A Year in Review: Looking into 2025

I'm a bit later with this post than intended - 2025 is already looking to be quite busy! Here's a belated Happy New Year!

 2024 was a year defined by The Gulf releasing. With all of the travelling, it's easy to feel that I didn't work on all that much but I have to remind myself I drew over a hundred pages of comics not including Blind Alley. This is a weird job!

Let's follow the format I laid out last year. I'll be reporting back on the things I laid out last year as well as what 2025 looks like for the project.

Festivals

My desire to become a hermit and draw comics in a cave is strong. I'm not planning on doing too many festivals this year but I am hopeful I'll be attending SPX or CXC (with something new in tow). I will probably still attend the festivals that are easy to do - VanCAF and Short Run.

Events

Right off the bat, I will be doing a bit of travel; I'll be driving down to Santa Rosa as I am the Second Saturday Cartoonist on April 12th at the Schulz Museum. It'll be surreal and emotional to be there, with my own work, surrounded by the work of Schulz. I can't wait (even if the event itself is only two hours).

The Gulf

2024 was the year of The Gulf. Surprisingly, the beginning of 2025 has been dominated by it as well. While I can't say the nature of the work I am doing quite yet, it's been a treat to be spending some more time with the characters of The Gulf. I hope to be able to say more soon but the reality is I may have to remain hush-hush for a few years. Speculate away!

Whatever this is will dominate my time until halfway through February.

Brambles

I've already written about my feelings on Brambles. Chapter one was finished and all published online. Brambles will be back in 2025. It will also be available in print. However, the form the project is always in-flux. I think that's for the best. 4 panels? Six? Multi-pages? I've found labelling each instalment as chapters feels a bit too austere for how the work feels to me.

Moving forward, what we will get are little stories - a la Moomin - except that I hope to build them into something larger. There is a large story I will eventually tell with Brambles but we will take a while to get there. It the larger story is made up of smaller ones. At this point, we're still introducing characters and the world. I'm not sure how much Brambles I will get to draw in 2025 but there are 40 something strips lying in wait for...

DOLDRUMS ---> Mutt Mag 

Mutt Mag is a one man comics magazine. It'll be a place to publish both serialized mascot-based stories as well as one-off shorts I have kicking around. As I said last year, think of it as a kumerish Shonen Jump. I initially pitched Doldrums to Silver Sprocket as an anthology of more cartoonists than just myself but the feasibility of paying everyone properly makes that next to impossible. Maybe one day!

Regardless - Mutt Mag will be happening with Silver Sprocket! We are aiming to publish it in September this year. It's funny to see I said the exact same last year but this time it's certain.

Why the title change? Well, I felt like Doldrums, though a great title, didn't quite encapsulate what the project ended up entailing. Mutt captures the vibe of what this collection will be; an assemblage of different parts. It's scrappy. The comics are of various scopes and tones. It will be made up of a bunch of comics that couldn't have a home elsewhere; not because they're bad comics but because comics publishing is narrow and weird.

Mutt Mag won't be numbered. The idea is that any story within it will be able to be read as a standalone, even if there are numerous chapters prior. Each volume will be themed - this current one is tentatively called "aloft" or "Taking Flight".

What it includes:

• All of Brambles ch. 1

• Another 40-ish page Brambles story.

• Zoonosis (my vampire story from Peow2's Ex. Mag)

• A 40 something page Blind Alley adjacent story called Truffle Pig.

• A 18-page and 7 page standalone comic.

• Potentially, another short 6-page story (yet to be drawn).

Mutt Mag is what i've actively been working on (alongside The Gulf-thing). My deadline is the end of February. I need to draw the front and back covers, draw around 20-pages of comics, and tone about half of the book.

Lots to do. :o)

A Gleaming

Last year, I said it was finally the right time to do the third and final part of A Gleaming. Just kidding!

I was in negotiations with a publisher and was ready to hit go but...it just didn't feel like the right thing to do. To spend six months to a year working on a project that has an audience of maybe 300 readers and maybe a few dozen of them who would actually be excited to read the third issue just didn't feel the like the right business move. Cartooning isn't a practical career choice but I've been lucky enough to pay my rent with it for the past two years. Pursuing a small project, right before the release of my biggest project, just seemed like the wrong move. Egotistically, I love the optics of being a cartoonist who has finished every project I've started but that hardly seems like the right reason to devote so much time to A Gleaming.

That said, I yet again find myself thinking about this story and these characters. A Gleaming is not dead. It lays in wait for some miraculous window between my bigger projects and my numerous self directed projects. I'm vaguely confident that I will one day finish the story. 2025 is not the year for it.

Blind Alley

Year three of Blind Alley will draw to a close in the early spring. That means that the book and the limited edition t-shirt are just around the corner too. Pre-orders will be online at the end of February or the beginning of March.

We started out at the pace of 3 strips a week. It quickly become unsustainable. I loved spending that much time drawing Blind Alley but it just didn't leave enough time for all the travelling and the other projects on my plate. I would love to draw this strip daily but...I don't make enough money from it to justify doing that.

As for Blind Alley year 4...I don't know when that will happen. Fall 2025 or winter 2025? It really depends on my other projects. Regardless, we will return to the alley! Most likely at a pace of two strips a week. Will the Sunday Strips return? I hope so. I feel sad I couldn't deliver a full 12 this past year. I hesitate to over-commit again. I'm cognisant of wanting to make the patreon a worthwhile thing to subscribe to so I will do my best to continue with them.

Finally, Blind Alley will be released in French! The first two books will be published in full-colour by Dupuis after being released in Spirou. It's a dream come true to say that. Fingers crossed that this strip does well over there - I would love to be publishing Blind Alley directly into the French market at pace of the English releases.

I'll share the colour strips here once they're published.

Running with the Dogs

I'm hoping this will be my next-next book. I've already spoken to this project in previous blog posts so I won't go into too much detail here. I'm toying with the idea of retooling my pitch for this book and pitching it alongside what I hope will be my next book. I view The Gulf, my next-book, and Running with the Dogs as a thematically related trilogy. Each book is a distinct and standalone story but they all explore themes of belief, meaning, and meaning-making in our world.

No Place

My next book is tentatively titled No Place. I've yet to assemble the pitch or write a script for it yet it appeared in my head more solidly than Running with the Dogs. There's searching to be done, for sure, but this story appeared to me with such a clear arc. I thought of the idea immediately after pitching Running with the Dogs.

It follows Max, a teenager who has grown up as the only child in a secluded cult. After their world is calmly breached by outsiders, Max is drawn by curiosity to see the world that has been withheld from them.

The book is formally engaging for me to draw. It will be told in three chapters. The first chapter will use very few panels. As the story progresses and Max arrives into the city, the story will become increasingly panelled. Open to closed.

It's a book about a lot of things. As always, there are probably too many ideas circling this project. That's what excites me! The cult will be slavishly devoted to the idea of living better. I am taking a politics I agree with to an extreme and seeing what happens. I'm hoping to surprise people with where this story goes. I do not wish to indict the cult but rather implicate all of us as being formed by cult-like thinking. I feel like there's a lot of power in acknowledging that cultural ideas are malleable. Be it our dominant neo-liberal capitalistic thought framework or our inherited individual biases toward heteronormative-monogamous romantic relationships and thoughts on gender. I think interrogating why we think certain things are normal is worthwhile in a YA/Crossover story.

We'll see. Lot's in here. I can't wait to dive into this come March. This is what I hope will dominate my year. I aim to pitch it in the spring and move full-speed-ahead on the project if its greenlit and barring...

A Secret IP Comics Project

Well, I don't want to jinx things and I also don't want to seem cagey. I was asked to pitch a story for an IP I care about. They loved the pitch but there are some moving parts that need to be sorted before I am given the go-ahead. If I am, this project will be what I work on while writing No Place.

Well - it's looking to be a busy year. As always, you'll get a peak behind the curtain at anything I can share. A belated happy new year.

All the best,

Adam