NYCC kind of week
TALES FROM THE DEAD ASTRONAUT
TALES FROM THE DEAD ASTRONAUT #1 (SEP211774) and #2 (OCT211750) are now available for order through your local comic shop thanks to the fine people at SOURCE POINT PRESS. We are also a week from NYCC which will mark the first time I go to the convention as a “professional” and my second time going to the convention overall.
I’m not sure what to expect with Tales and this little adventure Jorge and I are on with it. I hope we do well, obviously, Jorge and I worked hard to make sure that the book had a wonderful flow to it. I wanted each story to continue naturally and build to their own amazing climaxes in #3 and I think we pulled it off. I’m excited for the excitement surrounding the book. Thanks again to Source Point who believes in this book enough to have made us their cover for their section in the September Previews Magazine. As a kid growing up thumbing through Previews that was so awesome to see.
I started working with Jorge Luis Gabotto as a way to challenge myself to finally take the dive into comic book writing. He was the first artist I ever worked with. Jorge and I teamed up with a short called Seek/Repair which was a fun little robot 2 pager that helped me loosen up with how to approach comics. It was also the first time I learned to just trust that the artist knows how to lay out a page far better than I can so its best to just let them work.
After that we put together ANOTHER WORLD. I pushed a little further with this one bumping up to a six pager and trying to tell a more complex sci-fi trip. It came out so well that it was picked up and published in a sci-fi magazine called INFINITE WORLDS. The magazine only would accept color comics so I had Jorge lay down those beautiful tones and what came out on the other side was even more complete.
At that point I was ready to fill our book out. We had one solid story with Another World and I knew that I had both THE STAR and PRICE OF STEEL in my notebook. Two ideas that I had wanted to explore for a long time. Jorge and I put each story together one by one while I came up with the simple narrative device of a Dead Astronaut floating through space telling us these tales.
I printed 200 digest sized copies, set up a website, and began to hustle. Each one sold was better than the money I lost putting the book together. I was feeling confident with all the good reception we were getting about that book that I cold sent it out to several publishers. Then I forgot about it. A few months later an email came in from Source Point telling us that they loved our book and wanted to publish it.
They asked us how much of it was ready and how long it would take us to finish…but I never conceived of it as more then just the stand alone issue. Now, I had to dig in and figure out where to go with the book. The Dead Astronaut had a cliffhanger so that would continue as our through line. I thought about doing different stories, which is where SPACE HOARDER! came from. But, in the end I felt the best course was to continue with each of the stories set up in the now issue #1.
We finished throughout the winter and spring which led us to here…NYCC and our November 24th release around the bend. I’ll have my first published comic #1 and plenty more in my holster getting ready to go.
Make sure you order your copies! This is just the beginning!
GotD Progress
On the A GAME OF DOUBLES side Ryan just wrapped the final design of the tpb and it went straight to the printer. I really love how this book came together (over 100 pages!) and I’m excited to get another slice of this universe I am creating up on my shelf.
Check out the pre-launch page for his next project here!
THE KILLER Progress
There is so much that could be said about THE KILLER and its progress and words would fail it. What I have found constantly refreshing as I work with new artists is seeing how they interpret my scripts. I don’t change my style to suit the artist in the script stage, maybe through panel amount per-page and expanding on what they already can do great, but really all of my scripts look the same. Every time I see the finished results I am empowered by the alchemy of comics. Seeing pages coming has helped me tweak and add just making this story better as it goes along.
When we started we had 60 pages…now I think we’re up to 64. It just keeps getting better.
Make sure you follow us on instagram @spacestationzed to keep updated!
ALL IN!
While all these things are coming together I am developing my next KICKSTARTER project…a Mario Kart/Cowboy Bebop/Speed Racer mash up called ALL IN!
Check out some of the characters thanks to the artist and my teammate Jok…
NYCC
Since I have a handful of copies left of TALES FROM THE DEAD ASTRONAUT the best thing I could think to do would be to bring them with me to Comic-Con. I’ll be at the Source Point booth on Saturday giving away the 50-75 or so remaining copies of the original print run.
Come grab one!
END OF TRANSMISSION
Comics have been great to me throughout my life. Now, they have become an amazing way to express my art of storytelling. They are a unique form. There are so many things we can do in comics that we can’t do in literature or film.
I will end this newsletter with a quote I saw from Matt Fraction from 20 years ago (still relevant today) that sums up how I feel about these floppy books that we love:
"I don't believe that there's a magic bullet for comics. I think absolutely everything that can go wrong for comics is going wrong, and I think there's a lot of stuff going right. I don't think it's a diverse enough medium. I don't think it gets to where it needs to go. I don't think there are enough intelligent people working in the medium-not to say that there are not intelligent people in the medium, but the fact that people make *exceptions* for good stuff bothers me. I'm tired of good stuff being the exception to the rule. Distribution is a nightmare. The direct market is a shambles. The fact that there's one distributor is absurd, the fact that superheroes have such a chokehold is absurd. The fact that absolutely everyone aren't aware of who Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez are is absurd, the fact that Joe Sacco isn't on Nightline once a week is absurd. But at the same time, it's weirdly anonymous-you can do a lot of great shit. So there's a lot of good stuff too, there's a lot of good stuff being done, and I'm greedy -- I want more. I'm tired of it being a medium of exceptions."
(Matt Fraction, 2002)