FEBRUARY (and also January) 2026 NEWSLETTER

Hello howdy wazzup,

How has your bracingly cold and depressing year been so far? Has it been too cold to draw in your studio bcuz your wretched building installed heaters that don’t properly warm your space? No just me? Hmmmm.

Despite that, we are still plugging away over here. Was a pretty hectic holiday season, and we recharged a wee bit but now we’re back to the endless hustle.

We’ve randomly had a big bump in subscribers the last 2.5 months, so: hello to everyone new. Hope you will enjoy reading these newsletters. Welcome to the twisted mind of a indie comics artist and small press organizer, who has hopes to widen the audience of weird storytelling and artmaking…will we accomplish this? Idk, but thanks for tuning in. Maybe you can help…?

So let’s get right into it…

The big announcement of the newsletter is that our next show is coming up QUICKLY. Friday, March 6, at Life World (in Brooklyn) as usual.

This is gonna be a BIG one. I know I always say that, but have I ever been wrong? We are constantly in a game of one-upping ourselves, and let’s just say we are majorly planning on doing that here. Or at least, I think we are. You’ll have to see for yourself I guess.

The spread of talent at this show is all over the place in the best way possible…

We’ve got three comic readers: two faves with A.T. and Christina, and then a new comic talent with Liz Stuard Smith (more on her work in a sec.)

One new animator to the show: Lena Greene!

Then a bunch of wacky weird performances: Pierce is gonna be doing his thing as usual, Amir is going to be putting together a video game interactive performance, and Vinnie Neuberg is gonna be playing music.

Don’t miss it: https://frogfarm.online/frogfarm11

So maybe you noticed in the poster a little announcement? That there is a Frog Farm comic debut at this show.

This new comic is “Sweet Creature” by Liz Stuard Smith. We’ve been working with her in the last year or so to make a really awesome comic, and it’s finally ready for the world to read!

This is a very fun little book (it’s quite small physically.) I hope you all enjoy it! I’ll be posting some of it in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled.

It follows a girl who ventures into a mysterious forest kingdom to save a creature who's been haunting her dreams.

If you can’t wait to buy it at the show, or just aren’t in New York and want to order early, you can pre-order over here: https://frogfarm.bigcartel.com/product/sweet-creature-by-liz-stuard-smith

OK what else are we up to?

Well we’re chipping away on a big Critter project…it’s been long in the works, but gears are turning and we have enlisted many artists who are equally as invested in this multi-medium scheme as us. One part magazine, one part comic strip, one part video game??

We’ll be posting more very soon but check out all this WIP:

More details in the next few months as we start sharing finished work for this, but we’re aiming for a May-June release?

What will be the final form of the release? You’ll have to wait to find out. Thank you to all Critter fans (including our generous benefactors at Cartuna) for your patience as we figure out what the legs (or uhhh slime trail) of what Critter is. It’s evolved slowly from Critter is a prop in a movie to…Critter can be in everything and everywhere. He’s a fucking star, baby.

Looking ahead the next few months, our first fest of the year will be MoCCA, weekend of March 28-29! We are on our last like ten copies of the Connoisseurs right now, so we’re just doing the proactive thing and not letting the comic go out of print and roll right into it’s second printing. So yes: we will have copies, thanks for asking. Same for Valley Valley/Idella Dell! Reprint plans for the very successful comic are in motion.

…I guess this is the braggart corner of the newsletter - we are selling comics, and people are buying them!! Very nice.

As for new stuff: we’ll have a new tote and t-shirt most likely. All the SVA students who attend MoCCA love that shit.

Hmmm ok what else can I put in the small talk/small update section…we have begun planning some NEW books. Audra has handed us the next chunk of her Valley & Idella stories. The comics are really good. A few other projects are cooking in the oven, including a big sci-fi racing comic (hell yeah), and a speculative biology zine-textbook (very exciting) and we are PUMPED to be working on them. As is our modus operandi, we’re not rushing anything. Things are coming together though. We are feeling good about the artists we are supporting.

Is this exciting? Are you excited?

Ok recommendation corner time? Yes.

First one is a big one. Basically Avengers Endgame for quirked up white boys from Toronto (me: non-derogatory.) I’m talking about: Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. If you’re worried about having not watched the webseries or Viceland tv show you really don’t need to, you can go in cold. All you need to know is that these two guys: Matt and Jay, are trying to book a show at the Rivoli (a shitty little mid sized venue in Toronto.) They do various schemes and plans on the show, and the movie is just a bigger version of one of their classic schemes.

Basically my pitch for this nearly 20 year project is that it’s a combination of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Nathan For You - where they have a loose plot outline and are improvising the beats, but then they are often doing these scenes in public around real people and so inevitably when someone interacts with them it gets folded into their story, sometimes small ways, sometimes way larger than you’d expect.

If you’ve been craving the experience of a funny movie in the theatres…here is your chance. It feels good to say (with a hint of melancholy, because it doesn’t happen very often anymore) seeing it with a group of 50 or so people at IFC Center was really nice.

That being said, if you end up liking the movie you can watch all of the shows online. I’ve linked them all below:

Webseries: https://nirvannathebandthe.show/episodes/

Viceland show season 1: https://archive.org/details/NTBTS_S1

Viceland show season 2: https://archive.org/details/NTBTS_S2

It’s all very inspiring stuff in terms of how they’re breaking the mold of the form to make something new and unique but also extremely watchable and relatable. Personally, it’s really cool seeing them break containment past Canada. I’ve known these guys since I met them in film school in Canada (I was undergrad, when Matt was doing his graduate film degree.)

I think NTBTSTM also brings up interesting thoughts about nostalgia and how using it can be a crutch vs an actually effective tool. A lot of their plots revolve around referencing or involving 90s and 2000s media, and I think if done poorly would feel cheap and lame, but it doesn’t!

My buddy Shaumbé was posting on his instagram stories about the wretched and lazy use of nostalgia in so much media nowadays. Since I saw the movie with him, I asked him what he thought of how deep Matt and Jay’s characters are seeped in nostalgia.

My text to Shaumbé: What’re your feelings on NTBTSTM’s use of nostalgia?

Shaumbé: “i kinda interpret their characters as a criticism of the kinds people with arrested development who are obsessed with old shit - more lighthearted but still a criticism.

i think they used old things to make something new, instead of just making a movie that said “remember when” over and over. thats my beef with nostalgia.

so they used a familiar old setting as a humor/plot device, and used old footage and cameras and all that shit, but i think it was in service of a new thing (back to the future homage is not new but id consider the formal elements of their storytelling to be pretty novel.)”

The cool part is how intermingled their nostalgic stuff is with the plot to the point where they can argue for it’s Fair Use under the law. I dredged up this video from 2018 when their show was still on the air.

It’s very inspirational and highlights a lot of stuff including how lame and risk averse Canadian media is in general. I think a lot of Americans assume it’s free unlimited arts funding in Canada, and while that’s somewhat true if you get plugged into the system, they really aren’t interested in new cutting edge stuff. That spirit of experimentation is not really rewarded and so is a lot harder to come by. But also in the last 8 years it’s only gotten more wretched here in the United States for arts culture, soooooooo……

Doomer doomer doomer. Blargh.

Ok another recommendation: Cryptid Corner by Parker Davis

If you don’t know Parker, he’s one half of the powerful creative duo of Harrison & Parker. They’ve made work together for Adult Swim, have separately had animations with A Studio Digital, and are generally a very productive team posting very weird stuff on their youtube page regularly.

The two of them toe the line of making live action, animation and comics work together, and I am fan of all of it. We have published work by Harrison (the famously epic Orbs) and I am a big fan of Parker as well. They share similar tastes and influences which reflect in their overall artistic sensibilities of making work in a somewhat naive crude style, but approach it in very different ways.

Cryptid Corner, published by I Know What You Did Press, feels like a very distilled taste of what Parker is specifically interested in and shows (in a cool way) what he brings to the table in the duo, which is: specifically weird characters, with obsessive interests with an ability to only communicate through these interests. But because the interests are extremely opaque and obscure, the interfacing between these characters are closer to manipulations and breakdown in communications.

This is a beefy comic from Parker, around a 100+ page count and it is a weird one. It starts as a videogame-ish focused webcomic a la Penny Arcade, and then devolves into a paranoid thriller about a creature stalking the protagonist and his gf, being pushed along by a community of obsessed cryptid aficionados, with a nefarious ringleader. It reads like if South Park was a terminally online paranoid paranormal thriller.

Which speaking of, after reading this comic, I started rewatching some peak South Park (“peak” imo is season 5-11, which is like 2001 through 2008…so I guess Bush era lmao.) Hilarious to see what was controversial back then. Some absolute major loser centrist takes, but somehow funny still. Character based, kid-centric stuff like Casa Bonita, or Randy-centric like the one where he takes the biggest crap are big winners in my book. Ok sidebar over.

I think the story in Cryptid Corner meanders in some parts as we fall deeper into the cult-ish rabbithole, but I think that’s part of the pleasure of the process for Parker, seeing how these weirdos treat each other. Similarly Parker definitely conceives of the layout of the pages much like they’re frames in an animation, and so he’s often filling the entire page with just one panel. So although it’s a decent length, you flip through it pretty quickly. This comic is definitely not for everyone, but if you share my taste for the rougher around the edges crude online cartoon world, then this could be something you go and check out.

If you wanna get a copy, bug either Parker or I Know What You Did Press. I believe they’re about to do a reprint, so nows the time to grab a copy.

What else is going on? Hmmmmm. Not much, it’s been cold and miserable, as previously mentioned, so I have been inside trying to distract myself. I finally finished my epic silkpunk fantasy series called “the Dandelion Dynasty” by Ken Liu. I’ve been reading it since last summer so feels good to wrap it up. Has anyone else read this?

Kinda exactly my q-zone of anthropological, linguistic, technological detailed fantasy worlds. A lot of airships, and detailed histories with a lot of twists and turns. There’s a weirdly low amount of online chatter on this book series, it feels like it’s mostly morons dismissing it, where it feels like bcuz it’s not Game of Thrones some of the elements are going over their heads. I kinda stumbled on this series by accident, but like 5000 pages, and 4 books later, I don’t regret jumping in at all. It’s written by the translator of “The Three Body Problem,” and has a bit of the same “overexplaining, but in a fun way” vibe to it lol.

I reread some Ursula Leguin short stories…”The Matter of Seggri” is still really great. I have a new appreciation for the short story “Solitude.” I wonder if Ursula would’ve been a femcel if she was born in 1999 instead of 1929 lmao. I think…yes, but in like a cool way. I miss hosting my Ursula Leguin Hainish Cycle book club during the pandemic. I know it’s said often, but she’s the GOAT and I want to be talking about this more often with people.

Also have been watching a lot of movies. I finally saw a bunch of stuff I had missed, like:

• Marty Supreme (dope)

• Avatar Fire & Ash (dope, but kinda a rehash of Way of Water)

• The Running Man (not great, but not as bad as people have said)

• F1: The Movie (meh, racecar go vroom vroom though)

plus some of the new stuff released after the holidays like:

• 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (dope)

• Wuthering Heights (not bad, not great)

• and of course NTBTSTM (dope, read: longer review above.)

What else?

• I beat that game Thank Goodness You’re Here. Very cool linear character focused game that works really well within the constraints it gives itself. Matt Barry does a voice in this game.

  

• Playing through Minish Cap for the first time in awhile. Really clever game design with Link’s shrinking mechanic. There’s a sequence where you’re going around Hyrule Town trying to retrieve three library books that are overdue so you can climb the shelf in mini mode where the books are usually placed.

• What else…Uhhhh….Got back into Balatro a few days ago…unlocked the final deck. Not too shabby.

What’ve you been reading/watching/playing to cope with the last half dozen wretched weeks?

Ok I think that’s about it. Please come to the next show, it’s gonna be dank. More soon. Hope to hear from everyone what you’ve been up to!

It’s 45 degrees in NYC today which is positively balmy, so there’s still hope. Don’t give up lol.

Cheers,

Alex