07/17/26: REVENGE (AT LAST)

Hey y’all,

Like a lot of you, I spent a lot of the pandemic with my life under an electron microscope. I was having a lot of serious thoughts. Thoughts that would spill out into even more serious conversations. That would spill over into very serious walks. I thought. I talked. I walked. I thought and talked and walked again. And again. And again.

What I didn’t do, at least for a while, was make any art. For most of the back half of 2020, I didn’t write down a single creative thought or draw a single line. I had always expressed myself through my work, but now I didn’t even know what I wanted to say, much less if it was worth saying.

But surprisingly, when my pen did get moving again, the ideas I’d sealed away like treasure in my Scrooge McDuck vault came flooding back to drown me. Pitches and outlines and ideas scraps for stories that only had value in the past. Life had changed dramatically, and whatever came next had to reflect that.

Now, it probably goes without saying I’m still working on that. But I was fortunate to know from experience that setting out to create some great and vaulted work rarely gets you past the first chapter. So rather than try to force some immediate change, I just started to slowly do my “push-ups”. Exercises to get my hand and mind moving. To unclench. To sweat and burn off as much of the weight I’d put on as I could.

A lot of those experiments yielded pretty fuck awful unusable results. Stumbles in reverse, or sideways, or into the threat of oncoming traffic. But sometimes they yielded ideas that, well, maybe just needed to ferment?

One of those comics kombuchas was something I could only describe as Adult Swim making G.I. JOE with cosmic stakes. But despite a pretty deep pre-production dive, that story it has laid unfinished all these years, in part because I believed it was too close to the kind of superhero-adjacent violence I used to peddle.

But as time has passed, and I’ve put more comics between me and 2020, I’ve thought more and more about how fun it might be to go back to distilling/embracing/satirizing 80s action heroes I grew up on. If nothing else, I needed to polish off all the design work, right? Maybe type up the outline? Hell, why not finally color the first 8 pages?

Y’know… just in case.

I don’t know if or when I’ll finish it. And I really don’t know that it’s anything new. In fact, it may just be a love letter to everything old. Whatever the case, it sure was fun to play with.

Which means maybe it really is “to be continued”?

• There are about 30 backers who have never completed your survey for shipping. Which of course, means I still have your books. So if this is you, PLEASE help me send you this comic. I’m very proud of it. And I think you will enjoy it.

• Speaking of, if you did enjoy it… How about maybe going over to say GOOD READS or Amazon or… wherever and leaving a VERY positive review? I sure would appreciate it.

• And last but not least, if you are owed an ART REWARD— I have not forgotten you! One of the truly humbling reasons why I don’t do a lot of commissions is that I have a very bad habit of trying to put my whole back into them. Which is as bad for mental health as it is good for your art rewards. You have my word, your patience will be rewarded.

Sorry it took so long to get back over here and post. I’ll do my best to avoid that happening again. As always, thanks for everything. Hope you enjoyed it.

More soon…

-j