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NEWS

Let’s dive in with the first of a couple reversals. The crowdfunding platform Kickstarter became the latest entity pressured by payment processors to ban adult content. If you follow the work of , you know how much this would affect the comics campaigns on there. After a great deal of outrage that was both understandable and completely predictable, Kickstarter amended their statement to explain that they would not be banning adult content outright but that the payment processors handling the funds raised by campaigns with adult content may decide to ban or block them, which feels arbitrary and not at all reassuring. This is a ridiculous and unnecessary controversy generated by a handful of sanctimonious extremists with outsized influence and yet another functional monopoly, payment processing company Stripe.

One of the most upsetting pieces of news in the past month was the revelation that a comic created using generative AI had made its way into an anthology that was subsequently nominated for an Eisner. The anthology in question was eventually pulled from the list of nominees, which you can find in full in the Awards section below. of Comic Book Yeti created a petition to close the loophole in the Eisner nominating process to ensure this never happens again. It’s got almost 4,000 verified signatures at time of writing.

In other AI news, deceased Marvel creator Stan Lee’s voice and likeness have been licensed by the company ElevenLabs, because nobody learned anything from that ghoulish hologram at LA Comic Con last year.

In more monstrous news, Neil Gaiman is suing one of the many women who has accused him of sexual misconduct for half a million dollars for breaking a nondisclosure agreement. I don’t know if he thinks this will make him look less guilty or if he reasons he has nothing to lose, but he can go to hell.

Saturday, May 16 was the Nakba Day March in New York City for Palestinian liberation, although you might not have known from the extent of the coverage it received. There was a whole contingent of comics professionals who showed up for this event, and good for them.

In other New York City news, the NYC Public Schools’ Civics for All Comics Group program released an educational Know Your Rights comic for residents of the city, including undocumented immigrants. It was written by , with art by David Hahn, letterer Taylor Esposito, and colorist Ellie Wright.

Also in May, HR 2616 passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. This is different from the national book ban, but also would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and prohibits the teaching of “gender ideology” and would force teachers to out trans students to their parents. This is why it’s been nicknamed the “Don’t Say Trans” bill. It’s stuck in committee in the Senate now, so voice your displeasure to your senators if you’re in the United States.

In corporate comics news, the Diamond bankruptcy has caught the attention of business outlets framing it as a fight between JPMorgan Chase & Co and publishing companies over the latter’s assets that are being held to recoup from the bankruptcy. It should be fairly obvious what “side” I’m on here. JPMorgan is Diamond’s largest creditor but it’s also one of the largest banks in the world and I fail to see how much they’ll gain in the long run by sending a dozen companies spiraling into bankruptcy for physical stock valued at an amount their executives can probably find in their couch cushions.

In Dark Horse news, the board of directors of their owners, Swedish gaming conglomerate Embracer Group, has decided to spin off the comic company’s immediate parent company, Fellowship Entertainment, into its own, public company. The announcement reads something like Dark Horse is being converted into an IP farm, but here’s hoping that’s just my failure to understand business jargon. Good news, though! Jay Komas, interim CEO of Dark Horse, released a statement that management had chosen to voluntarily recognize their employees’ union. Congratulations to Dark Horse Workers United!

This all comes in the wake of Dark Horse closing all three of its physical Things from Another World storefronts after almost 50 years in business.

Applications for the Cartoonist Cooperative’s Digital Comics Residency are open until June 30! If you’re a webcomic creator, be sure to apply.

Lastly, the Black Comics Alliance has called for a boycott of DC with the hashtag #DCBlackout as the second phase of a protest that began with #DCSoWhite. The fight for representation in media continues.

Interviews & Criticism

In Publishers Weekly, has this look at how comics series develop readership and word of mouth beyond their first issues. It’s nice to see comics creators think unconventionally from a marketing perspective to entice new readers as there is a lot more to most series beyond their debuts.

Over at CBR, has a couple of pieces about DC. The first is this look at Superman and how he’s more radical than people realize. It should come as no surprise that I heartily agree with this one. The second is about lesser-known characters who deserve a comeback (always nice to know there are more Wildcat fans out there!).

Continuing a look at DC characters, Stephanie Burt has this look at the recently deceased Gerry Conway’s Firestorm, the Nuclear Man and Tilly Bridges interviewed Nicole Maines about the character Dreamer, whom she portrayed on the Supergirl tv show and is writing as part of the Justice League: Dream Girls DC Pride Event comic.

Tilly Bridges herself was interviewed along with her wife, Susan, by Avery and Ollie Kaplan about writing Star Trek comics and their own original work and how their relationship as a married trans woman and cis woman, respectively, informs their work.

The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in London is hosting an exhibition titled Queer as Comics that explores the history of queer representation in comics. It’s Nice That contributor Jenny Brewer spoke with curator Paul Gravett about the exhibit and the uniqueness of comics and queer representation.

I had the pleasure of meeting creator Kasey Iris at a signing of her graphic novel Ghoul recently and found this interview she did with Writers Digest.

SKTCHD had a couple of great interviews this past month, one of which was a reprint. Tim Leong interviewed legendary artist Neal Adams back in 2005, which was reposted back on the fourth anniversary of Adams’ death. And spoke with IDW editor Bixie Mathieu about the publisher’s new line of Hello Kitty comics.

For the final interview of this section, Andrew Irvin at Comic Book Yeti spoke with Myfanwy Tristram about her new nonfiction comic, Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest, about Welsh resistance.

Hank Kennedy at Responsible Statecraft wrote a brief history about the role comics have played in war propaganda.

Heidi MacDonald at Comics Beat wrote a piece about keeping gatekeeping out of comics. It’s disheartening to see that comics shops can still be such hostile places to women and marginalized populations.

Writer Mina Ruyle had a couple of interesting pieces for SOLRAD recently. The first was this nuanced look at Osamu Tezuka’s MW and queer representation. The second was an examination of Paul Karasik’s and David Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.

The Comics Journal delved into the history of the Third Reich and its response to comics and cartoonists, which included marking some creators for death if they successfully invaded their countries of origin.

Ending where we began at Publishers Weekly, has this look at the Comic Arts Fest that took place in Manhattan back in April and how it bridged the divide between American and European comics. More of that, please!

Awards

As promised, here’s the list of nominees for the 2026 Eisner Awards. The winners will be announced at San Diego Comic-Con next month. Here’s Byron O’Neal’s petition again to create an explicit “No AI” policy for these awards.

The 2026 Minicomic Award winners were announced! Winners in seven categories were chosen from almost 700 entries.

The 50th Annual Kodansha Manga Awards were given to Gachiakuta for Best Shōnen Manga, Re-Living My Life with a Boyfriend Who Doesn’t Remember Me for Best Shōjo Manga, and The Darwin Incident for Best General Manga.

The 30th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Manga Grand Prix was given to Ao Kojima’s Hon Nara Uru Hodo (Have Plenty Enough Books to Sell). Kojima got his start in manga after getting sick during the pandemic and deciding to publish his comics online, which caught the attention of an editor.

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was given the rank of Chevalier in France’s Order of Arts and Letters, the first Korean comics or graphic novel artist to achieve this honor.

Jeff Smith was honored with the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Cartoonists Society.

The Independent Book Publishers Association Awards were given out, including a Graphic Novel category. Essentials, Volume 1 by Chris “Doc” Wyatt and Luke Arnold won Gold, while the two Silver winners were Creatures & Corridors written by Brandon Auman with art by Andrea Mutti and Super Science, Volume 1 written by N. Alessandro K. with art by M. K. Perker.

The 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Illustrated Reporting and Commentary was given to Anand RK, Suparna Sharma, and Natalie Obiko Pearson for “trAPPed,” a work of comics journalism published in Bloomberg about a digital scam victim in India.

The winner of the National Newspaper Award for Illustrated Commentary was Michael de Adder of The Globe and Mail, with finalists Judith Lachapelle from La Presse and David Parkins, also of The Globe and Mail. The 2026 National Headliner Awards for Editorial Cartoons went to Jeff Koterba of Cagle Cartoons for First Place, Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News for Second Place, and Rick McKee, also of Cagle Cartoons, for Third Place.

Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters: The Killing Stone by Jessica Maison won the 2025 Nebula Award for Best Comic.

Lee Lai became the first nonbinary person to win Australia’s literary Stella prize for Cannon, which is also the first graphic novel to be given the award.

Cannon also won the Bédélys Québec Award, one of several of the 27th Bédélys Awards given out at the Montreal Comic Arts Festival.

The 2026 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize winner was The Weight by Melissa Mendes, published by Drawn & Quarterly.

The winners of the 22nd Doug Wright Awards were announced last week.

This past month also saw the creation of a new award thanks to Comic Art Fans and Indie Comic Creator Con! Named for artist Dan Tancredi, the Dan T Award will recognize indie comic book creators and be given out at the IC3 conventions in July and September. Good luck, everyone!

I thought I’d end this section with a bit of fun. The 2026 Grantie Awards were announced via the blog of writer Grant Stoye. Congratulations to all the winners!

Obituaries

Sadly, the comics world experienced more loss this past month. Larry Stark, a scholar and critic who became famous for his examination and fandom of EC comics, died last month at the age of 93.

John Lent was also a comics scholar, the publisher and editor of the renowned International Journal of Comic Art. He passed away at the age of 89.

Ted White was an editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic magazines who entered publishing after winning the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1968. He died at the age of 88 after suffering complications from a fall.

Marjane Satrapi was a comics creator and filmmaker of great esteem with many great works of memoir, history, and activism in her bibliography. Indeed, Persepolis was one of the first comics we read for the Comics Book Club back when we first started meeting. She was 56.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on June 17 to discuss Us. Thanks again for everything.

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In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some (More) Thoughts on Love and Rockets

Our resident retailer was in attendance this month and brought along a couple items for “show and tell,” including a full-color reprint of an individual issue of Love and Rockets, which had smaller dimensions than the original, and a compendium of the Locas stories, which made me worry about his back. Lol One person didn’t finish this volume, so we tried to avoid spoilers, but we also got to talking about how the characters have aged and grown in real time over the last forty years, including major developments like marriages. That person did read “The Death of Speedy Ortiz,” so we got to discuss that story and share theories about the ending. One person had some trouble parsing the large cast of characters, and admitted they prefer color comics to black and white. This led to a discussion about the advantages black and white comics have and how they convey mood and texture. There were a couple slurs present in the dialogue that took a couple of people by surprise, and one character wearing a swastika t-shirt inspired a not-unrelated conversation about the history of punk. That segued nicely to how the Hernandez Brothers had conceived of the series as a “punk rock Archie,” which became obvious as soon as it was brought up because of some of the cartoonier flourishes in the action sequences and facial expressions.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, June 17 to discuss I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together.

What We're Reading

June 17 - I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop

July 15 - Our Dreams at Dusk, Volume 1 by Yuhki Kamatani

August 19 - Minor Arcana, Volume 1: The Fool by Jeff Lemire

September 16 - Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka

October 21 - Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell

November 18 - Loving, Ohio by Matthew Erman and Sam Beck

December 16 - Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young

January 20, 2027 - Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath

Next month’s selection is not on hoopla, but there are plenty of copies available at the Chicago Public Library. Just reserve them soon, because I did not realize how long this comic is when someone suggested it and it does seem to be in pretty high demand.

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About What We’ve Read

I couldn’t find much history or criticism about this specific volume, especially since it collects individual issues that have appeared elsewhere, but there’s been so much written about Love and Rockets that I wouldn’t know where to begin anyway. It was named “the best non-superhero comic” by Rolling Stone. Conversely, Wizard magazine ranked it 95th on a list of 200. I’m not gonna bother linking to that. I will share this essay by Scott Cederlund about “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” (spoiler warning, though).

There are two videos I want to share, too. The first is from PBS looking at the Los Angeles punk rock scene that influenced Love and Rockets:

The second is this in-depth interview with the creator of this volume, Jaime Hernandez:

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, June 12.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I want to start this section by promoting the work of a couple of friends of mine. My main non-comics collaborator, Onicia Muller, recently interviewed writer Latasha for Rebellious Magazine about her Black feminist romantic comedy, She Loves Me Not. Latasha was running a crowdfunding campaign through Seed & Spark for the post-production and managed to raise 110% of the funds needed!

My friend is part of the Parallel Truths graphic novel anthology that’s in pre-launch on Kickstarter right now! She’s written one of the twelve stories that will be part of that volume, “Dead Reckoning,” with art by Sam Hart. Make sure to follow the campaign to be notified when it launches on June 9!

I promised to share more about “The Cleanest Room in AI City,” an eight-page gay sci-fi noir comic I’ve written with art by Federico Peters. Here’s the first page!

The main character, Ray, pictured above, is the hotel detective in a city run by artificial intelligence. Buddy Beaudoin will be lettering the pages once they’re complete. I’m hoping to have physical copies for the latter part of the summer.

Another project I’m working on is something I’ll code name Project: Drag Queen. I’m reuniting with artist Wren Rios, who illustrated my contribution to the Prism anthology. She’s provided a couple of character sketches that were somehow exactly what I was thinking of but better. Check them out below!

I’m hoping this will be complete by the end of next month, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to share while it’s in development. I’m excited to be working with Wren again! This collaboration has already led to a lot of cool conversations and I’m thoroughly impressed by her work.

Rise of the Flightless, the penguins versus robots anthology for which I wrote a four-page comic, will be launching on Kickstarter soon.

I have a storefront on comix.one! They’re selling my self-published comics digitally and via print on demand.

The Dreamlands Anthology from Warden Comics should be shipping soon.

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 has gone out!

The Prism anthology is available on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing! You can also find it in my online shop.

Some (More) Thoughts on Love and Rockets

Among certain insufferable music snobs, the Great Debate is “Which band is better: The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” (Stick with me here.) The conventional thinking is that The Beatles reinvented and/or redefined pop/rock music, while the Rolling Stones should win because of their sheer longevity and for being “grittier” than The Beatles (or something). I do not care about this argument, but in comics terms, Love and Rockets is The Beatles and it’s the Rolling Stones.

This series has defined the slice of life genre of comics for multiple generations at this point, while also branching off into multiple genres like science fiction and sports and incorporating surrealism, magical realism, and darker, more grounded themes. As for longevity, Love and Rockets is unsurpassed and exceptional!

Something that struck me while reading this volume is how quietly experimental it was. The pages were all more or less grids, but they mirrored each other or led the eye in subtle ways that were funny or devastating. (I got a couple more paragraphs into this topic before realizing that Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, once again, has already done a better and more succinct job of analyzing this aspect of Jaime Hernandez’s art while looking at a different Love and Rockets volume, Perla la Loca. Enjoy the video below!)

I remember when I learned about Love and Rockets. When I was in high school, the clerk at my local comics shop had included a magazine supplement about “hot new characters in comics” with my usual titles as a gift (he would eventually be fired to giving away too much store merchandise to customers). In between the entries for Lorca (from Defiant Comics’ Warriors of Plasm title) and Megaton Man by Don Simpson, there was a page for Maggie and Hopey (the main characters of L&R).

They were the only non-superpowered or non-superhero-adjacent characters in the whole magazine and I’d never heard of them. I wish I could say I sought them out, but I did not. Love and Rockets would have been publishing for at least a decade by the time that magazine had come out, so it’s funny to think of it as “new” while surrounded by titles that didn’t survive the nineties.

I think I was intimidated to start Love and Rockets because I knew there was so much of it over so many years. The cast is sprawling and the relationships are complicated, but I found it remarkably accessible once I started. I think Perla la Loca was my first volume, but then I jumped around, went back, and read forward again. I don’t recommend this strategy to anyone looking to start. Lol These latest editions from Fantagraphics are organized really well and are much easier than other scattershot or gargantuan collections.

Early Love and Rockets perfectly captures the aimlessness of people in their late teens and early twenties figuring themselves out, which is why it’s so rewarding to see how these characters develop. The way conversations loop and characters talk around what they mean or how they feel makes this one of the most human comics ever created. There’s so much more I would like to discuss, but I’m getting down to the wire again.

Thanks for reading! What are some of your favorite indie comics? Have you read much (or any) of Love and Rockets? If so, who’s your favorite character and why? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop!

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NEWS

I’ll start with one of the worst recurring themes of the last month, which started with mass layoffs at Marvel and continued with layoffs at Mad Cave Studios. In the case of the former, that was part of a wider initiative of parent company Disney to eliminate about a thousand jobs and included VP of Sales and Marketing David Gabriel, who had been with the company for more than twenty years. In the case of the latter, that included senior editors James Emmett and Chas! Pangburn and senior marketing manager Maya Vee Lopez, whom I congratulated on that position in this space only a little over a year ago.

There was also the news that comics journalism site Newsarama has shut down after the final staff writer had been laid off. This is devastating all around, and I want to express my sympathies to those affected. These are smart, talented, and passionate people, and I hope they find something better very soon.

In perhaps not-unrelated news, publisher Square Enix is partnering with an AI technology company for translation and typesetting work. This is a terrible idea for several reasons, as anyone who’s ever used Google Translate could tell you. I find it telling that they hyped it as “saving 3,000 hours of manual work a year.” If you do the math on that, it’s a little more than 60 hours a week. Hiring two more people would provide them with more labor and require less quality control.

In more manga news, Shihei Lin, a former editor at Shueisha responsible for such hits as Chainsaw Man and Dandadan, is creating a new manga platform through his company Mix Green and is accepting submissions (link is to a Google form in Japanese). Good luck to everyone!

Webcomic platform Webtoon has launched Studio White, partnering with manga publishers Kadokawa and Red Ice Studio to create webcomic spin-offs of some of their more popular titles. The debut will be based on Record of Lodoss War by Ryo Mizuno and published in Korean, with plans to expand into English, Japanese, French, Traditional Chinese, Thai, and Indonesian. Future source material is slated to include Sword Art Online by Reki Kawahara, Slayers by Hajime Kanzaka, and The Familiar of Zero by Noboru Yamaguchi.

Checking in on a couple of major stories, the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France is now being run by the Morgane group, which is promising a new festival starting in January 2027. The decision was “not unanimous,” though, and the controversial previous producers are apparently threatening litigation, so I don’t think the drama has completely died down.

Meanwhile, the trustee in charge of the Diamond Comic Distributors bankruptcy asked a judge to approve financing to hire a lawyer for their own litigation. I wish I could simplify that sentence. The lawsuits and countersuits for publishers to reclaim their consignment from Diamond continue.

Yesterday, PEN America posted statistics about book bans in public schools in the United States for the years 2024 and 2025. There were almost four thousand! While books by marginalized creators and those intended for younger audiences continue to be disproportionately represented, there was an increase in nonfiction titles and books with “themes of empowerment and self-esteem.”

DC Publisher and Chief Creative Officer Jim Lee shared some difficult news about his health, including a diagnosis of prediabetes, and how this resulted in production delays and a need for a healthier work-life balance. I’m glad he’s doing better and hope this can lead to more systemic change in the industry.

The shareholders for DC’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, approved an acquisition from Paramount Skydance for $111 billion. I’ve been refraining from covering this developing story about “DC’s new owners” until the dust settles, but this seemed like a good time and place to mention it. Those shareholders have quadrupled their stock value to create another entertainment monopoly in this country while the creatives who keep it running suffer.

Sean Edgar, formerly of comics publisher DSTLRY, is Kickstarter’s new Director of Comics and Collectibles.

Some good news out of the state of Colorado, as the state senate passed a bipartisan law to create the first A-Corp, or artist corporation, to guarantee creatives 51% ownership of their work. The bill now goes to the state house of representatives and will need to be signed by the governor to become law. The article includes the math involved, but this could be a big help for creators!

On the topic of workers and their rights, the Cartoonist Cooperative has issued its 2026 Comics Worker Survey. If you made any money at all from comics last year, please fill this out! The transparency that this affords benefits everyone.

Interviews & Criticism

Though it came too late for the Comics Book Club’s discussion, Valerio Stivé has this look at The Summer Hikaru Died for The Comics Journal. I’m always happy to see this manga win more people over.

I met Jesse Lonergan an at NYCC last year, but still haven’t finished Drome. In the meantime, Scott Cederlund at From Cover to Cover has this look at one of his shorter works, Faster. Lonergan is one of the most innovative artists working in comics right now, and his pages deserve thorough readings and examination.

Lara Boyle had a couple of great pieces at SOLRAD recently. First was this personal essay about poetry comics. I’m a big fan of that genre, and it’s often underrated or overlooked. Second, she reviewed the debut graphic novel Ace of Hearts: Lessons in Love from an Asexual Girl by Cooklin.

ICv2 has an interesting comparison of different order management and point of sale (POS) systems used by comic book retailers. This is an aspect of the business side of comics I would not have ever considered, so I’m glad someone else did. It gave me flashbacks to navigating all the different POS systems I used back in my serving days, some of which were better than others.

Lots great interviews this month! First up, spoke with Oni-Lion Forge’s Publisher and President, Hunter Gorinson. They covered a lot of ground, including Oni’s upcoming 30th anniversary, the company’s move to Penguin Random House for distribution, and all the great comics planned for 2026.

David also spoke with writer Ram V about his new title Deicidium, which will have art by Evan Cagle and Anand RK and letters by Aditya Bidikar. The series will be released as black and white, 96-page graphic novels simultaneously in the United States and France by two different publishers.

One of the biggest stories in mainstream United States comics lately has been that a Rick Veitch Swamp Thing story from 1989, pulled from publication due to controversy back then, is finally seeing the light of day. spoke with Veitch about it for Gizmodo. I look forward to reading Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Red Hood series in thirty years.

Over at Comic Book Yeti, Andrew Irvin spoke with Ben Wickey about More Weight: A Salem Story and Asia Miller about Lindsey Cheng Dates a White Boy!!! Both are books I hope we can read for the Comics Book Club someday.

I’ll end this section with a fun piece from Marcus Helminiak at comicbook.com from back in November that recently came to my attention about the need for civilians in the extended casts of mainstream superhero comics.

Awards

Nominations are open for the 2026 Ringo Awards! There’s a wide variety of categories, and if you’re not sure who to vote for, just search “ringo awards” on this platform and quickly become overwhelmed. Lol Winners will be announced at Baltimore Comic-Con in September.

San Diego Comic-Con recently changed the rules on who can vote in the Eisner Awards. If you’re unsure if you’re eligible to vote, you only have a few days left to apply! The deadline is Wednesday, May 13. I think I accidentally applied twice.

Jaime Hernandez won in the Graphic Novel/Comics category at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes for Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection. Perfect timing for our discussion of The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. in a couple weeks.

The National Cartoonists Society revealed the finalists for the 80th Annual Reuben Awards. The winners will be announced on August 7. Congratulations to for her nomination in the Online Comics—Short Form category!

The winners of the Center for Cartoon Studies’ 14th Annual Cartoonist Studio Prize were Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (long-form winner) and Two Snakes by Suerynn Lee (short-form winner).

The inaugural Zelda Awards for women in comics were given out on April 11. You can watch the full ceremony here and check out their website here. Congratulations to for winning Best Series for Sacrimony!

The Blue Metropolis Literary Festival was held in Montreal last month, and comic creator Guy Delisle was awarded the Metropolis bleu Avenir et société prize for contributing to “building a better future” through his work.

Obituaries

Sadly, the comics community lost a few more legends this month. Creator Gerry Conway, perhaps best known as the creator of the Punisher, died at the age of 73. There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to characters he added to mainstream superhero comics in the United States. Despite creating the Punisher, he was not happy with the character becoming a favorite among authoritarians and white supremacists. He became a top Marvel writer at the age of 19, worked for both Big Two companies, and created some of the most celebrated stories for Spider-Man that continue to resonate. He will be missed.

Writer, professor, and journalist Len Strazewski has died at the age of 71. Largely known for his work at DC for the Flash, the Justice Society of America, and Starman (Will Payton), he also co-created the characters Prime and Prototype for Malibu’s Ultraverse. He was a beloved professor who inspired generations of journalism students at Columbia College.

Manga artist Sadao Shoji died last month due to heart failure at the age of 88. His manga Tanma-kun ran for almost 58 years, while his Salaryman Senka manga ran for 55. He won the Japan Cartoonists Association Awards grand prize in 2001 and two Japanese national honors, the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2000 and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette in 2011.

Finally, revered cartoonist Frank Stack, considered the first underground cartoonist for comics published under the pen name Foolbert Sturgeon, passed away at the age of 88. A great believer in comics as an art form, he was also a prolific painter and an adored art professor at the University of Missouri.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on May 20 to discuss The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. Thanks again for everything.

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In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on Food Poisoning

As with most anthologies, some stories were better than others but opinions varied on favorites in this collection. “The Pirates” with art by Vanesa Del Rey was one person’s favorite story and art style. I was split between Leonardo Manco’s artwork for “Salty Horse” and Francesco Francavilla’s for “The Cow Head,” though someone else thought the former veered too far past horror and into being simply gross. Everyone liked Irene Koh’s art for “The Snow Woman.” I’ve seen that story adapted before into other comics and a short film. One person who is admittedly not a horror fan was confounded by the practical and logical leaps of some stories, such as why Japanese monsters were in European settings. I kind of liked that bit of syncretism, but we all agreed that some of the comics could have used another page or two to address some of their plot points. It was unclear if some were meant to be morality tales or not. The finale that wrapped up the framing device was universally satisfying. The recipes included at the end probably aren’t going to be attempted by any of us. One person is a vegetarian and I found them too labor intensive. Call me lazy if you want, I’m not buying cheesecloth and butcher’s twine just to make cabbage. Lol

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, May 20 to discuss The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.

What We're Reading

May 20 - The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime Hernandez

June 17 - I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop

July 15 - Our Dreams at Dusk, Volume 1 by Yuhki Kamatani

August 19 - Minor Arcana, Volume 1: The Fool by Jeff Lemire

September 16 - Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka

October 21 - Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell

November 18 - Loving, Ohio by Matthew Erman and Sam Beck

December 16 - Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young

January 20, 2027 - Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath

Next month’s selection is also on hoopla, along with several other Love & Rockets collections. We’re bending the rule of starting with the first volume of a series, because most people agree The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. is when the series began to fire on all cylinders. We didn’t have enough people to decide on shuffling any of the selections, but we’ll see how the year plays out.

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About What We’ve Read

Anthony Bourdain spoke with Newsweek about Hungry Ghosts with his main collaborator, Joel Rose. Sadly, Bourdain died by suicide in June of the following year. Rose spoke with The Hollywood Reporter and Salon about their work together. Sony optioned Hungry Ghosts for an animated series back in 2019.

If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, there is help available.

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, May 8.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Good news: I was accepted to table at a convention! Bad news: I had to decline because of transportation costs and day job factors. I was sad to turn down such a great opportunity, but the organizers of the convention were very gracious and understanding. This does make me hopeful that I’m that much closer to achieving my goal of tabling by the end of the year!

The submission deadline for the has been extended to May 21!

The Dreamlands Anthology from Warden Comics was a success! Surveys are out, books will be printed shortly. I’ve already submitted an updated pitch for The Passion of St. Alban of the West to a couple of publishers to include how the main character appears in this book.

On March 26, I hopped onto Comix Wellspring’s Spilled Ink livestream with several other creators. Apparently, I was the first writer to ever do so! Technical difficulties prevented me from being on camera, but I was working on a script while others were drawing.

My promotional blitz for Dreamlands concluded on March 30 with my appearance on Inspired Ink with Brandon Bloxdorf. We talked about a wide range of topics, including the just-concluded C2E2 and my audio-only appearance on Spilled Ink. It was a fun time!

Brandon also edited the video to create a couple of shorts, which don’t seem to embed as easily on Substack, but you can check those out here and here.

Rise of the Flightless, the penguins versus robots anthology for which I wrote a four-page comic, will be launching on Kickstarter soon. Be sure to follow that campaign to show your support! Luke W. Henderson, the editor of the anthology and the letterer for my contribution, shared a cover that will be new for this edition. Hopefully, it’ll be a rainbow holographic cover! Art by Mike M.

I have a storefront on comix.one! They’re selling my self-published comics digitally and via print on demand. I’ll be uploading all my future comics there!

Speaking of future comics, if you saw any of my podcast appearances promoting Dreamlands, you may have caught me mentioning a new comic in the works. “The Cleanest Room in AI City” is an eight-page gay sci-fi noir that I’ve written. I’m re-teaming with Federico Peters, one of the artists of a short Alban of the West comic. I’m excited to share more soon!

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 hit several unfortunate delays, but should be fulfilled soon.

The Prism anthology is available on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing! You can also find it in my online shop.

Some Thoughts on Food Poisoning

Before leaving for Thailand for the first time, I was warned not to eat any street food. I had hoped to see my doctor before the trip to get something to fortify my immune system or prevent any adverse effects, but my husband and I had to plan the trip in a hurry and I didn’t want to delay.

The trip itself was magnificent! A life-changing vacation in several ways, it was my first time traveling outside of North America since I was a foreign exchange student as a teenager. As you’ve probably suspected, based on the title and the introductory paragraph, I did get food poisoning. It was about a week into the trip and it was the worst pain I have ever experienced in my entire life.

I’ve been poisoned before (twice). I’ve also been electrocuted twice and stabbed. I’ve had cavities filled without novocain and have gotten stitches without anesthetic. The skin on the back of my heels has been flayed (long story). But I have never, ever experienced pain like that of food poisoning. It felt like I was being wrung out like a wet towel.

I don’t want to get too graphic, but the vomiting and diarrhea were constant. Sometimes I experienced both at once and had to scoot back or grab a trash can while on the toilet. I ended up losing fifteen pounds. After three days of this, my mother-in-law took me to the hospital.

My husband did all the translating. The doctor advised me to avoid street food, which I thought I’d been doing, and prescribed several pills and a powder to mix with water to settle my stomach. It was the most inexpensive emergency room visit I’ve ever had, and that includes the airfare to Thailand.

My husband and I still debate over what meal was responsible. For lunch the day before the worst of it, we’d taken a boat out into the middle of the Gulf of Thailand to a floating seafood restaurant. He thinks I had some bad mussels or clams or something. I remember having to go to the bathroom before that, which I think was the start of it, so I blame a bowl of congee we had for breakfast. I thought it had come from a restaurant, but maybe it was from a street vendor?

Either way, that night we had dinner at a beer garden with live music and polished off several towers of Chang beer, which definitely didn’t help. Lol I did get to see one of the best performers from the best version of The Mask Singer perform, so it was one of the best nights of my life.

When I returned home, I did tell people that I’d had food poisoning but that it hadn’t ruined the trip for me by any means. Yes, I had experienced excruciating pain but I had experienced it in Thailand! I was 9,000 miles away from home! Everything was exciting and new, even something that horrible. And it didn’t even impact the trip that much; I only spent one day confined to my hotel room.

I suppose this is an extreme case of “looking on the bright side,” and of course I would have preferred not to have gotten food poisoning, but what’s done is done. The next time I went to Thailand, I visited my doctor ahead of time and made sure all the food I ate came from a restaurant or was homemade.

Thanks for reading! What are some of your favorite international foods? Have you ever had food poisoning? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime Hernandez!

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NEWS

I’ll start with the happiest news this month, which is that comic creator Margeaux Pepoy has come out as trans. A prolific artist with an extensive body of work, including for Archie comics and several others, she may be best known for her self-published work The Adventures of Simone & Ajax. Similar to Jenny Blake Isabella, Margeaux is fine with her previous credits remaining unchanged while she moves forward with new work that will be attributed to her correctly. And as with Jenny Blake, I want to express full love and support for Margeaux!

If I may provide a personal sidenote, it makes my heart happy to see people proud to live as their authentic selves later in life, especially in the times we’re living in. I don’t want to risk reducing people to symbols, but they’re proof (not that we needed any, frankly) that the fascists and Christian nationalists trying to erase and destroy the existence of trans and queer people will never succeed.

Unfortunately, the nationwide book ban mentioned last month, HR7661, which has also been called a “Don’t Say Trans” bill for how it targets LGBTQ+ material, has proceeded out of committee to be voted on by the full United States House of Representatives. This bill aims to alter the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to withdraw funding from any school with “sexually oriented material” accessible to minors, which is simply Republican code for anything inclusive of LGBTQ+ people. If it becomes law, it will be a disaster for schools and the children who attend them.

Elsewhere in the United States Government, the Department of Defense (I’m not calling it anything else) says it wants to remove all “woke distractions” from the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes. These apparently include comics, because the paper is now banned from publishing comic strips.

In the most direct overlap of politics and comics, publisher Fantagraphics announced that they may have lost two full print runs after a cargo vessel was struck by an Iranian missile. The books being shipped were Bitchy! by Roberta Gregory, a massive collection of underground comics celebrating decades of work, and The Atlas Comics Library No. 9, Adventures into Weird Worlds, Volume 1, a collection of uncensored horror comics from the Golden Age by some of the mediums greatest pioneers.

Fantagraphics has secured the rights to publish R. E. Burke’s Visiting America: 19 Days in an I.C.E. Facility, based on her wrongful imprisonment after trying to cross the border into this country from Canada. It will be published in 2027.

Not much comics-specific AI news this month, but if anyone is looking for a “human-made” logo to certify their work has no AI-generated content, Oni Press has unveiled one designed by comic creator Matt Kindt with a Creative Commons license. Feel free to use or alter it, just make sure to use the attribution, “100% HUMAN-MADE© 2026 by Matt Kindt, LLC is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.”

The Comics Journal had a Diamond update with a look at the wider world of comics and how well its doing despite the turmoil. Here’s a more recent and thorough update from Comics Beat and Graphic Policy about the switch from Diamond’s bankruptcy from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 and the struggles of publishers trying to get their inventory back.

Digital comics platform GlobalComix has acquired $13 million in new capital and the digital manga platform INKR, which greatly expands their catalogue. They’ve also named a new CEO: Henrik Rydberg, a “seasoned tech and startup growth executive,” a combination of words that sends a chill down my spine.

Comic Book Yeti did some digging into the executives named in this article in a Bluesky thread well worth reading. GlobalComix eventually amended its AI policy, promising to remove fully AI-generated comics from its platform but allowing its use for “supporting or enhancing a creator’s original work.” The list of examples that follows, including coloring assistance and idea exploration, is concerning to say the least. Also, and this is just me, the fact that they use “for example” in one parenthetical and “e.g.” two bullet points later is sloppy.

Speaking of manga, Dr. Stone artist and manga creator Boichi made headlines by expressing concern that the popularity of Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine might lead to a less “strong and vibrant” manga industry. As someone who can attest to a certain homogenization of comics in the United States thanks to the influence of the Big Two, I hope his concerns are understood and appreciated.

Meanwhile, Boom! Studios, which was recently acquired by Penguin Random House, has announced “a major restructuring” to be better integrated into PRH, including layoffs. Several key editorial staff have remained in place, thankfully.

Comics publisher Silver Sprocket has closed their storefront in San Francisco, effective March 23. A gofundme has been set up to help affected staff.

In a non-comics story that may reverberate outward, online marketplace Whatnot is the subject of 15 arbitration complaints alleging that it is an unregulated gambling operation over its practices regarding trading card sales. I don’t know if this will affect their comics sales and publishing ventures, but you may want to watch how this story develops.

In happier news, there’s a new comics nonprofit in the world dedicated to promoting the art form in Brooklyn and New York that’s launching a new convention! The Brooklyn Organization Dedicated to the Endurance of the Graphic Arts (BODEGA) will run the Brooklyn Expo of Comics (BEC) on November 14 and 15. Applications are open until May 17!

More news out of New York City, as the corner of Delancey and Essex Streets will be permanently known as Jack Kirby Way.

Out in Vermont, artist Stephen R. Bissette, best known for co-creating The Saga of the Swamp Thing, has been named the state’s sixth cartoonist laureate.

The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) Foundation is celebrating 30 years of helping book and comics people in times of need and awarding more than a thousand scholarships!

Interviews & Criticism

Given all the bleak stuff mentioned in the previous section, I thought I’d start this one with an essay from Seth Adrian Romo, “Comics Will Survive Fascism.” And congratulations to Pages and Panels on another year of publishing!

Stages of Rot by Linnea Sterte was a recent favorite of mine, and Gina Gagliano at The Comics Journal spoke with her about that comic as well as the rest of her work, her influences, her love of nature, and being a cartoonist in Sweden.

Aug Stone at The Comics Journal spoke with Jordi Lafebre, the creator of one of our most popular Comics Book Club selections. They discussed comics, film, generative AI, Always Never, and Lafebre’s new work, I Am Their Silence.

I wanted to highlight a couple of pieces from Andy Oliver at Broken Frontier. The first is this look at Mad Villain #1, written by Nikesh Shukla and illustrated by Camille Aubry. The self-published comic is the first of a projected five issues about a middle-aged father who joins an antifa group in Bristol.

The second is his interview with Bex Glendining, mostly about their debut graphic novel, On Starlit Shores, but also about their coloring work.

I’ll end this section with a couple of scholarly pieces. Martin Dolan has this look at Jaime Hernandez’s Locas comics for The Baffler (I might cite this again in a couple of months when we read The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.) and Varsha Singh wrote about E. Dawson Varughese’s Visuality and Identity in Post-Millennial Indian Graphic Narratives for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

Awards

The finalists were announced for the 38th Lambda Literary Awards. In addition to the LGBTQ+ Comics category, the LGBTQ+ Anthology category includes a couple of comics: Come Out and Play: The Queer Sports Project by Meghan Kemp-Gee and Megan Praz published by Stacked Deck Press and Queers at the Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food (with Recipes) edited by Alex D. Ketchum and Megan J. Elias and published by Arsenal Pulp Press.

Heartstopper creator Alice Oseman has received a YA Book Prize Special Achievement Award.

The longlist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction includes the comic Cannon by Lee Lai. The shortlist will be announced on April 21.

The 2026 Herblock Prize was given to editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman with editorial cartoonist Pedro Molina announced as the finalist.

Cartoonist Emily Flake has won the 2026 Thurber Prize for American Humor in Cartoon Art. The award presentation will be May 7 in Columbus, Ohio.

The Society of Illustrators Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Arts Festival was last month, and the SI MoCCA Arts Festival Awards of Excellence were given to 15 artists of varying styles and formats. They included traditional comics, a leatherwork shirt, a tarot deck, and a horse print.

Obituaries

The comics community suffered its share of sadness, as several celebrated creators from all over the world have passed away.

Belgian artist Frank Pé died back in November. A leading figure in Franco-Belgian comics, he was capable of whimsy, dark atmosphere, and everything in between. Known for drawing animals and humans with equal panache, his most famous comics are Broussaille and Zoo. He was 69.

Perhaps the most famous death in comics here in the United States this past month was that of Sam Kieth, who died of Lewy Body Dementia. He was 63. I know I’m far from alone in writing that his series The Maxx had a profound effect on me when it came out. It combined a psychological depth and experimental style that helped me realize what comics were capable of. It was eventually adapted into an animated series. He will be deeply missed.

Animator Barry Caldwell, known for childhood staples such as Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, has died. He was 68.

Glen Baxter, a British cartoonist known for absurdist humor in magazine and greeting card illustrations, has died. He was 82.

Manga creator Yoshiharu Tsuge died of aspiration pneumonia. He was 88. The Comics Journal has collected essays and remembrances about his work. An incredibly influential and celebrated artist, a collection of his comics, He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid, is set to be published by Drawn and Quarterly.

Libertarian and comics historian Brian Doherty died after a fall in San Francisco. His most notable contribution to the latter may be his 2022 book Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix. He was 57.

Chilean cartoonist José Palomo Fuentes passed away at the age of 82. A towering figure of Latin American humor, his comic strips were known for their introspection and political activism. Forced to flee into exile after the rise of Pinochet, he spent most of his adult life in Mexico.

Finally, Belgian artist Hermann Huppen, often credited using only his first name, has died. He was 88. Another monumental figure in Franco-Belgian comics, he was awarded the 2016 Grand Prix at Angoulême. His last work will be published posthumously on April 30, titled Cartagena.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on April 15 to discuss Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts. Thanks again for everything.

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In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on Racism in Fantasy

The person who hated Dandadan said this was their favorite manga yet! Those unfamiliar with manga tropes were still familiar with fantasy tropes, which helped bridge the gap. Most of us are fans of “books with maps,” so that was a huge selling point. Everyone loved the artwork! The character design, architecture, and landscapes were all singled out for praise. We discussed the central metaphor of art as magic, how it’s a skill that needs to be developed, and how it expresses itself through different media in the setting. Coco’s ingenuity had us all rooting for her. The apprentices all had distinct personalities, and we all liked Master Qifrey, though we thought it was naive of him to leave four children all by themselves and expect everything to be fine. XD I found this comic extremely charming and noted that I’ll be recommending it to Harry Potter fans as a worthier replacement. Almost everyone said they’ll continue reading it or watching the anime adaptation premiering next month. One person had already started the second volume, while another had accidentally gotten the first volume of the spinoff series, Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen. That features characters who hadn’t been introduced in the first volume of the main series, so they tried not to read it for fear of spoilers, but still wanted the recipes.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, April 15 to discuss Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts.

What We're Reading

April 15 - Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose, José Villarrubia, and Various

May 20 - The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime Hernandez

June 17 - I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop

July 15 - Our Dreams at Dusk, Volume 1 by Yuhki Kamatani

August 19 - Minor Arcana, Volume 1: The Fool by Jeff Lemire

September 16 - Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka

October 21 - Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell

November 18 - Loving, Ohio by Matthew Erman and Sam Beck

December 16 - Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young

January 20, 2027 - Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath

Next month’s selection is on hoopla, much to everyone’s relief. It’s also a slim, standalone volume, so nobody has to worry about a cliffhanger or multiple follow-up volumes. Lol I might shuffle some of these selections in the future, since there are more continuing series than I thought.

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About What We’ve Read

has covered Witch Hat Atelier several times for his newsletter, including for his “One Great Panel” and “One Great Character” series. I haven’t read all of them, but seeing this manga was the fourth best that he read in 2024 was what got me interested in it in the first place.

The first volume was covered on the Mangasplaining podcast featuring back in 2022! provided a transcript.

Creator Kamome Shirahama spoke with Anime News Network and Manga Mavericks while they were covering a reading and Q&A she gave to Kodansha House in 2024. Anime Trending spoke with her at TCAF later that same year.

The international acclaim for this series is vast! Witch Hat Atelier was nominated for the 42nd and 44th Kodansha Manga Award in the General category in 2018 and 2020 and nominated for the French ACBD’s Prix Asie de la Critique in 2018 and at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2019 for Best Youth Comic.

Speaking of French awards, it won the Daruma d'or manga at the Japan Expo Awards, the Mangawa Prize for best seinen manga, and Les Mordus du Manga award Grand Prize, all in 2019, and the Babelio 2020 award in the manga category. In Spain, it won the Manga Barcelona award for the seinen category in 2018, 2022, and 2023. It was nominated for the 11th Manga Taishō awards in 2018 and the Korean Ridibooks Comic Award in 2019.

Kodansha USA’s English release won the 2020 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia. Stephen Kohler’s English translation and Lys Blakeslee’s lettering won the Japan Society and Anime NYC’s first American Manga Awards in the Best Translation and Best Lettering categories, respectively, in 2024. Witch Hat Atelier won the Harvey Award for Best Manga in 2020 and again in 2025.

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, April 10.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I promised to be more transparent about bad news this year, so I want to start this month by sharing that I have been unsuccessful so far in securing a table at a convention. I knew I was aiming a little too high, and I have started looking at smaller venues, like single-day art and craft fairs or horror conventions. Either way, I promise to provide updates in this space. Thanks for your support!

The Kickstarter campaign for The Dreamlands Anthology from Warden Comics is fully funded with a few days left to go! I’ve had the chance to be on a few podcasts to talk about it, starting with on Sunday, March 1, shortly after the campaign started. I got to talk about my six-page Alban of the West story in it, “The Descent,” drawn by artist David Escobar and lettered by Buddy Beaudoin, along with Alban himself and how I came up with the story and the character. I felt out of practice, but Cody is a kind and gracious host!

Next, I spoke with Christian at Fugitive Poems Comics on March 12, along with Tom Lynott, who has a comic about Dagon in the Dreamlands Anthology and drew on his own experience to write it. Don’t let the thumbnail fool you, Ludie was unable to join us, but he was with us in spirit. We discussed our influences and how we each discovered Lovecraft. It was a fun conversation!

Finally, I spoke with Jameson Rohrer at on March 14. Jameson asked about Dreamlands, Rise of the Flightless, and Blackout. At this point, I was feeling more comfortable talking on camera again. If you watch all three in rapid succession, you can see me develop as a podcast guest in real time!

I’m also scheduled to talk to at Comix Wellspring on March 30, the day after C2E2. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to share about the weekend, but I hope I won’t be too burned out. Lol Either way, I hope you can watch!

My biggest news, though, is that I have a new storefront on comix.one! They’ll be selling my comics digitally and print on demand, so they’re probably the most reliable place to get my self-published comics. I’ll be uploading all my future comics there, so follow me and watch this space for updates!

Rise of the Flightless is still available on itch.io and will be launching on Kickstarter soon. Be sure to follow that campaign, too!

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 is still being shipped.

The Prism anthology is available on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing! You can also find it in my online shop.

Some Thoughts on Racism in Fantasy

When I started this month’s reading, I was worried about how I would react to something so beloved having one of my least favorite tropes in fantasy: that magic is reserved for people with some sort of innate specialness. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case with Witch Hat Atelier, and some of my favorite fantasy works subvert or reject this trope. (I wish I’d brought up N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy and I will defend Broom Boy with my dying breath!) Minor spoiler, but it’s revealed in the first issue that anyone is capable of creating magic, which is why it’s a closely guarded secret.

I know I touched on this in my essay on world building in fantasy almost a year ago (wow, time flies!), so I’ll keep this short. Also, I still have to get ready for C2E2 and I’m kind of all over the place. The idea that there’s some sort of inherent quality necessary for magic through blood or class offends my egalitarian sensibilities, but the problem is deeper than that.

I don’t know what comes to mind when I mention racism in fantasy, but I imagine it’s the typical tropes that are problematic at best and hateful at worst. Even the beloved Narnia books by C. S. Lewis have malicious “dark-skinned” characters who “smell like garlic.” And those are intended for children!

There’s a genetic fatalism in classic fantasy that always bothers me. “Dwarves are inherently good builders” or “goblins are inherently evil” may seem like innocuous storytelling devices, but it feels like a short leap from that to other statements about what kinds of people are better at certain tasks than others. Small wonder Tolkien fandom has a white supremacy problem. “All [blank] are good/bad at [blank]” gets worse the more specific you get.

I’ve been hearing that a lot of good work has been done to undo some of that, which is great. Of course, people who have promoted or internalized white supremacy see this as a personal attack. I’ll never forget a heated conversation I had with a nonwhite friend who was very upset at the very idea of nonwhite elves in a Tolkien adaptation, and we didn’t even get into how much I dislike the whole “elves are better at everything” quality.

I understand how this whole rigid system has served as a sort of storytelling shorthand in the past, and this can be uncomfortable ground to tread, but part of the point of telling stories is to examine and uncover uncomfortable truths. And part of the point of fantasy is to imagine a better world.

Thanks for reading! What are some of your favorite fantasy stories? Problematic faves welcome! Lol Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose, José Villarrubia, and Various!

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I meant to write up a retrospective of my C2E2 2025 experience, then it became a joint post about C2E2 and NYCC, but now I think it’s safe to say that ship has sailed. Not for lack of trying! I had a draft post saved for months, but it kept getting postponed for NEWS Digests and anthology announcements.

It’s probably for the best; out of all the panels I listed out last year, I can probably count the ones I attended on one hand. Most of my time was spent in Artist Alley, hanging out with old friends and making new ones. Eli Estrella Pérez provided me with a moment I’ll take to my grave when she recognized me from this newsletter. Subscribe to her newsletter in return! She makes great comics.

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Quick note: C2E2, like most things now, is not without controversy. Its parent company, ReedPop, is owned by the same company that owns the LexisNexis database, which is used by ICE. ReedPop issued a statement, though I’m loath to take such corporate defensiveness at face value. Several people I respect and admire are skipping the con out of protest, and I don’t blame them. I’d already gotten my professional badge when I learned of this connection, so I decided to continue to attend. I’m going because I want to support local artists, not ReedPop.

My C2E2 Schedule

Friday, March 27

Comics and Metal!

Friday, March 27 • 5:30 PM - 615 PM • Room S405-B

This one got bumped up in the schedule, so I won’t get to it without a teleporter, but wanted to mention it. Like comics and wrestling, the overlap of comics and metal fandoms is huge and something I’d love to learn more about. I hope is able to make it or that I get to talk to the panelists.

Building Community Through Shop Events

Friday, March 27 • 6:30 PM - 7:15 PM • Room S402-A

It’s unlikely that I’ll make it to this one, too, but I had to single it out because of how important I think it is. I’m very interested in the comics retailer experience, as anyone who reads the Comics NEWS Digest can attest. This is for a couple of reasons: as a writer who would like to get his comics into stores someday and as someone who believes in community building. Comics are art and art is important for community; also, I can remember when comic shops were downright hostile places to women and minorities and I’m glad that ‘s changing.

Inside Afro-Audacity Animation: Building ABASS, A Black Animated Sketch Show

Friday, March 27 • 6:45 PM - 7:30 PM • Room S401-D

Nerds Off the Grid: Chicago’s Black and Brown Geek Culture

Friday, March 27 • 6:45 PM - 7:30 PM • Room S405-B

I’ll be heading to the convention center as soon as I’m off work at 5:00, and these are most likely the first panels I’ll be able to see before meeting up with friends. It’s a tough, almost unfair choice!

The Haunting of Daily Life: How the Real World Shapes Horror Fiction

Friday, March 27 • 8:00 PM - 8:45 PM • Room S402-B

This one is late enough that I think I can head over after I finish hanging out with friends, and it features an award-winning librarian! As much as we might want to avoid the real world because there’s enough horror in it, I think this could prove to be a vital way to both cope with and change the world.

Saturday, March 28

Imposter! Feeling Like a Fraud

Saturday, Mar 28 • 11:15 AM - 12:00 AM • Room S405-B

I can count on one hand the number of creative people I’ve met who couldn’t relate to the topic of this panel.

I Was So Much Older Then, I’m Younger Than That Now: From Indie Darlings to Bestsellers

Saturday, March 28 • 12:15 PM - 1:00 PM • Room S402-A

This panel includes Lucy Knisley, who I’ve met several times, and is moderated by Tad Eggleston, co-host of the 22 Panels podcast, on which I’d love to be a guest someday.

Early Black Comics Creators: the 1930s through the 1960s

Saturday, March 28 • 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM • Room S405-B

This feels like too important of a history lesson to pass up, though.

Good Enough to Eat: Comic Book Cookbooks and more!

Saturday, March 28 • 2:45 PM - 3:30 PM • Room S402-B

If I miss Lucy at the earlier panel, I can see her at this one with the added bonus of Sarah Becan, who I’ve also met several times. They’re both delightful people!

CovrPrice Live with Jenny Frison: Exploring Her Most Valuable Covers

Saturday, March 28 • 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM • Room S402-A

This feels a little too close to treating comics like a commodity, but Jenny Frison is incredibly talented and it would be nice to see a showcase of her art.

Kyle Higgins: Radiant Black, the Massiveverse, and More

Saturday, March 28 • 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM • Room S402-B

I know a few people who have contributed to the Massiveverse and, though I’m woefully behind on most of those comics, I love that it started in Chicago.

So Much More Than Wednesday Superheroes: Independent Creators Provide Depth and Breadth to the Medium

Saturday, March 28 • 4:30 PM - 5:15 PM • Room S401-D

This panel has Terry Moore and C. Spike Trotman, and I feel compelled to support indie comics and creators.

Why Horror Comics?

Saturday, March 28 • 4:30 PM - 5:15 PM • Room S405-A

On the other hand, this panel is moderated by my friend and features Tim Seeley and . There’s no way I’m missing this one.

Collecting Your Infinity Stones: How Securing and Retaining Your Character Rights Forms Your Copyright Gauntlet

Saturday, March 28 • 5:15 PM - 6:00 PM • Room S402-B

This panel is about one of those practical considerations of which I think more creators need to be made aware.

Women Supporting Women: A Cross-Generational Cosplay Conversation

Saturday, March 28 • 5:15 PM - 6:00 PM • Room S402-A

Meanwhile, I’m always curious about cosplay and this panel will feature “multiple generations. . . from teens to seniors,” which sounds heartwarming.

The Black Geek Documentary: Redefining Culture, Creativity & Representation

Saturday, March 28 • 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM • Room S405-B

This sounds both informative and entertaining. Even if I don’t make it here, I hope to watch the movie! Or learn more about the host group, Geekset.

Misogynoir and Multiverses: A Black Girl’s Guide to Fandom Culture

Saturday, March 28 • 6:30 PM - 7:15 PM • Room S402-A

I mentioned earlier how comic shops can be hostile environments and that’s true of comics culture as a whole. This panel can shed an important light on that, but also provide some much-needed perspective.

From the Manga Pages to the Halls of Academia - An Introduction to Anime and Manga Studies

Saturday, March 28 • 7:00 PM - 7:45 PM • Room S405-A

This panel combines some of my favorite things: libraries, manga, and academia!

Charity Art Auction to Benefit St. Jude Children’s Hospital

Saturday, March 28 • 7:30 PM - 10:30 PM • Room S402-B

I may not have much disposable income, but this is for a very worthy cause.

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Sunday, March 29

Comic Creator Connection

Sunday, March 29 • 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM • Room S401-D

These networking events are mainly the reason I attend conventions in the first place. I’ve made some great connections at these before, and I’m working on a project I started with an artist I met here. I’m not missing this for anything.

How to Run a Fan Event

Sunday, March 29 • 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM • Room S402-A

I sometimes get asked about running a comics book club, and I think this panel could help anyone curious about the logistics of planning something like that.

Why Comic Book Crowdfunding?

Sunday, March 29 • 12:15 PM - 1:00 PM • Room S405-B

This is another panel moderated by featuring as well as Dan Parent, another creator I greatly respect and admire. I imagine this one will fill up quickly, but crowdfunding is something I feel I should learn more about as it’s one of the few avenues for new and inexperienced creators.

It’s Actually Really Hard, and You’d Probably Freeze to Death: Living in Space

Sunday, March 29 • 2:45 PM - 3:30 PM • Room S401-ABC

Science is fascinating! Learning real scientific principles can only improve my own science fiction writing, but either way I get to learn a ton at this panel.

Cool People Talking About Comics

Sunday, March 29 • 2:45 PM - 3:30 PM • Room S403

At the same time, this panel is full of incredibly talented people! Playwrights, podcasters, publishers, creators, I’d love to hear them talk.

Queer Horror Panel

Sunday, March 29 • 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM • Room S404

Outside of the Drag Story Hours (yay!), I think this panel might be the only one focused on the LGBTQ+ community. Definitely want to check this out!

Middle Eastern/North African Representation in Media

Sunday, March 29 • 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM • Room S401-ABC

I’ll have to figure out how to be in two places at once, though. As someone interested in representation in media, I want to learn more about this topic from the perspective of a marginalized group that’s often been presented extremely poorly in the United States (and that’s a massive understatement).

BAD IDEA: The C2E2 Panel

Sunday, March 29 • 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM • Room S403

Bad Idea is one of the most consistent and versatile independent comics publishers and I’ve been meaning to go to their panel every year.

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That’s everything! Am I leaving out anything important? I’d love to hear from you! If you’re going to C2E2, please leave a comment about what you’ll be doing and maybe we can meet. What sounds interesting to you? Do you enjoy panels at conventions or skip them altogether? Feel free to share your thoughts below!

The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on April 15 to discuss Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose, José Villarrubia, and Various. Take care, everyone!

Hello, everyone! This is the Comics NEWS Digest, an aggregation of all the top comics and comics-related stories that caught my attention that I thought you might enjoy reading. I post these two weeks after every regular newsletter.

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NEWS

The Comics Professional Retailers Organization had its annual meeting last month, from February 18 to 21, in Glendale, CA. Apparently, “resilience” was the unofficial theme of this year’s ComicsPRO, with reports of record sales, new deals, and publisher-provided food trucks. Robert Kirkman gave the keynote address. You can read ’s reporting on the “stunningly good vibes” and his assessment of who won and lost the weekend.

One of those deal announcements was Yen Press, LLC’s acquisition of fourteen new titles for publication. Another, much larger, acquisition in manga was Media Do International’s purchase of Seven Seas Entertainment. The largest eBook distribution company in Japan now owns what was the largest independent publisher of manga in English. I hope that works out.

The final big manga story for this month is a horrifying scandal involving the sexual abuse of minors, so skip this and the next paragraph if you want to avoid such material. Manga writer Kazuaki Kurita has been sued for grooming and sexually assaulting a student while working as a teacher at a private high school. When this news broke, it was revealed that Kurita had previously been arrested and fined for the possession and creation of child sex abuse material. His publisher, Shogakukan, had cancelled the series Daten Sakusen, which Kurita had written under the pen name Shoichi Yamamoto, but had rehired him under a different pen name to write the series Jōjin Kamen, which has been cancelled in the wake of this new scandal.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, an editor at Shogakukan had attempted to mediate between Kurita and his victim, offering her a settlement of more than one million yen to stay quiet about the abuse so Jōjin Kamen could continue publication. These revelations led a number of mangaka to remove their work from the Manga ONE platform, Shogakukan’s digital app, in protest. Shogakukan apologized but also admitted that while all of this had been happening, they had rehired Tatsuya Matsuki under a pen name after he’d been indicted for indecent assault. The publisher has since announced it will be setting up a third-party investigative committee to determine how this pattern of abuse happened.

Another month, another book ban update courtesy of Book Riot. A nationwide book ban was introduced in the United States House of Representatives shortly after the State of the Union address. The bill, HR7661, defines “sexually oriented material” as anything that so much as mentions “gender dysphoria or transgenderism” and would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. If you live in Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, or the 15th District of Illinois, call your representatives and tell them to pull their sponsorship of this bill. And if you live anywhere else, call your reps and tell them to vote no. It’s important to remember that book bans are extremely unpopular!

Utah added four more titles to its list of books banned from public schools, bringing the total up to twenty-seven. This update includes the graphic novel adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale written by Margaret Atwood illustrated by Renee Nault.

In artificial intelligence news, the Supreme Court declined to rule on a case, effectively eliminating the chance for AI-generated works to be copyrighted.

In the semi-regular Diamond Bankruptcy update, now that the bankruptcy is Chapter 7 instead of a Chapter 11 filing, publishers are arguing that they deserve to have their inventory returned to them instead of having it liquidated or sold off. I cannot imagine what they’re going through. The Comics Journal has another update and a look at the effect on the comics community at large.

Also at The Comics Journal, an update and examination of the cancellation of the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

In retailer news, Publishers Weekly had this look at how some are enticing new and old readers, including through the use of social media and puppets.

This month also sees the news of the return of two beloved (by me, but I’m sure plenty of other people) series. First up, Concrete by Paul Chadwick! One of the first indie comics I ever read, this is a funny but melancholy adventure story about a man whose brain is put into an indestructible body by aliens. Second, Sebastian O written by Grant Morrison and co-created by Steve Yeowell! This was one of the first Vertigo comics I ever read and maybe my first written by Morrison. It’s been out of print for a while and I’m so happy it’s back!

There’s a couple of bits of publishing staffing news. First, Dark Horse Comics founder and publisher Mike Richardson is leaving the company after 40 years. Unfortunately, instead of leaving on his own terms and naming his successor, it looks like he’s being forced out by the company’s parent company, hedge fund adjacent borderline monopoly Embracer Group, and temporarily replaced with a gaming executive more aligned with their values.

In happier news, Vault Comics has announced four new hires in their Editorial, Sales, and Crowdfunding departments and the promotion of Executive Editor Der-shing Helmer to Vice President, Special Projects and Crowdfunding. Congratulations to Helmer and to new Crowdfunding Director Chris Byer, Sales Coordinator Madison Bickford, Editor Rachel Pinnelas, and Assistant Editor AJ Shannon! I’m looking forward to seeing what you do at Vault.

I’ll end the NEWS section with a couple more stories about the intersection of comics and politics. Fantagraphics announced it will be publishing Requiem for Gaza by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, a comic about the lives of Palestinians displaced by Israel’s genocidal campaign against them. Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh has been using comics in her campaign to represent the state’s Ninth District. Don’t forget to vote in the primary March 17, Illinoisans!

Interviews & Criticism

In addition to the reporting linked above, David Harper interviewed a variety of comic industry insiders at ComicsPRO about what gives them hope and conducted a “straw poll” about sales charts and the data they present.

Revisiting Dark Horse and one of its signature series, Comic Book Yeti shared a Mike Mignola interview from more than thirty years ago on the cusp of the first major Hellboy mini series, Seed of Destruction.

Sally Madden at The Comics Journal presented a conversation between Whit Taylor and Mattie Lubchansky after the Small Press Expo (SPX).

Also at The Comics Journal, Kaoru Kumi revisits an earlier manga scandal, the allegations of tracing against artist Hisashi Eguchi, and provides a look at the greater cultural context.

Scott Cederlund has a close look at a manga at From Cover to Cover, examining Hirayasumi, Volume 7 by Keigo Shinzo, a delightful slice-of-life story.

As for genAI, Andy Oliver at Broken Frontier has a look at Brains by Alexandra Gallant-Lee, a self-published, forty-page rebuttal to AI’s “inevitability” and a celebration of human creativity.

Another clap back to genAI can be found in a Washington Post opinion piece about Jack Kirby and museum exhibitions about his work, including the iconic cover of Captain America #1 on display at the Smithsonian for the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.

Kendra Winchester at Book Riot has this look at the value of graphic nonfiction. Memoir comics have been booming for a while now, and it’s good to remember what an effective medium comics are for telling human stories.

One of the best memoir comics I read last year was The Advocate by Eddie Ahn after seeing him speak here in Chicago. Amy Zhou interviewed him for SOLRAD.

Awards

Lots of awards news this month! First up is a bit of news, as The Observer has renamed its graphic short story prize after journalist and champion of comics Rachel Cooke, who passed away last November. It will now be the Rachel Cooke Graphic Short Story Prize. It’s a legacy and an honor that is well deserved.

I’ll start with awards that simply have a comics or graphic novel category. The Bram Stoker Awards given out by the Horror Writers Association has five nominees for Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel, including Jumpscare by writer and artist Danny Luckert.

The British Book Awards has introduced a new category for 2026 for Graphic Novel Book of the Year. Among those shortlisted was Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith.

The finalists for the 2026 Libby Book Awards have been announced. The two selections for Best Comic/Graphic Novel feel like they couldn’t be more different: Absolute Wonder Woman, Volume 1 by and Hayden Sherman and Spent by Alison Bechdel, though there’s probably a graduate thesis in explicating how they’re two sides of the same coin.

The GLAAD Media Awards were last week, and included Avengers Academy: Marvel’s Voices for Outstanding Comic Book and Gaysians by Mike Curato for Outstanding Original Graphic Novel/Anthology.

As for comics-specific awards, we’ve got two being given out for the very first time! The ballots are open for the inaugural Zelda Awards celebrating women in comics. The winners will be announced on April 11.

The CBC Graphic Novel Advocate Award has been given to Gina Gagliano, Maia Kobabe, and Andrea “Andy” Miller. This award is for recognizing those who promote and celebrate comics as a literary source for young readers.

The first Jack & Roz Kirby Awards were given out at the Original Art Expo last month, and included five core awards and two legacy awards. I remember when Jack Kirby passed away and several creators lamented that there wasn’t an award named in his honor. I’m glad that’s changed.

Obituaries

Sadly, the comics community experienced loss this past month as well. Artist Jacopo Camagni died after complications from heart surgery days after the premiere of a new Marvel series featuring his artwork. He was only 48 years old.

Colorist Tatjana Wood, who had worked on some of DC’s most innovative and original comics and for which she won two Shazam Awards, passed away at 99.

In France, artist Clément Oubrerie succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was the creator of more than thirty books and illustrated novels but is perhaps best known for the Aya of Yopougon series he created with Marguerite Abouet. He was 59 years old.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on March 18 to discuss Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1. Thanks again for everything.

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Here’s the main cover by artist Leonardo Colapietro:

I already had an idea for a cosmic horror story featuring Alban of the West, a reinterpretation of “The Dunwich Horror” that introduced a new color for his mysterious right eye and powers that he didn’t fully understand. My pitch to the editor was for “The Descent,” a six-page comic: “A lone gunman with supernatural powers rides into the Old West town of New Dunwich. After unsettling interactions with the residents, he is confronted with terrifying knowledge of the cosmos unlike anything he has ever experienced. Before he descends completely into madness, [spoilers].” I can’t give away the ending here! You’ll have to get the anthology to find out what happens next.

This continues my collaboration with my team for The Passion of St. Alban of the West, artist David Escobar and letterer Buddy Beaudoin. I was excited to see David render eldritch beings and Buddy select a font and design for the R’lyehian language. They did not disappoint! Here’s a promotional image:

I couldn’t be happier with this comic! I hope to work with Warden Comics again and that this generates interest for more comics with Alban of the West.

Support the Dreamlands Anthology

The Dreamlands Anthology will feature several other talented creators, including and a couple of people I know from The Comic Jam, Tom Lynott and KVGir. There’s a variety of tones, genres, and styles in this book!

I can’t wait to see this book come to fruition. Please spread the word and contribute however you can. Support indie comics! Thanks again for everything.

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Hello, everyone! I brought a couple of other manga volumes that I thought would relate to the discussion. The first was Summertime Rendering by Yasuki Tanaka, which was recommended to me by my friend Allen Wu, a talented comic creator in his own right, because it’s another horror manga with a rural setting, local dialects, doppelgängers, and ubiquitous sound effects. I really enjoy it as well! The second was Massive, a collection of gay erotic manga (so, slightly NSFW link maybe), because the topic of BL manga was inevitable. One person sought out the latter for purchase right away. Lol

In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on Hermann Hesse’s “The Emperor Moth”

This proved to be much more popular than Dandadan! Lol The person who hated last month’s selection said they found the characters in this month’s much more grounded and the setting more believable. Everyday life is more of a focus in this story as opposed to adventures or dramatic fights. This was a very suspenseful manga, even when characters were going about their lives at school or the shopping center. Everyone praised the atmosphere and general creeping sense of dread. One person really liked the interstitial pages that provided trivia about the characters. I brought up the cultural significance of nosebleeds in manga, which greatly recontextualized one of the scariest moments. The queer subtext was the main topic of conversation, but we also touched on the existential subtext of the premise. How much do Hikaru’s memories inform who he is now? Is Hikaru acting on his feelings for Yoshiki because of his memories of those feelings or are they genuine and he feels less inhibited about them? Those of us who haven’t already been reading The Summer Hikaru Died said they would probably read the next few volumes or watch the anime.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, March 18 to discuss Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1.

What We're Reading

March 18 - Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama

April 15 - Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose, José Villarrubia, and Various

May 20 - The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime Hernandez

June 17 - I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop

July 15 - Our Dreams at Dusk, Volume 1 by Yuhki Kamatani

August 19 - Minor Arcana, Volume 1: The Fool by Jeff Lemire

September 16 - Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka

October 21 - Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell

November 18 - Loving, Ohio by Matthew Erman and Sam Beck

December 16 - Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young

January 20, 2027 - Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath

We planned out the rest of the year! It turned out three months in a row of manga was more than enough for everyone present, and Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts was by far the most popular title from the survey I sent out. People missed reading self-contained, “one and done” volumes, so I’ll have to keep that in mind going forward. I made sure to have an LGBTQ comic for Pride Month and a horror title for October. Here’s to more great comics in 2026!

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About What We’ve Read

I must once again start by recommending Josh Sippie’s MangaCraft newsletter, which first brought The Summer Hikaru Died to my attention with a look at “One Great Panel” that would be a spoiler if it didn’t happen within the first ten pages. Josh has also examined the subtlety of this manga and its use of sound effects.

You can read an interview with creator Mokumokuren here. The Summer Hikaru Died has won several awards, and has been adapted into a popular anime, but also an audiobook and a stage play.

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, March 13.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Crit One 4: This Spell Could Have Been an Email has reached its funding goal! This is a really fun anthology. I was one of several writers of an illustrated prose piece with the premise of an email chain in a fantasy setting. It was a blast to be a part of! The campaign has one week left, please consider supporting it. Thanks!

Another anthology for a worthy cause is being assembled! is being organized by my friend and will raise money for RAICES to provide legal and other material support for immigrants and their families. Please subscribe and contribute however you can! Thank you.

It’s been almost a full year since I wrote a one-page comic for The Comic Jam but I’m hoping to be more involved this year, even as I devote myself to more projects. Last week’s theme was “One Actor’s Multiple Characters.” I was inspired by comics writer Gail Simone’s trolling of Rob Schneider on social media and the fact that if you did a Google Images search of “Rob Schneider characters” you’d find multiple instances of horrifying brown- and yellowface makeup.

This comic was drawn by Ash De Luney and lettered by Kevin D. Lintz. This was my first time working with Ash, and I worried that I didn’t provide enough input, but he did a great job! His cartoony style is a perfect fit. I’ve worked with Kevin before, so I knew to expect quality work. He matched Ash’s style without overshadowing it and complemented my slapdash writing. Thanks, guys!

(My favorite part about returning to The Comic Jam is that despite failing to update my biography, it’s still accurate that I have “comics in two forthcoming anthologies.” I can hardly believe I’ve been so consistent in my output!)

The Kickstarter campaign for The Dreamlands Anthology from Warden Comics is starting in a few days! My six-page Alban of the West story, “The Descent” is drawn by artist David Escobar and lettered by Buddy Beaudoin. Here’s the first page below. I’m really excited for this book! Please follow the campaign.

To promote the Dreamlands Anthology once the campaign starts, I have podcast appearances lined up with Cody at for March 1, Christian at Fugitive Poems Comics on March 12, Jameson Rohrer at on March 14, and at Comix Wellspring on March 30. Mark your calendars!

Rise of the Flightless is still available on itch.io and will be launching on Kickstarter soon. Be sure to follow that campaign, too!

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 is still being shipped.

The Prism anthology is available on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing! You can also find it in my online shop.

Some Thoughts on Hermann Hesse’s “The Emperor Moth”

I promise this month’s essay subject makes sense in context. I was originally going to write about rural horror, but struggled to come up with anything. Josh’s essay on sound was better anyway. Go read that! I tried pivoting to contrasting horror stories set in the country with those set in cities, but it was still a slog. Then, I realized I could write about a very subtle character detail in The Summer Hikaru Died that we didn’t get around to discussing during our meeting.

After Chapter 2, it’s noted that Yoshiki has the nickname “Emil” because of a verbal quirk he adopted in school. The Translation Notes at the end of the volume state that this is because it’s a quirk used by one of the main characters of Hermann Hesse’s short story “Das Nachtpfauenauge,” or “The Emperor Moth” in English, which is required reading in many Japanese middle schools.

First, I think it’s a cute detail that Yoshiki adopts a personality trait from a story he read in school. It speaks to how impressionable the character is, but also to that time in life when people grow and try out different ways of expressing themselves while learning who they are and who they want to be. It further cements how these characters are schoolchildren.

Second, I love cross-cultural exchanges like this! I feel like it really speaks to the universal power of art and how it can transcend certain barriers. One of my favorite examples is how Dolly Parton has a large fanbase in Kenya. I never would have imagined that Hermann Hesse would be popular in Japan.

I had a feeling the story itself held some significance for The Summer Hikaru Died beyond being a cultural touchstone. I didn’t have time to read it before our meeting, and there didn’t seem to be any English versions at the Chicago Public Library (although there are about a million copies of Siddhartha). I had to settle for a Google-translated Wikipedia page.

Consider this paragraph a spoiler warning! I want to talk about this story in the context of The Summer Hikaru Died, but worry that doing so might make some plot points obvious or that my baseless speculation might ruin something. I’m less worried about spoiling a short story from more than a hundred years ago.

“The Emperor Moth” concerns two ten-year-old boys, Emil and Heinrich, who collect moths and butterflies. Emil is a teacher’s son known for “impeccability” and being “the ideal boy”; naturally, Heinrich hates and envies him. When Heinrich catches a rare emperor moth, Emil points out its flaws. Two years later, Emil catches an even rarer species of emperor moth. Heinrich goes to see him, but Emil isn’t home. Seeing the moth and overcome by its beauty, Heinrich impetuously steals it and hides it in his pocket. When a maid approaches, he becomes guilty and tries to return the moth but he’s damaged it.

Heinrich confesses to his mother, who tells him he must apologize to Emil and offer to replace the moth. Heinrich does so, but Emil reacts to the confession by saying, “So, so, that’s the kind of person you are” and refusing a replacement. Heinrich goes home and crushes his butterflies into dust.

The metaphorical parallels feel obvious, but it’s not like the paired main characters map perfectly onto each other. It makes sense that Yoshiki was drawn to Emil; he’s consistently praised for being smart and it’s taken as a given that he’ll move to Tokyo when he graduates. Furthermore, just as Emil sees Heinrich for the “kind of person” he is (albeit in sort of a dickish way), Yoshiki sees through to Hikaru’s true nature. But Emil and Heinrich are in no way friends and Yoshiki and Hikaru are devoted to each other, even codependent.

Also, what would the moth represent? Will Hikaru destroy something Yoshiki holds dear? Could the moth be the “real” Hikaru that Hikaru is only pretending to be in order to be close to Yoshiki? Both Yoshiki and Hikaru are hiding something, but only Yoshiki seems to feel any guilt. Or could Yoshiki himself be the moth and Hikaru may one day destroy him?

“The Emperor Moth” is mostly told in flashback, with an adult, traumatized Heinrich explaining why he no longer collects moths and butterflies. Is The Summer Hikaru Died going to end with an adult Yoshiki living in Tokyo explaining why he left home? An adult Hikaru confessing to the murder of Yoshiki? I have no idea, but I’m excited to find out.

Thanks for reading! What are some of your favorite examples of cross-cultural exchange? Are you a fan of Hermann Hesse? Did I completely botch the plot of “The Emperor Moth”? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama!

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Hello, everyone! This is the Comics NEWS Digest, an aggregation of all the top comics and comics-related stories that caught my attention that I thought you might enjoy reading. I post these two weeks after every regular newsletter.

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NEWS

I don’t think I have to provide any preamble or background on what’s going on in Minneapolis. The city is suffering under an invasion from our government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who have terrorized and executed its residents. Those residents continue to fight back, though. One of the many protestors, photographed by Theia Chatelle in an indelible image that will certainly appear in a history textbook someday, turned out to be local comics retailer Greg Ketter of DreamHaven Books. He spoke with Zach Rabiroff at The Comics Journal about his shop, his history of activism (he co-founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund), and his community.

spoke to members of the Minneapolis comics community about how they’re coping, what they’re creating, and the ICE Out Comics initiative. Another way comics creators have expressed solidarity and support is through the #Comics4Liam project, named after the five-year-old boy detained by ICE with his father and taken to a detention facility in Texas. For more information about that project and how you can help, check out their website here.

The Angoulême Comics Festival may have been cancelled, but it’s still making headlines. Plans are being made for a new festival, although the previous organizer is threatening a lawsuit to block those plans.

In better news out of France, publisher Morgen has made an exclusive deal for a “multi-volume graphic novel series” from the dream team of Ram V, Anand Radhakrishnan, Evan Cagle, Aditya Bidikar, and editor Eric Harburn. Don’t worry; it’ll be available in English through Image.

Book Riot has another round up of court cases involving book bans and other censorship news.

In generative AI news, it was revealed that one of the top manga on Japan’s biggest digital platform, My Dear Wife, Will You Be My Lover?, was created using AI-generated images. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, more than 10% of Japanese manga creators reported a decline in earnings because of generative AI, including “artists, illustrators, and other creators.” It’s not all bad news, though! San Diego Comic-Con, after considerable outrage, changed the policy for its art show and banned the presence of AI-created images.

In place of any substantial news about Diamond’s ongoing bankruptcy, there are multiple items about the results, whether that’s an examination of all the comics publishers who went out of business or the different companies jockeying to replace Diamond for comics distribution. Meanwhile, comics publisher DSTLRY has suspended their publishing altogether in order to “regroup and reset,” leaving several creators in the lurch.

Comics Beat also has a look at how layoffs at Amazon affected ComiXology.

In more news out of Japan, a major manga piracy site has been shut down. That piracy site was based in China, and tensions between the two countries have grown recently thanks to a couple of anime and manga collaborations between Detective Conan and My Hero Academia.

There are more updates to a couple of stories that have gotten overlooked amid the chaos of our current moment. First, several artists have reached a settlement with Cadence Comic Arts after suing the art dealers for “egregious misconduct.” The terms call for a dismissal of the case, but the artists retain the right to reopen it if the terms of the settlement are not meant. Second, though no legal action was taken, an artists’ collective opened up about the mismanagement at publisher Hiveworks. You can read the full statement here.

A different comics publisher with a somewhat turbulent history lately, Silver Sprocket has made several announcements, including a deal with PGW/Ingram, a lineup of 2026 releases, and new members of their publishing team.

There was another (dubious) addition to the canon of LGBTQ+ superheroes over at DC, as the character of Featherweight was confirmed to be trans. The linked article is largely positive and far be it from me to criticize the work of writer Greg Rucka, the co-creator of Batwoman (Kate Kane), but there’s a reason the phrase “ultimate cringe” shows up in a lot of other coverage of this story. Featherweight is a character that makes both LGBTQ+ people and transphobes angry, and will be forgotten within the year.

While we’re on the subject of transphobes, Declan Shalvey seems to have donated to a fundraiser for Irish anti-trans activist Graham Linehan.

The intellectual property of Will Eisner is for sale, including the Spirit, the Contract with God trilogy, and an unpublished Spirit comic from 1996.

I wanted to close out this NEWS section with something good. Writer has started a nonprofit organization, The Midnight Lantern Foundation. As outlined in , its mission will be to deliver gift bundles focused on creativity and storytelling to families for the 2026 holiday season. You can learn more about the foundation at their website.

This final story isn’t directly comics related, but we at the Chicago Comics Book Club are fans of horror and the public library, and I wanted to share more positivity. The Chicago Tribune named librarian Becky Spratford the Chicagoan of the Year in Books for 2025. She’s specifically cited for fostering an interest in horror fiction and championing several horror authors. She’ll be at C2E2!

Interviews & Criticism

I know I’m late on delivering my usual round up of “best of” lists (2026 is starting off as a very busy year), but Andy Oliver at Broken Frontier has a helpful guide to “Ten UK Small Press Comics You Need to Own!” that I thought best share in the meantime. There are some real gems here.

Over at SKTCHD, David Harper had a look at Vertigo in celebration of its return as an imprint of DC. As someone for whom Vertigo was key in my development as a comics reader, this was a must read.

Speaking of Vertigo, one of its key writers, Grant Morrison, was interviewed by Gabriel Kennedy for The Comics Journal.

Revisiting the topic of trans representation in comics, Madeline Blondeau at The AV Club has a great look at the classic manga Stop!! Hibari-Kun!, which is now available in English for the first time in forty years thanks to publisher Peow2. It hasn’t aged perfectly, as few comedies do, but can be surprisingly progressive.

Back to manga, DC President Jim Lee made headlines for talking about the “advantages” manga and anime have over American comics in an interview.

Friend of the newsletter Aria Baci had another interview for SOLRAD, this time with multiple-award winning creator Caroline Cash.

Also in SOLRAD, David Barclay wrote about how the comics medium is uniquely qualified to depict societal collapse.

We read Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles for the Chicago Comics Book Club back in January 2021, but it continues to be a relevant and interesting read. Scott Cederlund took a look at it in From Cover to Cover.

Publishers Weekly spoke with Fantagraphics publisher and co-founder Gary Groth on the occasion of the company’s fiftieth anniversary.

Someone else who celebrated 50 years with the comics medium was George Hagenauer, “the Comic Book Wizard of Ypsilanti,” who’s been collecting comics and artwork for that long and was recently interviewed by Detroit Bookfest!

Alison Bechdel shared a fun cartoon on the opinion pages of The New York Times last month, “8 Things You Need to Start Your Own Commune.”

Awards

The NAACP Image Awards announced their nominees, including five selections in the Outstanding Literary Work—Graphic Novel category in the Literary & Journalism category. Two of them are for a decidedly younger audience, but a wide range of publishers are represented. The television program Iyanu, based on a comic, was nominated both for Outstanding Children’s Program and Outstanding Animated Series.

The SPACE (or S.P.A.C.E.) Prize winners were announced for Graphic Novels, General, and Minicomics/Short Stories categories.

In manga, the 19th Japan International Manga Awards went to creators from all over the globe, including Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

The American Library Association’s Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table gave out their first awards in Outstanding Comics for Young Adults and Outstanding Comics for Adults categories.

Finally, Cathy G. Johnson won the 2025 Underground Visionary Award from the Boston Comic Arts Foundation.

Obituaries

Sadly, the comics world lost several people recently. Manga creator Kiriko Nananan died at the age of 52 at the end of 2024. The news of her death was held for one year at the request of her family. Several of her manga were adapted into live-action films.

In France, cartoonist Serguei passed away at the age of 69. His first cartoon was published in February 1981 and he had worked steadily for Le Monde ever since.

Italian cartoonist and illustrator Sergio Tarquinio passed away at the age of 100. He was known for creating comics ranging from pirates to westerns to the typical superheroes.

Activist, artist, and teacher Diana Green has died at the age of 71. She was a Distinguished Adjunct faculty in Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and was known for creating comics about LGBTQ+ rights.

Two deaths loomed larger than others this past month. Beloved artist Sal Buscema, known for his definitive work at Marvel Comics, died at the age of 89. He was one of those artists whose work would be recognizable even to people who didn’t read superhero comics. Tributes have been pouring in ever since the news broke. He will be dearly missed.

At the other end of the spectrum, Dilbert creator Scott Adams died at 68. A man who leveraged his limited talent into astronomical wealth for a cartoonist, he squandered his legacy by being a conspiracy theorist and bigot. I firmly believe that every human death is a tragedy. In Adams’ case, the tragedy is that he failed to make the world a better place for anyone but himself.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on February 18 to discuss The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1. Thanks again for everything.

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Hello, everyone! I know this new year is off to a rough start, but I hope you’re all doing okay. I’d write that the number of layers I was wearing exceeded the number of people who attended, but that’s not entirely true. It has been extremely cold in Chicago lately, and it started snowing during our meeting. We discussed Heated Rivalry almost as much as this month’s selection and the weather, though I have yet to start that show. (I promise I’ll get to it eventually!)

In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on Manga (and Anime)

We had a pretty diverse range of opinions, including someone familiar with the anime adaptation and one person who absolutely hated this comic. The latter person felt the dynamic between the two main characters was nothing they hadn’t seen before and their personalities were too cartoonish. The person familiar with the anime said the show provided more context for certain plot points and made the speedy development of the core friendship feel more natural. Nobody had a problem with any typical manga tropes like chibi heads or waterfall tears and everyone found it easy to read and follow. One person pointed out that there was a “you are reading the wrong way” explainer page for anyone who tried reading from left to right. A couple of cultural references needed explaining, such as who Ken Takakura and Bakatono were. I joked that this was the horniest comic we’ve read since Sex Criminals back in 2021 but nobody else was around for that. Personally, I thought it was fun, but don’t know if I’ll read additional volumes of Dandadan. I might start watching the anime.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, February 18 to discuss The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1.

What We're Reading

February 18 - The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1 by Mokumokuren

March 18 - Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama

We nave a new reader survey to help us determine our 2026 reading list! The voting is now closed, but feel free to leave a comment. I noticed most people stopped voting after the email cut it off. Only a couple of official members have voted in the Google form I shared, so we didn’t schedule any further selections, but we’ll take care of that next month.

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About What We’ve Read

I cannot recommend ’s excellent newsletter enough. He’s written about Dandadan multiple times, including character first impressions, balancing ensemble casts, and other topics, and it was the subject of not one but two of his One Great Panel examinations. It made his list for one of “The 10 Best Manga I Read in 2024.” As I’ve only read the first five chapters (Dandadan is in the triple digits now), most of this flew over my head.

Dandadan has won several awards. It was nominated for the Next Manga Award in 2021 in the Best Web Manga category and the Manga Taishō award in 2022. Also in 2022, both the Nationwide Bookstore Employees and Publisher Comics’ Recommended Comics lists ranked Dandadan first, and it ranked fourth at the Tsutaya Comic Award. In 2024, it was nominated for Best Shōnen at the Spanish Manga Barcelona Awards and won in the same category in 2025. Most recently, Dandadan was one of several winners of the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2026.

Last year, Gizmodo talked to Kumar Sivasubramanian, who has been the main translator of Dandadan for publisher Viz Media for a while. There are mild spoilers for much later chapters than what we read, but I’m glad they addressed the use of the word “schlong.” Lol

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, February 13.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I’ve applied as an Individual Artist for a DCASE grant through the City of Chicago! I’ve done this twice before for other projects, but I think this is my strongest chance yet. I decided to ask for funds to create a full issue of Blackout. Issue #1 will be titled “Smoke from Within” and 24 pages long. Since it takes place in Belgrade in 1941 and Chicago has a strong Serbian community, this seemed like the best option. I tied my application to both the comics and Serbian communities in Chicago. I’ve already reached out to a couple of local artists for variant covers! I’m hoping to have a finished script next month.

I won’t know if I’ve gotten the grant until May, but the issue has to be ready by the end of the year, so I have to start working on it right away and treat the grant as a reimbursement for anything I spend in the meantime. I ran this plan by artist Michael Howe, my collaborator on Blackout, and he gave a full endorsement. I’m still shopping our pitch for a four-issue mini series to a publisher, too. This might be a tough needle to thread, but I’m excited to see how it plays out. Expect to see random updates on the progress of this issue’s creation!

Crit One 4: This Spell Could Have Been an Email is the final issue of a fantasy series. I’m contributing to an illustrated prose piece with four other people and it’s a lot of fun. Please follow the campaign! This is my latest collaboration with Rise of the Flightless editor Luke W. Henderson and I’m happy to be working with them again.

Finally, Warden Comics shared the main cover for The Dreamlands Anthology by artist Leonardo Colapietro! I’ve contributed a six-page Alban of the West story drawn by artist David Escobar and lettered by Buddy Beaudoin. I’ll share more details as they become available, but I’m really excited!

I have an online shop! You can buy copies of my self-published comics, prints of a couple one-page comics, and a zine bundle. You can also find some of my comics at local (to Chicago) retailer Howling Pages and I’m working on a profile for another digital marketplace, too.

Rise of the Flightless is still available.

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 is still being shipped.

The Prism anthology is available on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing!

Some Thoughts on Manga (and Anime)

I was born a few years before the murder of Vincent Chin. I don’t mention that tragedy to be exploitative, but to provide some historical context as to why I arrived so late at enjoying manga and anime. While my elementary school classmates were watching Voltron and Sailor Moon, I was not allowed to watch any Japanese media.

These attitudes only became worse when I joined a white evangelical church that saw occult themes and “depraved” sexuality in even the most innocuous cartoons. Thanks to the criticism of Roger Ebert syndicated in my local paper, I discovered the work of Hayao Miyazaki, but My Neighbor Totoro was seen as animist and Spirited Away, despite winning an Oscar, was full of witchcraft.

In college, I agreed to a wager with someone who lived in my dorm: I would watch an anime marathon if she would read the gospels. She chose Ranma 1/2 and both of us lost. (I found it intolerable as a barely-disguised excuse to show a young woman showering stretched across multiple implausible plot points, but that’s exactly why a lot of people enjoy it; I have grown to appreciate it.)

The pitiful exposure to manga and anime that I allowed myself as an English major in college did provide me with a more acceptable reason to dismiss it besides racism: snobbery. “The story will be moving along and all of a sudden a cyborg vampire from space shows up!” was a common refrain I gave for why I couldn’t enjoy cinematic classics such as Akira or Ghost in the Shell (which have no such plot development). I thought I was being clever.

Even if I had seen anything that actually matched this description, I was presuming that any story with a cyborg vampire from outer space was inherently “less than.” At this point in my life, I can think of plenty of narratives that would be improved by one (looking at you, Moby Dick!) (just kidding, I actually really like Moby Dick, though I have seen it referenced in Thundercats, so I guess I’m not that far off).

Also, the breadth of manga genres available is breathtaking. Dismissing it for being focused on science fiction and fantasy is incredibly ignorant. Just as there’s a comic for every genre beyond superheroes, so too is there a manga and more so. I can probably count on one hand the number of sports comics that have broken out into mainstream success in the United States; conversely, there is a manga for literally every sport. Even curling!

Years later, when I moved to Cleveland, I started to try new things, sometimes because they were so unlike anything I had done before. I started drinking coffee, got heavily into fitness, and when I saw a flier for a meeting at the Cleveland Public Library for an anime marathon, I decided to attend.

It was hosted by a local anime club who were soliciting for membership. We watched Grave of the Fireflies, an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and a couple of other things I no longer remember. I was surprised by the religious themes of the GitS: SAC episode; it’s stayed with me all these years later and influenced my first published comic. I was a blubbering mess by the end of Grave of the Fireflies, but I was not alone. The depth and profundity I experienced really affected me. I decided to attend the next meeting this anime club held.

In a twist that any could see coming a mile away, we watched four episodes of some television show about horny teenagers and an argument about “subs versus dubs” broke out. It seemed to confirm the worst ideas I’d ever held about anime and the people who enjoyed it. I never went back.

But a seed had been planted! I got my first television set soon after that and started watching Toonami on the Cartoon Network. The one-two punch of Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist made a lifelong fan out of me. I didn’t know what a shōnen story was at the time, but I got a tattoo of the homunculus symbol from Fullmetal Alchemist on my right shoulder (which continues to lead to fun conversations at comic conventions). When I finished Paranoia Agent, I bought the whole series on DVD and devoured the filmography of Satoshi Kon.

Eventually, I bought my first volume of manga: Et Cetera. It’s out of print now, but the reason I chose it is a story in itself. Shortly before I had left the East Coast, the son of the pastor of my church had asked me about it because he’d heard about it on the playground shortly before his parents had pulled him out of public school to homeschool him. I’d warned him away from it, same as I’d done for countless media before that, but decided to finally read it for myself. I found a cute, charming sci-fi western. It wasn’t the first time I regretted advice I’d given to that kid and it wouldn’t be the last.

The floodgates had been opened! I’m struggling to remember what followed Et Cetera. I know I gave up on Bleach and Dragon Ball Z pretty quickly after realizing how many volumes both series had. I’ve always been into crime fiction, and I know I read the first few volumes of Black Cat, though I couldn’t tell you a single plot point today. I did start reading Uzumaki, which gave me nightmares.

I still own those Paranoia Agent DVDs after more than a dozen moves across three states. And there’s a lot more I could write about how my growing appreciation of manga paralleled my growing awareness of my own sexuality. (Discovering the work of Gengoroh Tagame was a revelation.) I’ve gone on long enough, so I’ll close by writing that I’m glad to have gotten into anime and manga. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time avoiding them.

Thanks for reading! What has your experience with manga and anime been? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1 by Mokumokuren!

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It’s That Time Again!

We’re getting close to the end of our scheduled readings here at the Comics Book Club. If you’re curious about how we decide on what to read, you can visit the Welcome page or look at the last time we had one of these. The main criteria for a comic’s eligibility are usually that the library have enough physical copies and that it’s available as an eBook or on hoopla.

I’m including a poll for each book again, since the public-facing Google form I tried last time led to some confusion. That makes this a little too long for email, but feel free to open this in your browser and vote away!

Here are the titles we’ve chosen for this round! I’m sending this out while we discuss Dandadan, Volume 1, and there are a couple more manga titles on here. Let’s see how popular that is! Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below. What do you think we should read? What would you add?

(Note: All images and descriptions taken from the Chicago Public Library’s online catalog.)

1. Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose, José Villarrubia, and Various

   

   On a dark, haunted night, a Russian oligarch dares a circle of international chefs to play the samurai game of 100 Candles—where each storyteller tells a terrifying tale of ghosts, demons, and unspeakable beings—and prays to survive the challenge.

2. The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

   

   The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family’s move from their war-torn home to the United States.

3. Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? by Harold Schechter and Eric Powell

   

   This book provides an in-depth exploration of the Gein family and what led to the creation of the necrophile who haunted the dreams of 1950s America and inspired such films as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.

4. The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime Hernandez

The second volume in the chronological reprinting of Jaime Hernandez’s “Locas” stories from Love and Rockets. This collection features the spunky Maggie; her annoying, pixie-ish best friend and sometime lover Hopey; and their circle of friends, including a bombshell, a weirdo mentor, and an aging but heroic wrestler.

5. I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together by Maurice Vellekoop

Maurice is the youngest of five children raised by Dutch immigrants in the 1970s in a middle class suburb of Toronto. He is really, really gay. Which is a huge problem, because his family is part of a strict Calvinist sect not accepting of homosexuality. This is an enthralling portrait of what it means to be true to yourself, to learn to forgive, and to be an artist.

6. Loving, Ohio by Matthew Erman and Sam Beck

   

   A teenager’s suicide in the town of Loving, Ohio, leads a group of their friends down a terrifying path of cult conspiracy and supernatural horror. The teenagers have been mysteriously vanishing day-by-day, but when a bizarre killer begins terrorizing the town, Sloane and her friends vow to make it out of Ohio, even if it kills them.

7. Minor Arcana, Volume 1: The Fool by Jeff Lemire

   

   Returning to her hometown to take care of her phony psychic of a mom is the last thing on Theresa’s bucket list. But when Theresa finds out these abilities might be real, it will up to her to confront the failures of her past and help the people she’s spent her life running from.

8. Our Dreams at Dusk, Volume 1 by Yuhki Kamatani

   

   Not only is high schooler Tasuku Kaname the new kid in town, he is also terrified that he had been outed as gay. Just as he’s contemplating doing the unthinkable, Tasuku meets a mysterious woman who leads him to a group of people dealing with problems not so different from his own.

9. Search and Destroy, Volume 1 by Atsushi Kaneko, based on Dororo by Osamu Tezuka

   

   Search and Destroy transplants the vengeful action of Dororo from feudal Japan into a dystopian future with mercenary robots, an orphaned thief, and a mysterious girl in a stinking animal hide with deadly cybernetic implants.

10. Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History by Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee, adapting C. L. R. James

    

    When C. L. R. James’s play opened in London featuring Paul Robeson in 1936, it marked the first time Black actors starred on the British stage in a play written by a Black playwright. After the script was lost for almost 70 years, this extraordinary drama has been turned into a graphic novel.

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I’d love to hear any and all feedback (provided we keep it positive around here). Thanks for reading and for voting! Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already to see how it all turns out.

Hello, everyone! This is the Comics NEWS Digest, an aggregation of all the top comics and comics-related stories that caught my attention that I thought you might enjoy reading. I post these two weeks after every regular newsletter.

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NEWS

I’ll start this first Comics NEWS Digest of 2026 by sharing ’s New Year’s Resolutions for the Direct Market. It’s been less than ten days, so too early to tell if any will come true, but I’m looking forward to finding out as we go along.

Speaking of the direct market, the biggest comics news story of 2025 keeps chugging along to be the biggest news story of 2026 (and most likely beyond). The bankruptcy of Diamond Comic Distributors has been converted from a Chapter 11 filing to a Chapter 7 filing after JPMorgan Chase Bank refused to continue funding the company’s reorganization. The biggest effect of this change is that the company’s assets will have to be sold by a trustee to pay creditors. This is rough for any publishers and creators still waiting on payment.

At least the fate of one of Diamond’s biggest assets is settled, sort of. Saturday, May 2, 2026 will be Free Comic Book Day, but there will also be a “Comics Giveaway Day” run by Penguin Random House.

Diamond is not the only distributor to go out of business. Baker & Taylor, the largest distributor of print books to public libraries, is also shutting down. The company was a big advocate for comics and graphic novels, and the negative effects have been felt by comic shops and publishers alike. One Spanish-language book distributor has already shut down as a result.

The last of Book Riot’s three posts checking in on the censorship of books and comics can be found here, including a look at PEN America’s banned book report from back in October. The usual titles can be found on there, such as Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Flamer by Mike Curato, and there’s been an uptick in the number of banned manga. The big surprise for me was Relish by Lucy Knisley. I know there’s no logic to why people ban books, but that choice is nuts.

Rounding out trends from 2025 that are spilling into 2026—generative AI—(those em dashes are the closest I get to subtle humor), Mike Deodato, Jr. was accused of using genAI-created images for the crowdfunded comic Ultimate Oz Universe: The Lost Lands. There isn’t really a good non-genAI-related reason for the art discrepancies that led to this speculation, unfortunately. A lot of people I respect and admire were involved in the creation of this book, and the panel I went to at NYCC that was devoted to it was a lot of fun. It’s a shame that one bad actor can trash so much goodwill.

In DC news, the company released sales figures to The Hollywood Reporter, and they’re in the millions for its Absolute Universe titles. This love did not extend to Birds of Prey or Green Arrow, both of which were cancelled despite critical success. These two stories together represent so much of what’s wrong with the current sales model for monthly “floppies.”

In other publishing news, Ablaze has acquired NBM Publishing, reportedly to expand into international markets. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) have acquired a controlling interest in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts after paying almost half a million dollars to Canadian media company WildBrain for their stake. They now jointly control 80% of Peanuts Holdings LLC. The remaining 20% is controlled by Schulz’s family.

The BBC had a look at how more kids are getting into comics these days. I appreciate that the headline is blessedly free of any onomatopoeia (are the days of “Comics” and “BAM! POW!” always being near each other finally done?), but I think it still represents a double standard between comics and other art forms.

I understand that the story is about the market availability for comics aimed at young people and is just an extension of previous stories about the decades-long careers of Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey, but apply this logic to any other medium and see how insane it sounds: Are your kids too young to be listening to songs like “Baby Shark”? What’s the right age to introduce your children to film?

Moving on to things that personally give me a lot of hope, zines are making a comeback! I mean, they never went anywhere, but their resurgence is making headlines. Indie bookstores are back, too! And in an awesome combination of both, local (to Chicago) bookstore Quimby’s has started its own print and design service for local artists to self-publish zines, comics, and art books.

Interviews & Criticism

One of my first experiences reading comics was the Archie Double Digests I used to pick up at the supermarket checkout as a kid, so I was delighted to see this look by Dan Greenfield over at 13th Dimension at thirteen Betty and Veronica fashions from the definitive artist for the characters, Dan DeCarlo.

Friend of the newsletter Aria Baci has another interview at SOLRAD, this time with Spanish artist Laura Pérez about her comics Totem, Ocultos, and Nocturnos; her stylistic and artistic inspirations; and the liminal spaces in her work.

Also at SOLRAD, Lara Boyle talked to Mattie Lubchansky about her graphic novel Simplicity, which I’m sure will be making a lot of “best of 2025” lists.

Seth Adrian Romo at Pages and Panels interviewed filmmaker and theater artist Nihaarika Negi about her first graphic novel, Hunger, published by Lab Press with art by Joe Bocardo and colors by José Villarrubia.

In another look at comics creation, Eileen Gonzalez at Book Riot interviewed author Jewell Parker Rhodes about adapting her novel Ghost Boys into a graphic novel with artist Setor Fiadzigbey and editor Andrea Colvin.

Awards

Broken Frontier is accepting votes for the Broken Frontier Awards 2025 to celebrate “some of the best indie, experimental, socially important, and alt comics of the year.” Voting runs until the end of January 14 (UK time) and the winners will be announced on January 19.

Nominees for the 37th GLAAD Media Awards were announced, including categories for Outstanding Comic Book and Outstanding Original Graphic Novel/Anthology. It’s good to remember that for all the many, many reasons 2025 was an awful year, it did have a lot of great LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly comics.

The Transfeminine Review had their TFR Reader’s Choice Awards, which included Simplicity by for Outstanding Graphic/Comic.

Dutch cartoonist Tjeerd Royaards won the 2025 European Cartoon Award with runner-up cartoonists Emad Hajjaj from Jordan and Zehra Ömeroğlu from Turkey. Patrick Chappatte from Switzerland was awarded an Honorable Mention.

The winners of the Tripwire Awards 2025 were announced, including big wins for Mad Cave as Best Publisher.

The Comics Beat announced its 2025 Comics Industry Person of the Year: DC Editor-in-Chief Marie Javins. It was based on a survey of comics creators, so maybe this should be unsurprising. Similar to how the two DC stories above have wider implications, this feels revealing of larger issues regarding industry professionals. Anyway, Gretchen Felker-Martin did nothing wrong.

More news was released about the Jack & Roz Kirby Awards, including the categories, advisory board, and voting committee.

Obituaries

Sadly, there was still loss at the end of 2025. On December 21, Dan Moynihan died at the age of 52. He was a prolific cartoonist, illustrator, and children’s book author and educator with a loose, inviting style. A gofundme has been set up for his wife and young son.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on January 21 to discuss Dandadan, Volume 1. Thanks again for everything.

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Happy holidays, everyone! Have yourself a wonderful season full of peace and love, regardless of what, how, or whether you celebrate. Be well! You deserve it. We had another small group, which was understandable between the holidays and the weather. Our white elephant gift exchange was more a matter of everyone passing their gifts to the left, but everyone was happy. I was lucky enough to leave with The Way of the Househusband, Volume 1 by Kousuke Oono. 2026 is going to be a Year of Manga, after all! Lol

In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on 2025

By some miracle, everyone finished the entire thing in time! A political discussion was inevitable for several reasons: the plot paralleling our current reality, the president appearing on the television screens, and the murder of Horst Wessel being a plot point. Some of us knew about that last one because it came up so often when Charlie Kirk was murdered a few months ago. Back to the comic, Silvia and Anna were everyone’s favorite characters. Kurt and Marthe felt like cliches in the beginning (the “bitter older journalist” and “young ingenue,” respectively) but they became well-rounded characters over the course of the story. The subplot about the jazz musicians in the second volume felt aimless and disconnected from the main story, especially since the main cast wasn’t directly involved. The art was good and we all noticed how the characters aged and Jason Lutes’ skill developed, though some of the bearded men and blond women were hard to tell apart at times. One person felt hope for the future of the United States after reading it because of the protests going on right now; the other person said they felt less hope for the United States because of the collaboration of the police with the Nazis and ICE.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, January 21 to discuss Dandadan, Volume 1.

What We're Reading

January 21 - Dandadan, Volume 1 by Yukinobu Totsu

February 18 - The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1 by Mokumokuren

March 18 - Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama

Our season of manga begins! Lol I figured after so many deep, lengthy comics, we could take a break with a few tankōbon. Plus, we haven’t read nearly enough manga in the years we’ve been meeting. I’ve got another poll ready to go out to help us determine our 2026 reading list. I’ll post it after the next NEWS digest.

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About What We’ve Read

Berlin was ranked 48th on Rolling Stone’s “The 50 Best Non-Superhero Graphic Novels” list back in 2019. It won the 2019 Vermont Book Award, the first graphic novel to do so. It also won two Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards that same year at Denver Pop Culture Con for Best in Educational Comics: Adult, Fiction and Book of the Year. Jason Lutes won an Inkpot Award in 2018 at San Diego Comic-Con.

The independent weekly Vermont newspaper Seven Days talked with Jason Lutes and explored the themes and creation of Berlin upon its completion and Lutes’ Inkpot win. The Comics Journal conducted an in-depth interview shortly thereafter. He spoke with PopMatters, and The Berliner interviewed him about his research into Berlin and the Weimar Republic.

Back in 2008, Jason Lutes talked about his creative process with the Wall Street Journal for a short YouTube video upon completion of the second volume.

Here’s a review of the stage adaptation produced by the Court Theatre. I was impressed by how it streamlined the narrative and cast of characters, and I’m glad I had a chance to see it when it premiered.

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, January 9, 2026.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I’ve applied to two conventions for next year! Wish me luck. As much as I think I’m on more solid footing than I was last year when I applied to one of them, I should probably start looking at smaller, one-day events and build up to shows like CAKE and TCAF. Either way, I’m hoping to table at my first con in 2026.

Two things that I think will improve my chances are that I’ll be appearing in two more anthologies! The first is in pre-launch on Kickstarter and is being organized by Luke W. Henderson, the creative mastermind behind Rise of the Flightless (link below). Crit One 4: This Spell Could Have Been an Email is the final issue of a fantasy series. I’m contributing to a prose piece with four other people and it’s a lot of fun. Please follow the campaign!

The second anthology is still being organized, but my contribution is almost complete. Artist Steven Bristow is drawing comics of different mythologies and folklore from around the world. I’ve finally gotten my Krasue script made. Third time’s the charm. XD Feast your eyes on the title page below!

The Alban of the West comic I wrote for The Dreamlands Anthology to be published by Warden Comics is almost complete!

When I spoke to Dr. Mark Martell’s Superheroes and Cultural Mythology class last month about “Comics Writing, Superheroes, and the Public Domain,” I passed a handful of zines around the class as visual aides. I created a short companion video walking through one of them, but that’s part of a bigger announcement: My online shop is live! With a lot of help from Onicia Muller, I managed to achieve my goal for the year of having a place to buy my comics. Check it out!

Rise of the Flightless is still available.

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 is being shipped!

The physical copies for Prism arrived, but there was an issue with the printing. It’s available for preorder and you can read the whole thing on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing!

Some Thoughts on 2025

It is a strange experience to have one’s dreams come true while the world burns. It’s difficult to reconcile the desire to celebrate a personal milestone with the knowledge that people I love and care about are facing violence and deprivation. I know not celebrating won’t relieve any of their anxiety and pain, but I’m also not self-centered enough to demand they be happy for me.

Strangers on the internet have thanked me for bringing certain injustices to their attention while close friends chastised me for not “doing more.” I’ve tried to do what I can while protecting the people close to me, but I’m never sure about whether I’m doing enough or how much to do. I have people who depend on me, and I don’t want to put any of them in danger or risk not being available for them.

I have friends who protest regularly, organize mutual aid, and/or fight for their existence and survival. I recognize that my inability to match their participation looks like abdication, and it often feels that way. Are my priorities incorrect? Am I wrong for spending so much time focusing on art, especially comics? It looks petty and juvenile to people who were encouraging me a year ago.

I’ve pitched multiple series to major publishers. I’ve applied to table at conventions. I’ve interviewed creators. I have an online store. I had my first comic book signing! Within recent memory, I wouldn’t have dreamed that I would have the confidence or ability to do any of those things.

Of course, I’ve had at least three rejections for every acceptance. I suppose it would have been more honest or realistic to chronicle the disappointments in the Shameless Self-Promotion sections this year as well as the successes, but I wanted to focus on moving forward. If you want to know what didn’t pan out, go back through the newsletters and make a note of anything I sounded excited about and then never mentioned again.

But does any of that mean anything against the rising tide of history? People around me are losing their jobs and healthcare and having mental health crises. Other people are being kidnapped off the streets by a white supremacist paramilitary secret police. Anything can seem petty in comparison to that, but then I risk making the persecution of others about my reaction to it instead of about the injustice itself. I run the risk of sounding like the main character of Berlin at his lowest point, jaded and depressed.

My creative pursuits and mental health have increased in direct proportion to the support system I’ve curated and surrounded myself with. I couldn’t have done anything by myself. Countless others have helped me make my dreams come true and continue to make them come true. Even as the world burns.

I don’t know what next year will be like, but I’m excited and scared in equal measure. I’ll be here to share comics news and my own journey as a comics creator, and I’d love for you to join me. I have goals and ambitions that I mean to pursue even as I work to protect my family and contribute however I can to fighting the forces of fascism that are marching and making everyone miserable. I hope we’re all doing what we can to help each other.

Thanks for reading! I am doing better than the overall tone of this month’s essay would suggest. How was your 2025? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next year for Dandadan, Volume 1 by Yukinobu Totsu!

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Hello, everyone! This is the Comics NEWS Digest, an aggregation of all the top comics and comics-related stories that caught my attention that I thought you might enjoy reading. I post these two weeks after every regular newsletter.

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NEWS

In a year marred by bankruptcies, lawsuits, and deaths, the one constant has been that I have been unable to keep up with the pace of the news. Within hours of posting last month’s digest, I learned it was outdated regarding the status of the 2026 Angoulême International Comics Festival. The festival’s operating company, 9e Art+, agreed at an emergency meeting that their owner, Franck Bondoux, would immediately retire.

Among increasing calls to cancel the festival after elected officials threatened to pull public funds, 9e Art+ announced it was suspended before announcing its cancellation. Bondoux blamed everyone else despite being largely responsible for the festival, threatening to sue the public officials in charge of funding it, and fostering or ignoring the hostile and violent atmosphere that caused the controversy in the first place. The Comics Journal provided plenty of context.

The first town hall held to determine next steps was rough. Angoulême was scheduled to take place in a little more than a month and it would be a shame if there wasn’t something to celebrate the art of comics. I’ve never been, but from everything I’ve heard from those who have, it should be the gold standard for comic cons. This is all terribly oversimplified, and I look forward to finding out there’s been a new development immediately after sending this out.

In good comic convention news, the parent company of Indie Comic Creator Con, Collectors Network Holdings, Inc., along with its “operating arm” Collectors Network, LLC has converted to a public benefit corporation that will collectively be called CNPBC. This means it will be legally required to consider its employees, communities, and the public good in its decision making.

Following up on an earlier story, Comics Beat catches up with international comics publisher Humanoids and their bankruptcy filings. They link to multiple investigations (in French) and untangle a lot of the knots that have seemingly led to the downfall of one of Europe’s greatest comics publishers.

In more disheartening news, Colin Kaepernick promoted a GenAI tool to schools in Maryland for children to “create” their own graphic novels. (Link is to a video, because the only print news I could find on this story read like a press release.) I told a friend this is like learning Tarana Burke had become a fracking lobbyist.

In a story that doesn’t directly tie in to comics but does involve two awful recurring themes of this year, librarians are being harassed because people can’t find fake book titles that were generated by artificial intelligence.

CRWN Studios, a comics fulfillment and publishing service company based in Portland, will be branching out into distribution to partially fill the void left by Diamond Comics Distributors’ bankruptcy. Terry Helman, a Diamond employee for more than 25 years, will lead sales strategy and publisher relations.

at SKTCHD had this look at the uncertainty faced by many creators of non-licensed (in other words, original or creator-owned) comics today. It’s a sobering look at the human cost of enjoying some of the greatest work the medium has ever produced.

Speaking of original or indie work, 404 Media is printing a zine about the technology used by ICE. Not only are they using the format of a zine, one of the great bastions of underground and indie comix artists, but they’re using a risograph machine to counter the technological surveillance state.

One piece of media news that’s been looming over the comics industry for the last few months is the fate of Warner Media, the parent company of DC. I wasn’t sure how to address it in this space, but thankfully Rob Salkowitz has this rundown of the whole messy ordeal for ICv2.

Congratulations to the writers who won Part One of the first Summit Comics Talent Search! Part Two is open to artists and submissions are open until December 24.

For this year’s last bit of NEWS, we have Tim Seeley quitting Twitter after receiving death threats over a Marvel comic he wrote. I normally avoid covering “social media drama” but this felt both insane and a good encapsulation of 2025.

Interviews & Criticism

I’ll start this section with a couple of interviews from The Comics Journal that I had to cut last month because I ran out of time. The first is Zach Rabiroff’s interview with Vika Lomasko, a graphic journalist who grew up in the Soviet Union and has authored such works as The Last Soviet Artist.

The second is Ritesh Babu talking with Ram V about the latter’s decade writing comics, one of my favorite critics in conversation with one of my favorite writers.

Another piece I should have gotten to sooner is SKTCHD’s special feature on New York Comic Con. It makes me feel like anything I’d have to write about that wonderful weekend redundant; it perfectly captures all the fun and energy.

Revisiting a story from the NEWS section if only tangentially, AiPT talked with Tim Seeley about his X-Men work.

Margot Waldman at ComicsXF shared this look at a specific issue of Detective Comics that also serves as a rumination on Batman’s versatility as a character and the impact of the creative team of Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle.

Over at Forbes, Rob Salkowitz looks at Kodansha USA, the growing popularity of manga, and how the publisher expands and adapts its audience and output.

Courtney Lewis, the Crandall Family Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, curated an exhibit at one of the university’s libraries called “American Indians Go Graphic,” about Indigenous superheroes and Native American representation in comics.

In other representation news, The Comics Journal spoke with Rahil Mohsin about his comic Hallubol, the first-ever comic written in Dakhni, an endangered language primarily spoken in South-Central India.

Are you a fan of Hellboy but not sure how to read the other comics set in the same universe? Are you curious about Hellboy but not sure where to start? The staff at Comics Beat has you covered! Presented by Mark Tweedale, it’s a comprehensive guide on the reading order for all the comics in the Mignolaverse. There’s a lot. Lol

SOLRAD had a couple of reviews from Tom Shapira I wanted to share. The first is this look at The Hanging by Aaron Losty. I’m unfamiliar with this work but hope to pick it up someday! The second is of How Comics Are Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page by Glenn Fleishman. Despite the broadness of the title, it’s actually a very specific look at the process of creating newspaper comic strips, a form of comics that don’t always get their due.

Speaking of comic strips, David Harper at SKTCHD had this look at how they’re enjoying a resurgence and the influence they have on the broader comics landscape.

I’d like to end this section with a couple of silly, comics-adjacent articles. The first is this piece from Interview magazine, the title of which says it all: “Why Rachel Anna Simon Can’t Stop Painting Spider-Man Getting Head.” Words can’t express how grateful I am to for bringing this to my attention.

And Nature has a fun but dubious bit of mental health research into “the Batman effect,” in which passengers on a train behaved more altruistically when a guy dressed up as Batman was present. It has more to do with the disruption that a costumed passenger causes and how that calls people’s attention to, say, a pregnant person looking for a seat. I’m guessing they chose a Batman costume instead of a clown or a funny hat because why not?

Awards

Not a lot of awards as the year winds down, but applications are open for the 2026 Comics Criticism Mini Grants. Four small grants of $250 each will be awarded, but the deadline to apply is January 1, 2026.

The 2025 Selkie Awards for independent and small-press Scottish comics announced their winners earlier this month.

The National Press Foundation’s Clifford K. & James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons was given to Matt Wuerker of Politico.

Obituaries

Sadly, the comics community lost an inker back in October when Andrew “Drew” Hennessy passed away at 56. He worked for Marvel, DC, and Crossgen and was memorialized by many of his colleagues.

Cartoonist and illustrator Dalton Webb passed away last month at the age of 53. A gofundme has been set up for his wife and daughter.

J. D. King, another prolific cartoonist and illustrator, died in early November. He was 74 years old.

Journalist and literary critic Rachel Cooke has passed away from ovarian cancer at the age of 56. She helped establish the Comica Graphic Short Story prize for graphic novels back in 2007.

Finally, there was a devastating loss to the cosplay community recently when Ash, also known as Ashley or “Squidkid,” reportedly died by suicide after aggressive online harassment and bullying. They were nineteen years old.

If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, there is help available.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on December 17 to discuss Berlin. Thanks again for everything. See you in 2026!

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Happy Black Friday, everyone! We had a small group this month, but it was a lot of fun. Everybody got to know each other a bit more and catch up on personal news. This month’s comic intersected with our own experiences in different ways. It was decided that the tradition of doing a white elephant used book/comic exchange will continue next month! Scour your shelves for something good that everyone can enjoy, and bring it to the next meeting. :)

In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on Unlikely Biographies

I was the only one in attendance who had read Blankets, but everyone else became interested in reading it because of the references to it in Ginseng Roots. The artwork in Ginseng Roots never got as expressionistic or abstract as it sometimes did in Blankets, but there was still a variety of styles that showcased Craig Thompson’s versatility as a cartoonist. We all really enjoyed the cartoonish, Dr. Seuss-like ginseng root. This was a dense book, but we all learned a lot about various topics, from farming to “Big Agriculture” to Hmong history and culture. These disparate threads were tied together deftly through the overarching topic of ginseng, but there were other connections, such as how Dow Chemicals was responsible both for pesticides for the farms and chemical weapons in Southeast Asia. We had a disagreement over the amount of self-awareness Craig Thompson displayed in portraying himself; I thought he had less than it appeared, but I should have let that go. Lol We could all relate to varying degrees to having religious upbringings, dealing with aging parents, and recognizing the different Midwestern signifiers on display.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, December 17 to discuss Berlin.

What We're Reading

December 17 - Berlin by Jason Lutes

January 21 - Dandadan, Volume 1 by Yukinobu Totsu

February 18 - The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1 by Mokumokuren

March 18 - Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama

Next month’s selection is another hefty one. There are enough copies at the Chicago Public Library, but they should probably be reserved early. I totally understand if anyone wants to read only the first volume, but whoever chooses that option should expect spoilers during the discussion. I’ll be sending out another poll soon to help determine our 2026 reading list. Leave a suggestion in the comments! Just be sure to check the Chicago Public Library first. XD

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About What We’ve Read

Ginseng Roots was nominated for Best Graphic Memoir at the 2021 Eisner Awards, while Craig Thompson was nominated for Best Writer/Artist. He spoke with Writer’s Digest magazine and Milwaukee Magazine about his process and the book’s development. My argument against Craig Thompson’s self-awareness in Ginseng Roots largely had to do with criticism of his previous work, Habibi.

I was hoping to provide links to all the articles included in the annotations and end notes of Ginseng Roots, but that proved to be too ambitious. There was a lot of research that went into this comic! I only managed to track down “The root of the ginseng industry’s problem” by Hannah Hoag for Maclean’s; “The tobacco belt tries to rise from the ashes” by James Bradshaw for The Globe and Mail; and “Environmentalists in Beijing Go Topless to Protest Ginseng Organization” by Anthony Tao for Beijing Cream (originally for Global Times China).

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, December 12.

Shameless Self-Promotion

David Escobar’s artwork for our submission to The Dreamlands Anthology by Warden Comics is complete! All that remains is the lettering by Buddy Beaudoin. I’m not sure how much I can share about our comic in this space, but I’m really excited! David shared a preview of the first page on his Instagram account.

I also edited a script for my friend Shaun Sunday that will have artwork by . You can read more about that over at Shaun’s ko-fi here.

Earlier this month, I spoke to Dr. Mark Martell’s Superheroes and Cultural Mythology class at the UIC Honors College about “Comics Writing, Superheroes, and the Public Domain.” I posted it to my YouTube channel and you can view my slide presentation here, which includes some helpful links on the “Resources” slide. I kinda beat myself up afterwards, focusing too much on how I should have rehearsed more and gotten a bottle of water or some Altoids or something on the way to the classroom, but I think it was received well. Enjoy!

Rise of the Flightless is still available. Today only, 100% of itch.io purchases go to the creators! You can raise more money for the Antarctic Science Foundation.

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 is being shipped!

The physical copies for Prism arrived, but there was an issue with the printing. It’s available for preorder and you can read the whole thing on Global Comix!

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing!

Some Thoughts on Unlikely Biographies

One of my longest relationships was with someone who demanded a certain standard of living and was willing to do whatever he needed to do to maintain that. I know that’s a very vague and obtuse way to describe one facet of his personality, but I’m trying to be generous. After we broke up, his best friend bluntly described him to me as “the most manipulative person I’ve ever met.”

I worked multiple jobs while we were together and took care of most of the bills. He insisted on going out multiple times a week, despite my concerns about our finances. When we could not afford to go out, he asked his friends to pay for us. This horrified me, but I was in love. We once had a very public fight in a restaurant because he had used money for the gas bill to buy himself weed.

Towards the end of our relationship, I told a friend that he felt “more like a drain on my resources than a boyfriend.” That made it sting even worse when he was the one who broke up with me. I had to find a new place to live and start over.

I bring all this up because this ex-boyfriend of mine had been sent to work as a migrant laborer on a farm when he was young by his strict, religious father after admitting to not believing in God. See, it does connect to Ginseng Roots! He endured all the harsh working conditions that we read about: the long hours, extreme temperatures, and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into collecting a harvest. I don’t remember what type of farm he worked at. I know he wouldn’t come out to his father for many years after that labor was over.

This fact surprised a lot of people who knew my ex. When I told a friend of mine from a writing group who had followed the dramatic ups and downs of our relationship about this, he said, “If you put something like this in a story, I wouldn’t believe it!”

One of the hardest parts about being a writer is having to create consistent, reasonable characters when real-life human beings are rarely either of those things. This is something that drives me nuts about those who criticize media for characters that don’t make “rational” decisions, but that’s an essay for later.

Was my ex rebelling against his upbringing by being so bad with money? Did he decide that he would never work that hard again? Was his time on the farm that formative of an experience for him or had it been forgettable? I cannot say. He didn’t mention it very often, and it’s been long enough that I don’t remember too many details or if he shared any with me at all.

A subtle theme of Ginseng Roots concerned how the Thompson siblings ended up as adults and how the same experience impacted them in different ways. I didn’t mean to start a whole “nature versus nurture” debate with this essay, but wanted to illustrate something I believe to be fundamentally true: People have a way of surprising you.

Thanks for reading! I wrote this month’s essay close to the wire again. What’s something that surprised you to learn about someone? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for Berlin by Jason Lutes!

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Hello, everyone! This is the Comics NEWS Digest, an aggregation of all the top comics and comics-related stories that caught my attention that I thought you might enjoy reading. I post these two weeks after every regular newsletter.

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NEWS

As mentioned elsewhere in this space, New York Comic Con was last month and there was plenty of coverage. The biggest announcement regarding comics, in my opinion, was that of the ten titles for DC’s latest Vertigo revival!

A major topic of conversation at NYCC was the then-recent cancellation of DC’s Red Hood series, and it turns out retailers are selling the lone issue for insane prices on eBay. Twenty-five copies for $2,000 is almost a bargain compared to the one person selling a single copy for $925.

Another NEWS Digest, another Diamond update. The Diamond Comic Distributors owned by Sparkle Pop/Ad Populum is now known as Diamond II, so at least that’s cleared up, and is suing Dynamite Entertainment for $1.7 million. Dynamite has filed a countersuit against Sparkle Pop for more than $600,000.

One of Diamond’s most well-known assets, Free Comic Book Day, has been acquired by Universal Distribution. Typically the first Saturday in May, Free Comic Book Day is a promotional event where retailers offer comics free to the public (that they still have to pay for) selected by publishers.

In other sad bankruptcy news, Humanoids filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last month. One of the most esteemed comics publishers in the world, Humanoids was founded in 1974 in Europe.

For more on comics distribution, Comics Beat shared the latest in its “Tilting at Windmills” series, looking at three new comics distribution companies. One of the distributors examined, Power Pulp, wrote a reply that Comics Beat was gracious enough to post. Yet another digital distributor, Sweet Shop, has launched its invite-only beta version.

There was a rather strange and difficult story from the comics crowdfunding space recently when four comics for an anthology with a campaign on Kickstarter titled A1 Deadline Special were replaced after Frazer Brown, a creator with an unfulfilled campaign from 2020, threatened legal action against them. The four comics in question were originally supposed to be in the unfulfilled campaign, Tales from the Quarantine, which raised almost fifty thousand dollars and never saw the light of day. One of the targeted creators is quoted calling Brown a “scumbag” and that feels like he’s getting off easy.

Things aren’t much better internationally, as Webtoon has been hit with allegations of unfair labor practices. These include unpaid labor, monopolistic market share practices, and restrictive contractual agreements. Examples include years-long “revision” processes that allow Webtoon to stop paying their creators in the meantime; Webtoon also allegedly takes a cut when one of their creators has a paid speaking engagement and up to 90% of overseas revenue that they earn. And don’t get me started on using comics to train GenAI.

This all came to light shortly before Webtoon Entertainment reported a loss of millions of dollars for the third financial quarter of 2025. Projections are not looking much better for the fourth.

In Japan, manga creator Hisashi Eguchi is embroiled in a scandal over tracing some of his artwork. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a simple matter of using an old artist’s time-saving technique with his own work, but using a photograph of a person without their consent. Eguchi eventually obtained consent, but only after the woman whose image he used contacted him. He has since lost advertising work and the originality of all of his artwork has been called into question.

Manga subscription service Manga Planet is cutting back its offerings and shuttering its digital platform entirely early next year. This is part of a much larger story about credit card and payment provider companies, Stripe in particular, refusing to process payments for anything they deem “adult content.” This has severely affected anywhere from dozens to thousands of artists trying to make a living by selling commissioned pieces.

Meanwhile, Viz Media, America’s largest manga publisher, was allegedly the victim of a data breach, though it may have affected only a single employee.

I’ve mentioned previously how the Angoulême International Comics Festival has not been without controversy lately and that has escalated dramatically. Almost all of the largest publishers in France have cancelled their 2026 appearances at the festival and Angoulême’s mayor has intervened, all to try and terminate the contract of those running it, Franck Bondoux and his company 9e Art+, or at the very least prevent the contract from being renewed.

There were a few good pieces about comics from The New York Times last month. There was this personal essay from George Gene Gustines about the ¡Wepa! exhibit at the New York Public Library about Puerto Rican comic characters and creators. Lynda Barry shared a personal comic about “The Real Horrors of America” on Halloween.

In book ban news, because we can’t escape it, the Alabama Public Library Service held a hearing on October 21 about a proposed rule that any book that “positively depicts transgender procedures, gender ideology, or the concept of more than two biological genders” would be inappropriate for anyone younger than 18 years of age. They’re expected to vote on it this month.

A judge overturned a book ban for school libraries on military bases. In Texas, a school board’s conservative supermajority was broken in this month’s elections; it now has a liberal majority of four to three. That conservative supermajority, by the way, ushered in several book bans; don’t let anyone tell you they’re popular.

In other news that’s supposedly about “protecting children,” a retailer in North Carolina has been charged with a felony after allegedly providing a minor with a comic containing “adult material” at a Halloween event. The comic in question, Grendel Tales Featuring Devil’s Hammer #1, has a “not for children” label on the cover and is part of a series I remember first reading in middle school.

I don’t normally cover comics adaptations for a couple of reasons, but Black Hole by Charles Burns was one of the most divisive comics we’ve ever read here at the Comics Book Club. News that it will be made into a series for Netflix by Jane Schoenbrun, the director of I Saw the TV Glow, was sent to me by someone who once joked she would never forgive me for having her read it. Lol

I’ll end this section with some good news. First up, a heartwarming story of a blind high school senior who created an original graphic novel for his Drawing 1 course using braille marker labels and a special paper that reacts to watercolor.

The Kickstarter strike is over and it was a resounding success! The strike lasted more than a month, and played a role in the crowdfunding story mentioned above, but Kickstarter employees now have a four-day work week and cost-of-living guarantees for their salaries. Way to go, NYC-OPEIU Local 153!

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Mad Cave Studios Talent Search!

Interviews & Criticism

Harrow County, Volume 1: Countless Haints by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook was one of our most popular selections here at the Comics Book Club, and d. emerson eddy has a great essay about its style and themes for The Comics Beat.

I’m conflicted when it comes to “collectible comics.” On the one hand, I feel like it cheapens a work of art to treat it like an investment or a commodity, turning it into a piece of pop culture detritus. On the other hand, aren’t rare books and pieces of fine art given the same treatment? But does that fall into the trap of trying to fight for the respectability of comics instead of appreciating them on their own terms? This is part of why I found this interview from Pages and Panels with art historian Isabel Baldrich so fascinating. It doesn’t get mired in such philosophizing but provides plenty to consider.

Last month was National Hispanic Heritage Month and over at Shelfdust, Hank Kennedy looked at a time when mainstream United States superhero comics tackled U.S. imperialism in Latin America.

Awards

I didn’t make it to the Harvey Awards ceremony at New York Comic Con, but it sounded like a fun show. You can read the full list of winners here and read about the Image Select Retailer Award winner here.

The Ringo Award winners were announced at Baltimore Comic Con last month. Congratulations to for getting Best Anthology for Transphoria!

ComicArtFans.com announced the creation of the Jack & Roz Kirby Awards. The inaugural ceremony will be held in February 2026.

The Zelda Awards are accepting nominations to honor women in comics! The nominating process will conclude on December 31, and public voting will begin in February 2026. The awards ceremony will be held Saturday, April 11.

Voting has begun for the Tripwire Awards honoring U.S. and UK comics. That’s only open until Friday, November 21.

Obituaries

Finally and sadly, Drew Struzan, an artist and film poster designer who created several iconic images for franchises that inspired comics, passed away at 78.

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That’s all for this month. Did I miss anything? Comment below if I have. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already. The Comics Book Club will be meeting again on November 19 to discuss Ginseng Roots: A Memoir. Thanks again for everything.

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Happy Halloween, everyone! I was attending New York Comic Con and on vacation during this month’s meeting, but three people showed up in my absence. This makes me very happy to know that something I’ve helped run could potentially exist without me. Also, I feel like less of a bully knowing that people will voluntarily show up to discuss comics even if I’m not there. Lol

In this issue: What We’re Reading - About What We’ve Read - Shameless Self-Promotion - Some Thoughts on Blending Genres

I fell in love with this book as soon as I saw the artwork. The cross-hatching impressed me so much, I texted the person who recommended this book in the first place to express my gratitude. I also really loved the character design. Trese herself looked very cool and the tikbalang was very impressive. The artwork was universally praised along with the “monster of the week” structure of the individual issues and serialized stories. One person felt the writing was weaker than the art because they felt there wasn’t much of a sense of who the main character was outside of her profession and being her father’s daughter. The dossiers at the end of each issue were helpful for providing greater context for Filipino mythology and the characters’ origins. I appreciated these, but also felt they weren’t strictly necessary since the stories stood on their own merits. I really enjoyed the innovation in adapting the mythology to a noir story; it was cool seeing certain character types reinvented in that way (more on that below). One person said they’d consider reading further volumes while another is hoping more get published. One person watched the first episode of the anime, which I still haven’t seen but have added to my queue.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday, November 19 to discuss Ginseng Roots: A Memoir.

What We're Reading

November 19 - Ginseng Roots: A Memoir by Craig Thompson

December 17 - Berlin by Jason Lutes

January 21 - Dandadan, Volume 1 by Yukinobu Totsu

February 18 - The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1 by Mokumokuren

March 18 - Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 1 by Kamome Shirahama

Next month’s selection is not available on hoopla. There are fewer copies available at the Chicago Public Library than I thought, so reserve yours early! It’s a big one, too, so you’ll want to get started soon anyway. Same for the December selection; consider them some heavy holiday reading. XD

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About What We’ve Read

As mentioned, Trese has been adapted into an anime for Netflix, its first Filipino anime. Here’s an interview with Trese creators Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo about the origin of the comics and how the series became a global phenomenon. You can read the anime’s series wiki here, but there are spoilers.

Trese has been nominated for and won several awards. The third volume won the National Book Award for Best Graphic Literature in 2010. Volume 4 was nominated for the Filipino Readers’ Choice Award for Comics/Graphic Novels in 2012 and Volume 5 won in that category in 2013. Volume 6 was nominated for the National Book Award for Graphic Literature in English in 2015.

Trese, Volume 1: Murder on Balete Drive included a foreword written by Gerry Alanguilan. The final issue was dedicated to Mars Ravelo and Nestor Redondo, Filipino comic creators who created the character Darna back in the Golden Age, who was inspired by the same Filipino myth on which that issue of Trese’s story was based. Back in May, Book Riot had an overview of the 1970s “Filipino Invasion” of talent into comics in the United States. You can watch a feature-length documentary from 2014 about Filipino Komiks featuring Gerry Alanguilan, Komikero Chronicles, on YouTube here.

The latest NEWS digest is available here. The next NEWS digest will be posted in two weeks on Friday, November 14. I’ve got some catching up to do.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I got accepted into The Dreamlands Anthology by Warden Comics! This will be another short comic created with my dream team of artist David Escobar and letterer Buddy Beaudoin. It’ll be a cosmic horror story featuring a certain supernatural gunslinger that I’ve been hyping in this space.

Speaking of, I should do more to hype The Passion of St. Alban of the West and Blackout while I wait for my pitches for those projects to come together. I haven’t forgotten about making an online marketplace for myself before the end of the year! In the meantime, Howling Pages does offer some of my comics online.

On November 11, I’ll be speaking to Dr. Mark Martell’s Superheroes and Cultural Mythology class at the UIC Honors College about “Comics Writing, Superheroes, and the Public Domain.” Once again, my working title has become my actual title because I spread myself too thin. Lol I’ll be recording it and releasing it on my YouTube channel as well as sharing it here. I’ll be giving a brief zine demonstration, talking about both of my current major comics projects, and sharing the creation of a single comics page from script to completion!

My friend and collaborator Onicia Muller posted a preview of her rom-com with footage of a reading of the script over at her YouTube channel:

Rise of the Flightless is still available. We’re halfway to our goal!

Geek Collective’s Archetypes #2 is available digitally. The physical copies have been printed and are being shipped!

The proofs for Prism have arrived, and it’s available for preorder.

The first anthology to publish a comic I wrote, CyberSync, is available for purchase. It went into a second printing!

Some Thoughts on Blending Genres

One of the reasons I enjoyed Trese so much is because it approached mythology as one of my favorite genres. Most comics that tackle mythology tend to settle into fantasy or action/adventure yarns, so this felt refreshing. I’ve read urban fantasy before, particularly the Harry Dresden and Joe Pitt Casebooks by Jim Butcher and Charlie Huston, respectively. Both feature typically hard-boiled straight, white male protagonists, but reimagining mythology in this way felt different and not because it was Filipino mythology with a female protagonist.

Myths are stories with larger-than-life themes that provide explanations of nature and the creation of the world; noir is about individuals trying to make their way in a hostile world, often limited to a single urban environment. On the surface, these are literally worlds apart and might seem irreconcilable.

I’m sure there are plenty of examples that I’m forgetting. I know certain iterations of Moon Knight fold Egyptian mythology into noir-style stories and something tells me Terry Pratchett had a humorous take on a similar setup. (Would Fables count? Myths are different than fairy tales, though.) Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse mythology are the main pantheons mined for comics in the United States with varying degrees of loyalty to source material.

The cultural specificity of Trese is part of what made it so effective. The repurposing of Filipino mythology for noir had some very inventive results in both character and design. The tikbalang being a godfather and the nuno being an informant made sense from a narrative perspective, but also in the cultural context from which they were drawn. The nuno’s termite mound being traded in for a manhole cover was a nice touch, I thought.

People who think that the secret to success is pandering to vague notions of “diversity” (and who were probably annoyed at my use of the term “straight, white male” in the opening paragraph) don’t understand how cultural expression works. Before I fall down that rabbit hole, though, I want to get back to the topic at hand. Trese did more than adapt mythology or plug mythological creatures into a noir story randomly. It was intentional with its use of narrative devices and character arcs.

This might be what sets apart a good blended genre story: It has to take both halves of the equation seriously. That’s where a lot of horror comedies fail, by going too far in one direction or the other. I’ve lamented elsewhere how superhero stories (the genre most linked to comics in the United States) can be limited by not embracing other modes of storytelling and I think the same can be true of any genre. The best way to infuse new life into a story that’s becoming too reliant on tropes is sometimes to introduce a different set of tropes.

The one that comes to mind is Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming, transforming a superhero story into a police procedural. I wish I’d done more research for this essay to provide more examples, but life continues to be very busy at the moment and now I’m out of time. Sorry to cut this short!

Thanks for reading! I know this essay was somewhat slapdash. What are some of your favorite genre mashups? Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Take care of each other. Make sure to be here next month for Ginseng Roots: A Memoir by Craig Thompson!

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I heard some people compare New York Comic Con to San Diego Comic-Con and my initial reaction was to balk, but I quickly understood the analogy. If SDCC is every crowd you’ve ever been in all at the same time, as I’ve often described it, NYCC feels like as many people in a smaller area. That’s not to say NYCC didn’t radiate outward, from the violinist in the subway station dressed as Wonder Woman to the scalpers buying and selling passes around the Javits Center, but it wasn’t a concentrated takeover of the city the way SDCC was when I was there.

For every creator or old or online friend I got to meet or reconnect with, there were ten who unfortunately fell by the wayside because of poor planning or time management on my part. If you were one of those people and you’re reading this, I’m sorry about that. I hope we get another chance to meet up soon!

I arrived Thursday morning, but crashed pretty soon after at my friends’ Brooklyn apartment. After a nap and a shower, I was able to attend the panel Not Your Average Boogeyman! International Edition with Aria Baci and Faraohkay “Kay” in the Pride Lounge and learn some cool stories about Caribbean, Welsh, and Armenian folklore.

There was a lot of really cool cosplay and I wish I’d taken more photos! I love Nightwing, and thankfully I worked up the courage to ask Kidd Terrio for a picture after another panel in the Pride Lounge on Friday. Go follow him on Instagram!

Friday afternoon, I attended the Out in Comics panel moderated by and featuring Phil Jimenez, Bradley Clayton, and Chloe Brailsford. It’s always a pleasure to hear Phil Jimenez talk. This time, he shared about his time at DC and got choked up remembering those who advocated for him.

At the other end of the spectrum, Chloe Brailsford spoke about her truncated time as a cover artist for Red Hood. She also delivered one of the best sentiments of the whole weekend, in my opinion, saying that she was more interested in being transgressive than uplifting.

On Sunday, I met up with , , Alex Dvorak, and from Negative Space Comics. It was awesome meeting people I’d only interacted with online who I respect and admire so much! Negative Space gave me the confidence to continue pursuing creating comics, and I wouldn’t have made all the progress I have in the last few years without their help and encouragement.

There was no time to rest after NYCC, because I had a 6:00 am flight to Buffalo to meet my husband and his parents on our way to. . .

Niagara Falls! I promise not to do an extended riff on an old vaudeville routine.

We were there for a couple of days and made sure to visit the Canadian side, which made me more than a little nervous, but everything turned out okay.

After Niagara Falls, we came back to New York City to do some sightseeing. We visited Times Square and Chinatown, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and went on a boat tour around the Statue of Liberty guided by a soon-to-retire native of the city. I remembered how much I love this place and always wanted to move here, but Chicago is home now.

I’m not gonna lie, I got a little misty eyed standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. While this country betrays every ideal this statue represents and fascist thugs terrorize my home city a thousand miles away, I stood in a crowd of people from almost every continent and heard half a dozen languages while those same people took joyful photographs that embodied the spirit of a welcoming nation that illuminates the world. Old people, young people, blended families, some giving a thumbs up, others raising their right hands to mimic the torch, they made me feel a hope for the future that I haven’t felt in a long time.

My husband was really happy with this picture he took of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This church always reminds me of one of my favorite comics, so I didn’t mind including a visit to it during our trip. Lol We took many more pictures, but I’m running out of space. I’d say to follow me on Instagram but I’m hardly ever on there anymore.

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We returned a couple of days ago, so I’m two weeks behind on contact emails from people I met at NYCC. I hope they understand the reason for the delay as much as I hope this has been enjoyable and not bragging.

If you have any questions about NYCC or our trip, feel free to ask them in the comments! The next Comics Book Club Digest will be posted on next Friday, October 31 with a Comics NEWS Digest going out Friday, November 14. Take care of yourselves and each other. Thanks again for everything.

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