Mike Dawson

Stranger Things - comic pitch

Added 2025-03-14 18:04:57 +0000 UTC

I hit a pretty major milestone with my new graphic novel this past week, I completed the initial coloring pass. Coloring is the stage in the process that is the most labor intensive, I have found, and really for the past 4-5 months I've been working hard every week to make my way through all 236 pages of the book, with not a lot of time for much else (apart from publishing 'zines!).

There's still lots of work left to do on the book, revising, cleaning up, adding back-matter, and of course creating the cover, but finishing up the first pass on the colors means I have a little more spare time available than I did before.

I'll be sharing plenty more about the new book in the coming months, but I thought maybe it'd be fun to share this cartoon essay that I mocked up and sent over to the Arts & Leisure editor at The New York Times yesterday. This cartoon essay springboards out of a diary piece I wrote a couple years ago for my Instagram, and published in my Generation X 'zine, but I thought there was some room here to go a little further and maybe have something additional to say.

I thought readers here might enjoy seeing this in its raw form. I don't have a set way that I send out submissions, but with this one I decided to drop my usual font and just use a basic one like Arial as a placeholder. The drawings are loose, but hopefully convey enough detail that each panel makes sense enough to be read in this rough form. Enjoy.

We will see what the NYT people think. My track record with them is pretty good, so far three submissions accepted, and probably about 3-4 rejected. Fingers crossed for this piece!