Upping My Screen Time

New drawings and sci-fi novel reviews!

In this newsletter:

• Upping My Screen Time

• A comic announcement!

• New Justice Warriors poster

• New Toxic Avenger cover

• My Summer Sci-Fi Reading

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Always an iconoclast, I am cutting against current trends in mindfulness and upping my screen time.

When my first kid was born, more than seven years go now, I immediately switched to drawing my comics digitally. Until that week, it was all ink on paper, including hand-lettering each strip. Since I dropped political cartoons in 2021 I’ve been hankering to get back to drawing more—and I have been! I bought an iPad a few years ago and have drawn reams of concept art, some of which will be suitable to share before too long.

Now the bristol beckons. The ink invites... and the screen tones scream to me. That last part, screen tones, are sheets of clear adhesive film that have tiny dots printed on them, which grants those who wield it the effect of shading. It is a pre-photoshop practice that preceded me entering the field and sometimes an old-timer would pull out the sheets of discontinued Zipatone® they hoarded for just the right project. I once made a high resolution scan of a friend’s old sheet of lined screen tone, which had the benefit of slight imperfections that Photoshop just cannot replicate.

They’re heavily used in manga to this day, though mostly done digitally. Well, a Japanese company still makes the physical sheets you can place over your inks and so I bought some. You lay it down and then carefully cut away areas where you don't want coverage. Et voilà! A lovely piece of original art.

I’m starting with a number of Toxic Avengers in different styles before moving on to some long-overdue commissions next month. I owe some very patient people some drawings, which I hope to make extra nice with some screen tones. Then, who knows, there are plenty of characters I’d like to draw.

It’s a Cruel Universe, Baby

After 68 years, Oni Press has revived the seminal EC Comics line that gave rise to titles such as Tales From the Crypt and Weird Science, and, in response, the Comics Code Authority that shut them down and stifled the industry for decades. The talent under that publishing house included Jack Davis, Harvey Kurtzman, and Bernard Krigstein. Needles to say, I revere those comics—they were some of the first comics I ever procured and I still read them to this day.

Anyway, I wrote a story for Cruel Universe #4, the relaunched line’s new science-fiction anthology. It features the first extra-terrestrial president of the USA with art by Daniel Irizarri. This cover for the issue, referring to our story, is by the excellent Kano.

It’s a lovely thing to be able to contribute to. In stores November 6, 2024.

Election Imminent

Justice Warriors: Vote Harder, my election year satire and thriller with Ben Clarkson, drops in stores September 11. You can pre-order with me (in the US) or wherever books are sold.

I’ve been rolling out a series of posters I designed that highlight the major players in the story: Swamp, Schitt, The Prince, and three new characters. I’ve been dropping one a week with some additional writing with each that sets up the characters arc in Vote Harder. To see those, check my Instagram or just here on Notes.

Here I present you with a cover by Ben Clarkson that I made into a poster. This really gets at the paranoid thriller vibe, inspired by media like The Parallax View and The Manchurian Candidate. Not to be outdone by reality, we feature three assassination attempts… and if you think the recent presidential debate was a disaster, wait until you see our candidates appear on Question Cylinder.

Toxic Slop!

One of the great joys of working on a new Toxic Avenger comic has been drawing covers and packing them with as much mutant slop as I can muster. See here my cover for issue #2—a full wrap around! Let’s go ahead and make this puppy Substack-Big for all of you viewing on a desktop.

The first issue of this series comes out October 9, but an important date is coming up in early September: the cutoff for pre-orders. Pre-ordering a comic ensures the shop will have a copy for you and signals a customer demand. Both important! So call your local comic shop and say you’d like to order the new five issue Toxic Avenger series. You can even tell them you want the special Matt Bors variant covers, which intrigue you so.

Summer Sci-Fi Reading

I chopped a few floors off my tower of unread sci-fi novels this summer. I liked ‘em enough to bore you with some short reviews!

PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia Butler (1993)—I started this on the day in 2024 that the novel begins. How often do you get to do that with a book? Here, the United States is in considerably worse shape and entering into a full collapse around the teenage protagonist, Lauren Olamina, whose diary we are reading. Her family lives in a struggling walled community in what passes for middle-class, beset by scavengers and a lack of resources. Bleak and upsetting, mostly bad things happen to the characters through the entire book! Amid that are the acts of banding together, the survival through-and-because-of solidarity, and the development of a new religion that make it profound. It was as good and necessary as everyone told me. Some lines smacked me awake. Consider me Earthseed-pilled.

CHAIN GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (2023)—Televised gladiatorial combat put on by the private prison system. I’m in! In the near future, Hurricane Staxx and Loretta Thurwar are two lovers on the same prison Chain, killing other combatants to generate the profits they don't share and the hero-worship they don’t need. Their destiny is to either be Low Freed (dead) or High Freed (actually free) if they survive long enough. When they’re not crushing skulls, they talk about their feelings, and we flit about to see the perspective of activists, broadcasters, victims and inmates of this world.

It gets both dark and inspiring. The ways in which confinement, torture, and isolation worm into the mind of the incarcerated are some of the most affecting passages. The gladiatorial action is thrilling and you are asked to think about that. What could have been more of a conventional dystopian genre take aspires to literary and political significance—and mostly succeeds.

A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT by Becky Chambers (2021)—This was my first foray into “cozy punk,” a genre of conflict-free good vibes in more utopia-like settings, captained largely by Chambers. In this book, a wandering “tea monk” ambivalent about their life direction encounters a robot for the first time in generations, as AI and humans separated their societies long ago and seem to have solved most material problems. Instead of high drama and violence there is comfort and discussion. I wanted a little more, but this was a short read and it is nice to spend a little time with hopeful visions of the future considering some of the books I was reading…

TENDER IS THE FLESH by Agustina Bazterrica (2017)—Profoundly disturbing. Deeply unsettling! In this world, a plague carried by animals has wiped out a good deal of the human population. The remnants of society now eat factory-farmed humans grown in captivity for slaughter. The author fully commits to what industrialized cannibalism would look like under capitalism, ingrained in society, normalized, and enforced. It’s as brutal as you can imagine. Maybe worse.

Yes, it’s about factory farming and how humans can be bottomlessly cruel to each other, but what elevates this one to a really exceptional novel is both the world-building details of language, economics, behavior, and law that sculpt this new reality and also the simple story of the protagonist—his grief over a lost child, his growing unease with the hell he lives in, and his desire to regain back something resembling a shred of humanity. Scenes from this will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Currently, I am reading THE FUTURE by Catherine Leroux, a Quebecois author who spins a post-apocalyptic story out of an alternate history of Detroit, where it was never ceded in the war of 1812. Next will be HUM, Helen Phillips’ new novel. Her prior book, THE NEED, really knocked my socks off during the pandemic and I’m looking forward to this one. Hit me with your science fiction recs!