In Conclusion...

Hello friends,

I just wanted to post a small year-end wrap-up post. 2024 was a mixed bag for me personally, we've had kind of a rough past 24 months, my father-in-law was diagnosed with lung cancer at the beginning of 2023, he passed about a year ago, which left my mother-in-law in a bad spot financially. She moved in with us at the end of the Summer, and has been living here while she tries to get back on her feet. On the list of things I am very concerned about happening in this county in the near future, Elon Musk sniffing around looking to cut people's social security benefits is certainly included. I have to tell you, this "sandwich generation" stuff (where you're roughly 50, trying to finish raising your kids and getting them out the door to college, while also dealing with elderly parents entering their years of decline), well, it sucks! Hopefully, in regards to my family life, 2025 can be a year where things get back a little bit towards normal.

Professionally this year was pretty good. I had three strips published in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, and my burgeoning school visits/teaching artist side project continued to grow. I received an Arts grant from the State of New Jersey, and I really dug in writing and drawing a new graphic novel. My publisher, Union Square Kids, was acquired by Hachette recently. I don't exactly know if that's entirely good or bad news. I don't think I think it's great that every smaller company gets swallowed up by one of the big five, but also it's possibly my book will benefit from there theoretically being more resources available to promote and do what it is publishers do.

For the past 7 or 8 months I've been working intensely on the drawing and coloring part of making a book. For me, the writing stage happens in fits and starts, I will spend a few hours in a day working on the story, but still have a good amount of time available to me to do other things. When I get to the part where I'm solely making art, that's when it becomes a much more full-time thing. Coloring especially, the most labor intensive part of a project. I've shared some pages online from the book, showing off some of the airy watercolor style I've adopted for this story. What I haven't shared online yet is that this book takes place in two worlds, the painterly "real world", which I've shared, and also the "virtual world" of a game called Dominion. Figuring out a look and feel for this space is a lot of what I've been doing the past two months. I am not sure I am totally there yet, but I wanted to share here a few recently made pages.

I'm still figuring this out I think, but the idea is these much bolder brighter pages will contrast powerfully against the painterly style of the other half of the book.

If all goes according to schedule, I should be wrapping up the colors around April. The book deals with themes of animal rights and our food supply, and my intention is to write a new cartoon essay to include as supplemental material. For members of my Monthly 'Zine Club, I think you can expect to receive an advance copy of that cartoon as its own self-published mini-comic sometime around May.

A sincere thank-you to all of you supporting me here on this Patreon, especially the members of the 'Zine Club, I very much enjoy putting little comics and pamphlets together, and I love having readers to send that material out to. In regards to the most recent issue, I should be done dropping the print copies of the comic into the mail this week, and will be posting the digital PDF link most likely next Monday.

I hope you all have a wonderful Holiday Season, and a Happy New Year. Here's to good things in 2025!

Mike