August Minicomic - Digital Download

Hello friends,

This is the update to share the digital download for August's minicomic of the month, FUN TIME, Is This The Real Life? or also simply, Guitar Solo. Find it attached to this post or download it from this Dropbox link here https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1n601nu3rs38tb8715i1k/GUITAR-SOLO.pdf?rlkey=gpyoz6vmdxszavk1xyv546gd9&st=0b1d0k8h&dl=0

Physical copies have all gone into the mail. I may have made a mistake with some of the packages I sent out first, where I may not have put enough postage on them. I am unsure whether those will get returned to me or if they'll still reach their intended recipients. The lady at the post office says it can just depend on who's sorting them and if they feel like being nice about it or not, as these comics kind of skirt the line between being a regular letter and a large envelope. If you are a domestic Minicomic Club member, particularly someone who joined in the past five months or less, and you haven't received a new comic from me by, let's say, September 15th, please reach out and I'll get a new one out to you.

I spoke in an earlier post about how I have had this long held desire to create a full color, heavily edited, and vastly revised edition of my first graphic novel, Freddie & Me, making a book that's more aimed at an audience of younger readers. I am not sure if it would technically be classified as middle-grade or YA, but essentially it would be something written with a specific younger audience in mind.

The urge to do this is multiple-fold. I personally love revisiting and improving upon older work, even though it's the kind of thing people always warn against. I think it's a little bit connected to a chip on my shoulder I had much earlier on in my career, believing that editing was something you shouldn't do and something pure was lost that way. I think editing is the best, best, most best thing you can do as a writer, and it frustrates me a little to think of all the work I never gave a second pass to, out of some sense of artistic purity. If someone would pay me to do it, I'd redraw and rewrite pretty much all of my first few books.

Secondarily, Freddie & Me was absolutely not initially written with younger readers in mind, if I had been thinking about an audience at all, it was probably just people who table at SPX and read The Comics Journal. But I have noticed, in the almost two decades since it was published, that tween and teenaged readers seem to connect strongly with it. It makes sense, the bulk of the book is about my younger years in England, and then my High School years in America. There's a third part of the story, which at the time I considered "generic present day", but I now see as my young-adult years living in post-9/11 New York, but that never seems to be the chunk that readers get as attached to. It seemed to me that I could make a version of this that leans in to that part.

But, now having rewritten revised and redrawn a solid chunk of the book, in the pages of the minicomic I'm now sending you, I'm feeling like that urge has passed. This particular cartoon essay makes a really great standalone 'zine, and I think you'll enjoy it, but the desire to revisit all of this work has now largely cooled off. Maybe it was good to get it out of my system in this way? Currently my mind is more focused on new things.

Speaking of new, enclosed in the minicomic packages this month, members will find a postcard with the front cover and some additional images from my upcoming middle-grade book, The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James. I made these to give kids at workshops and school visits, I figure any opportunity to connect with a potential new reader should not be missed, and I thought they'd be fun to share with you all. I really am in the final stages of completing this project, and believe it shouldn't be too long before the cover appears somewhere online. I hope you enjoy seeing it. I'm not ready yet to share the full thing online, but for fun, here's a tiny little cropped piece of it, where you can see I decided a spotted lantern fly should forever live next to my logo. Horrible invasive things they are.

Thanks as always for the support!
Mike