unlikely duo gets the chance they’ve been waiting for. Assembling a crew of broken souls from across time, they form a force nothing in Heaven or Hell can withstand.

Try out the full-length issue #1 for just 99¢, and subsequent issues are just $1.99! If you prefer print, the TPB is available at finer comics stores.

Previews:

Continue reading “OUT 9/11/19: Gryffen #7 and Heavenly Blues #1 & #2!” →

In celebration of Heavenly Blues’ nomination for Outstanding Series at the upcoming Ignatz Awards, the acclaimed series will be available for the first time on digital comics leader ComiXology. Illicit Press is proud to partner with original publisher Scout Comics to bring the series to its widest audience yet.

Reuniting writer Ben Kahn and artist Bruno Hidalgo, the creative team behind Shaman and Gryffen: Galaxy’s Most Wanted, Heavenly Blues introduces readers to Hell’s greatest thieves, as they plan eternity’s greatest heist—against the angels of Heaven itself! To pull it off, Depression-era gun runner Isaiah Jefferson and accused Salem witch Erin Foley enlist a crew of outlaws from across time, including an Old West bank robber, a samurai addicted to a drug that provides a glimpse of the living world, and an Ancient Egyptian tomb raider. Together, they must evade the forces of both realms as they seek the afterlife’s greatest prize!

“It blew me away to see Heavenly Blues nominated for an Ignatz. It’s incredible to me how the series and its cast of never-say-die miscreants have connected with people,” said Kahn. “I’m so excited to be bringing the series to ComiXology, where new readers can discover it for years to come.”

By turns thrilling, poignant, and darkly funny, Heavenly Blues was a critical darling upon its print serialization and has been optioned for film. The new digital editions re-present the six-issue series in its entirety, complete with Hidalgo’s breathtaking covers, just in time for the Ignatz Awards at 2019’s Small Press Expo. And if you’re attending the convention, don’t forget to vote for Heavenly Blues for Outstanding Series.

Issues #1 & #2 release September 11
Issues #3 & #4 release September 18
Issues #5 & #6 release September 25

Issue #1 will be offered at 99¢ for a 27-page issue. Subsequent issues will be offered at $1.99.

About Scout Comics
Scout Comics was founded to discover, develop, and support content creators in addition to helping translate their projects to different platforms and mediums. Scout has had several breakout hits recently, including Zinnober, Obliv18n, The Mall, Fish Eye, and Stabbity Bunny.

About Illicit Press
Illicit Press is a micropublisher dedicated to exploring comics’ subversive side, producing irreverent books such as Semiautomagic, Comics Comics, and the digital editions of Heavenly Blues. The imprint is curated by Brendan Wright, editor of Archie vs. Predator, Black Hammer, Grindhouse, Gryffen: Galaxy’s Most Wanted, Heroines, MIND MGMT, and Usagi Yojimbo.

Preview pages from issue #1, available September 11, for 99¢:

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” →

I have lots of reasons for why I never did the Bridge Pedal before this year, though none of them are any good. I obviously should have done it before, as I love biking, love Portland’s bridges and the Willamette river, currently bike daily, and used to commute by bike to Milwaukie a few times a week, back when I worked at Dark Horse. But I am a terrible procrastinator, and in the rare years I was aware enough of its imminence, I put off registering too long. More often, I didn’t know it was happening at all, as I have traditionally paid far too little attention to the goings-on in a city I supposedly enjoy so much. One year I learned the Bridge Pedal was happening only when I was biking across the Hawthorne Bridge and suddenly found myself surrounded by a wave of other cyclists, actual participants in the event I was inadvertently stepping on for a few minutes.

(I have also always intended to do the unrelated Naked Bike Ride, and for whatever reason the word of it has always made it to me, but unlike my Bridge Pedal failures, some external circumstance always keeps me away from the naked ride. Some years I’m out of town, some years there’s an obligation I can’t get out of. This year I had four flat tires in three days that weekend, all seemingly unrelated, as the piece of glass someone at my local shop finally pulled out of the tire cannot have been there for the first two flats, one of which necessitated the replacement of the tire. The fourth flat was on the other tire.)

The biggest reason for losing track of my surroundings is that I spent several years prepared to leave at any moment, expecting my career to take me away. As a result, I stopped putting down roots, not getting too attached to places I discovered or too close to new people I met. After I quit my job a year ago, I started working from home in NW Portland and spending a lot more of my time walking and biking around the city. One of 2016’s major themes has been learning how to engage with place again, since those years I wasn’t focused on where I was but also didn’t leave left an emotionally barren stretch in my memory, and while it’s still possible I’ll live somewhere else in a year’s time, I don’t want to spend another year neither here nor there. Continue reading “How is this my first Bridge Pedal?” →

I’m not sure how long I’ve known Paul Tobin. Not forever or anything, but longer than I’ve worked with him, since pretty much all the comics people in Portland know each other. I’ve read him for a long time, and I finally got to see him at work when I brought his and Colleen Coover’s Bandette to Dark Horse after its initial arc’s digital serialization from MonkeyBrain.

Editing the first two Bandette collections was a blast, incorporating as much backup material in the way of shorts, making-of sections, and original prose stories as we could fit, but it wasn’t working together in the same sense that me editing an original project of Paul’s would be, and we talked several times about wanting to do exactly that, with Paul sending me an occasional pitch and us discussing what kind of genre we’d want to do.

During these discussions, Paul sent me the pitch for Mystery Girl, which, with its relatable lead Trine, great hook in Trine’s power to instantly know the answer to any question asked her (except if it related to the last ten years of her own life), and mix of whimsy and menace, is not a million miles from a more grown-up, sexier caper in the Bandette mold. We were off! Paul and I share an obsession with making first issues full, dense reads that create a complete experience while giving people reason to come back, and that became our first priority. So many first issues are all setup, with the actual premise only introduced on the final page, even if readers already know what a book’s about. We wanted to avoid that, and Paul built an issue showing us what Trine can do and giving her several short cases to solve before building to a bigger one, introducing a new threat, and teasing Trine’s larger arc. There’s a lot there, and it’s still breezy and fun.

Alberto Alburquerque was always Paul’s first choice for artist, the two of them having developed a rapport on previous projects, and I am a fan myself, so I was happy for them to have a bigger project to collaborate on than they had before. As scripts began to come in, the world took shape, but Paul also got in as many jabs at Alberto’s soccer club of choice to add an extra page or two of description. They were pretty in sync.

After her work on Semiautomagic, I knew I wanted to bring in Marissa Louise for color, and I think either Paul or Alberto actually suggested her as well. Marissa’s hugely collaborative, and she and Alberto were kicking color ideas back and forth while issue #1 was still in the pencil stage.

I left Dark Horse after all the scripts were edited and the first issue was completely colored and lettered, with the editing chores on issues #2–#4 going to Shantel LaRocque, who is now also DH’s person in charge of Bandette. While I knew the shape of the story and what to expect in each issue, having only seen some pencils for issue #2 before handing it off, I had the pleasure of reading the series with fresh eyes as the issues were released, and so, while I remain biased, I have to say that from my slight remove they read pretty well.

Now the collected edition is out, with the whole first arc accompanied by Jimmy Presler’s mod designs and an 18-page sketchbook section full of material that was new to me. It’s a great book, and I can’t wait to read more of Trine’s adventures as a regular reader. Thanks to the whole team for this book I’ve been loving reading and am proud to place on the shelf next to some of my other favorites I’ve edited!

I’m always happy when the collection of something I edited comes out, but a book like Semiatutomagic is especially exciting, because it will be the first time many readers have seen it. Rather than as a miniseries, Semiauto was serialized in two arcs in Dark Horse Presents vol. 3, so for everyone but readers of DHP, this is a brand-new book by Alex de Campi, Jerry Ordway, and Marissa Louise!

Semiauto centers on techno-occultist Alice Creed, who has Indiana Jones’s day job and John Constantine’s night job. She’s never going to get tenure as a professor because she’s missing class too often to fight things too horrible to exist and far less comfortingly familiar than the fables and folklore of traditional horror. And every victory costs her and her friends (those few she has left) dearly. Her troubles in the book begin with a kid possessed by a demonic videogame and only get worse from there.

Believe it or not, the series started out as a superhero book, sort of. In 2013, legendary artist Jerry Ordway wrote about the very serious problem in comics of established artists being pushed out as publishers chase new flavors. As he noted in the essay, new blood is essential to comics, but when he looked back at the beginning of his career, the generation before him continued to work side-by-side that new blood, which seems to be less true today. My frequent collaborator Alex de Campi immediately contacted me saying that if DC wasn’t keeping him busy enough, she loved his work and wanted to find something to cocreate with him. A huge fan myself, I was an easy sell. So was Dark Horse president Mike Richardson, who okayed a run in DHP on the basis of a TBD Alex/Jerry collaboration.

I was slightly tuned into the conversations between writer and artist that followed, but soon a space-based female superhero had become Alice Creed, and I received scripts for most or all of the first arc at once. I gave my feedback, made Jerry a schedule, and waited for pages to come in.

And then I had my mind blown. Jerry had never done anything like this before. In a career full of superhero work, he was unquestionably one of the best, but I hadn’t seen him try his hand at horror, and it turned out he can do scary and unsettling with all the panache he brings to capes and tights. Not only was he right that established artists still have vital work to do in the field, but here he was proving, 34 years into his comics career, that he had untapped depths no one would ever have guessed were there without new and different projects continuing to come his way. It’s been a pleasure to see his work show up at DC again, in the pages of Justice League and Convergence: Infinity Inc., but I also look forward to what new and unexpected things come his way after he reminded everyone how much more he can do. And of course I’m already trying to figure out what projects I can bring him in on.

Not long before, I had met colorist Marissa Louise Czerniejewski through my then-assistant (now an associate editor) Ian Tucker. We painted together at some drink and draw or party or other, and I had been looking for a project to try her work out in ever since. Semiauto wasn’t her first work to see print, but I believe we hired her before she was hired for the RoboCop run that debuted prior our first chapter. Like Jerry, Marissa proved versatile and surprising, with intuitive color decisions that pushed the creepiness factor of the work even further. We’ve gone on to work together on Grindhouse, Mystery Girl, and The Sakai Project at Dark Horse, Trent at Starburns Industries, and the new Kickstarted book of Semiauto stories.

Yes, in case you missed it, we produced three more Semiauto stories, two drawn by Jerry and one by guest artist Lara Margarida, all written and lettered by Alex and colored by Marissa, with editing assistance from Bekah Caden. It’s a slipcased set containing both the Dark Horse volume and the Kickstarter volume, with magnificent slipcase art by Tomer Hanuka. It goes to press in just a couple weeks! This was pretty limited, so I recommend grabbing the DH volume today if you weren’t a Kickstarter backer, but keep an eye out at conventions and you may be able to buy a set from Alex, Jerry, or me.

Anyway, I’m so happy Semiautomagic is a book now and that it’s out in the world as a standalone story. It’s not what you expect from Jerry, it’s even a little different for Alex, and it’s just good, fucked-up horror comics. Thanks to everyone who made it real: Alex, Jerry, Marissa, Ian, Mike, and then-DHP coeditor Jim Gibbons. We’re all really proud of this one!

If you’re still not convinced you need this on your shelf, don’t take my word for it, take Geeked-Out Nation’s word for it.

The Kickstarter campaign for Dare2Draw’s mentoring anthology, which I edited, has begun! The anthology pairs up-and-coming artists (many of whom are receiving their first paid gig) with pro comics writers for eight new stories featuring Mike Baron and Steve Rude‘s Nexus! Mike and Steve have generously let D2D use their beloved character, and Steve drew the cover! Writers include Ron Marz (Green Lantern, Star Wars, Witchblade), Alex De Campi (Archie vs. Predator, Grindhouse, No Mercy), Amy Chu (Poison Ivy, Ant-Man, Deadpool), Corinna Bechko (Invisible Republic, Star Wars: Legacy, Savage Hulk), Eric M. Esquivel (Adventure Time, Sanjay and Craig, Heavy Metal), and more. The full list, along with all the artists and some sample pages, are on the KS page!

I’m really excited about this one! I’m a longtime fan of Brian Hurtt, and working with Matt Kindt on MIND MGMT and his other Dark Horse projects was among the most exciting times I’ve had in comics. Plus, I always want to see more comics out there for younger readers, so when Matt’s agent pitched Poppy! and the Lost Lagoon, it hit all my bases.

The book was fascinating to watch come together, with Matt and Brian collaborating on both the story and art, and a few big tweet sessions showed them working side by side, Brian inking and Matt painting, for a result that doesn’t look quite like either of their other work but is also distinctly both of theirs. I left Dark Horse while they were making their final push to complete the book (as Brian also somehow drew the triple-sized The Sixth Gun #50, his Oni editors and I keeping in touch to coordinate), so thanks to my awesome colleague, editor Daniel Chabon, for finishing it up so ably!

Now Multiversity Comics has named Poppy! as its Pick of the Week. Well deserved, and congrats to Matt and Brian on your beautiful work and the reception it’s receiving!

Poppy! hit comics stores yesterday and will be in book stores and digital formats in a couple weeks. It’s a joy to behold.