A Year of Making Comics - Update 1

Happy New Year! I hope everybody's 2023 is getting off to a fine start. Thank-you for your continued support on here, I really do appreciate it very much.

I wanted to try something new, which is to provide a little more ongoing "Behind the Scenes" updates for Premium supporters. I have a variety of things going on, and I'm hoping this year is a successful one for me, so my thought was to post weekly "Year of Making Comics" updates. My aim will be to post these on Mondays. I'll try and paint a picture of how things are going for me as a cartoonist now, and maybe by the time December rolls around, we'll see how well or not-well things have gone for me over the course of the year.

NYT Sunday Book Review

I'm starting off, I think on a solid note. The above comic, which is probably not super-easy to make out in this format, should be published in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section on January 15th, where I hope it will be a million times more readable. As I understand it, it will be a full half-page, or maybe a full-page, I'm not totally sure. Until I see it in print, I won't quite believe it's definitely happening. It's most certainly an exciting new place to have my work published.

The comic itself is what I'm thinking of as a "Graphic Response" to a new novel written by the Slate editor, Dan Kois, called Vintage Contemporaries, which I thought was great. The novel will be out on January 17th from HarperCollins, and if you enjoy funny, insightful, and above-all, readable novels, I recommend checking it out.

I have never met Dan Kois in person, but have interacted with him many times, and he's had a lot to do with some of my more significant career milestones. He published some of my earliest cartoon essays on Slate, he shortlisted a piece of mine for the CCS/Slate Cartoonists Studio Prize, and probably most importantly to me, he gave me the assignment to write a comic about my daughter playing basketball, which lead directly to me getting a two-book deal to write The Fifth Quarter graphic novels. 

Since I am a paranoid nutcase, I'm worried that Dan will be annoyed by this comic, because it's not a real review of the book, this is why I'm telling myself it's a "response", because it's where my brain took me after reading the novel. I didn't expect that the NYT would go for the piece, I'd submitted to the editor there once in the past, years ago, and nothing came of it. I sent them a draft of this assuming they'd say no, but I heard back within an hour that they loved it and wanted to run it, and of course I wasn't about to quibble. Perhaps if nothing momentous happens to me career-wise in the next few days, I'll post the rough draft of this comic next Monday, and maybe even the piece I'd proposed to them years back, which was actually a cartoon about Robin DiAngelo's "What Does It Mean To Be White?", a book that I am not sure I have the same feelings about nowadays. That's one where I am maybe glad it got rejected.

Anyway, I gave Dan the heads-up that this strip was going to run, and he seemed happy for me. Again, pick up Vintage Contemporaries, I really did love it. 

Win Climate

This is another comic I've been busy making recently, it's something I was approached to do as a "work for hire" job. That means, I don't own it, I didn't write it, I was truly just a hired hand. But, I do very much like and appreciate what the group who commissioned it are trying to do. They call themselves Win Climate and they are attempting to tackle the climate crisis by encouraging and inspiring people to work with the government they've got to try and pass laws and legislation that will help. The group actually managed to get New York City to pass a law preventing all new buildings in the city from installing gas ovens or furnaces, which is a real achievement, that almost nobody has heard about. The above comic is about how they made that happen. As I understand it, they'll be publishing the whole piece sometime this month, and then there'll be additional comics to come, so I should have more on that in a future update.

Middle-Grade Graphic Novels

In 2022 the second book in my "Fifth Quarter" graphic novel series was published.  I recently wrote a little essay about some of what the writing process for that was like, as it happened during peak-pandemic Zoom-school time, an awful period of time that I don't look back on with any fondness at all. I get a little annoyed with myself how much I associate Hard Court with all that, but what can I do, it was a horrible moment of real trauma for all of us, even though I try to play it off for laughs in the comic of course.

When you have a book (or books) out in the world, people will frequently ask (well-meaningly), "How's the book doing?", and over the past two years I've always had to reply "good, I think", because I really didn't know exactly what the sales-numbers were like. My publisher had not been very forthcoming with that kind of information, and there'd been no movement towards a "what's next?" from them. I'd assumed for a long time that The Fifth Quarter was maybe a big flop. 

But, just as 2022 came to a close, I finally got some hard numbers, and it turns out, the books have sold very respectably! While they are nowhere near runaway bestsellers, it seems like they've had a strong enough showing that it's finally (FINALLY) time to start talking about something new. I have two pitches for new books out, and these too can be something I'll maybe dive into a little more deeply in future updates. It's not looking like I'll be making a Fifth Quarter 3 anytime soon, but both of the other ideas I've got circulating I would absolutely love to make into a real book. Hopefully now that The Holidays are finally done, things will start moving on that front more quickly. 

'Zine Club

Which brings me to my last item for this week, which is the next 'zine in my 'Zine Club. With FUN-TIME FALL 2022 I very much enjoyed both centering the issue around a common "theme", and also publishing all-new work within it that I didn't really put anywhere else. I want to do the same with the next issue of FUN-TIME, but I'm not quite there in terms of figuring out what some of those things should be. My thoughts are to do more comics touching on some of the stuff I wrote about in The Nib comic above, about writing work for middle-grade readers, but I think also perhaps about how much pressure I feel these days to think of myself as a "brand", rather than an artist. I often feel kind of nuts to be supposedly trying to establish myself as a kid-lit author, and then constantly making off-putting political comics about fascism and Donald Trump lawn signs. I know and appreciate that it's actually good to have a real point-of-view as a writer, even one who is attempting to build an audience of younger readers, and I'm not going to change, but I do often wonder if I'm messing up my career by not being more disciplined.

I've been sitting on a very funny story about buying weed now that it's legal in New Jersey, and I think this might be something to showcase in the new issue. It's a good anecdote on it's own, but I think it connects also to this question of how I think about "branding" myself. 

I apologize that things aren't further along with the new 'Zine, I really have been hoping to get something new in the mail to subscribers this month, but I am not totally sure if I can make it happen. Rather than slop something together, or reprint old material (which I'd been leaning towards doing), I am thinking perhaps these weekly updates will feel somewhat valuable while I make work that I'm proud of.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks again!!!

Mike