02/04/26: PSEUPER HEROES

Hey y’all,

So in the past, I’ve made a few loud, toothless, “surely, the lady doth bullshit too much” proclamations about feeling sort of done with superhero comics.

But oh, how easily are the lines I’ve drawn in the sand obliterated by my own hot air. I mean, those videos on old comics don’t make themselves now, do they? So, clearly I’d be lying to us both by claiming I’ve got no love left for the game.

But if there’s one thing I do know about relationships…

It’s that love alone isn’t always enough.

See, I fell in love with comics before the internet.

A time when shelves and spinner racks were almost exclusively populated by superheroes. When the most readily available stream of new art and influence came from the freelancers who paid their bills by drawing beefy guys punching for justice.

If you were lucky, the WaldenBooks at the mall carried a copy of “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way”— but there were no animators or comics artists blogging about the nuances of line weight, or composition, or “camera motivation”.

If you wanted to draw stories, superhero comics were your Rosetta Stone.

Now, this isn’t the first time I tried to walk away from superheroes.

I spent my teens and early 20s showing around some pretty idiosyncratic sample pages of Batman and the Hulk to every editor I could find. And after my one hundred thousandth “I love what you do, but change,” I became adamant that I would suffer no more jilting. I would become the jiltee.

But much like love, revenge is a meal, not a diet. I quickly learned that drawing stories with different tones and goals was still an abstract pursuit, and that it would take a lot of thought and time before I could even begin to wrap my mind and pencil around those demands. It led me to draw more from life. To write more. Toward a more holistic approach towards both literally and metaphorically owning what I put down on the page. Warts and all.

Of course, I eventually ended up working at Marvel, where I was desperate to prove to myself and the world that those personal lessons and philosophies could be broadly applied. And sometimes that worked— but like most industries, professional superhero comics can be a bubble of recycled air. Air that smells like French fries, sure… but unlike the eater, it’s rare the staff in the kitchen gets a whiff of anything else.

So when Marvel comics and I parted ways in late 2018, I wasn’t exactly thinking I was D-U-N done with superheroes, but I was carrying two big notions—

One was the hope that I was on the path to making different kinds of comics full time.

The other was just how impossible it felt to ever truly do that.

So here we are, almost 8 years later.

A time when I’m confident, I can say that even if my comics haven’t switched lanes completely, they’re certainly traveling at their own speed. And yet try as I might to chart my own destination, sometimes those roads lead me home.

If you listen closely, nearly every recent DRAWL episode that I’ve made makes an effort to point out the stories of the people who’ve built comics. In an effort to prevent their stories from getting lost in the algorithmic shuffle, those episodes often end up focusing on the superheroes that the market still demands. As a result, I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about those types of characters and why they exist. About what it took and takes to make them.

About how I could have my capes and eat too…

When I posted the first drawings of DOCTOR DAMNED, I had no true idea what I’d drawn or why. Maybe it was exercise in flexing my phantom superhero maker muscles— in how to take very obvious influences and still somehow present something with its own presence. Or maybe I was just a kid playing with crayons.

Either way, I was a little surprised by how many people the design seemed to work for. The short hand seemed set up some expectations. Damned, dirty expectations…

Fortunately, I had a spot for a character like this. A meta satire about the pitfalls and costs of making superheroes that really needed the joyful shot in the arm that drawing him evoked.

Unexpectedly, a “pseuperhero” had come to the rescue. And in the doing, I think I uncovered a way to stretch myself towards telling a different kind of story— without throwing away all the time, and skills, and insight that I learned crafting capes for a living.

For the moment, that’s what those DEADLINE designs above are for as well. For more stories, I hope to tell about both superheroes and the people who make them. Much like the FRISKY FOX strips, I think letting them unfurl naturally over time in many different shapes and sizes is the best way to stay committed. And that if we’re all patient, a much larger and deeper picture could take shape.

Anyway, if you’ve been generous enough to subscribe to the paid version of this newsletter, you already know exactly what I’m babbling about. If you’re a backer of SUPER EGO VOLUME 1, you soon will.

In fact, speaking of SUPER EGO…

Sticker sheets are here. Sketchbooks and prints will be very soon. Emails about commissions, dealer’s choice rewards, and paying for shipping rates are forthcoming. And best of all— the BIG BOOK itself should be very close to making port. I’m very excited.

So keep your eyes on this space. And as always, thanks for humoring me.

More very soon…

-j