Thing 1, Art: Goldmask by Jeremy Brooks

This week’s first commission is from the fantastic artist, Jeremy Brooks, whose comic series Ruby + Rubbish I first discovered last year at Heroes Cons. Jeremy has a great, loose high-energy style, knack for character design, and visceral sense of humor.

I gave Jeremy first choice of our characters to draw, and he immediately knew he wanted to do Goldmask, the dark wizard with a conscience co-created by myself and artist Luke Horsman. 

Check out Jeremy’s excellent Goldmask piece below!

So good. Rumor has it Goldmask will return in Death of Comics Bookcase, Vol. 2: Reign of the Comics Bookcases…but I’ll have more news about Death Vol. 2 next month. For now, I’ll just say writing is well underway.

Thing 2, My Comics: Black Friday Sale!

I promise not to weigh this newsletter down with promo…but this week I’m running a special BLACK FRIDAY SALE.

Through Sunday night, all three covers for Death of Comics Bookcase will be available at 20 percent off in my Etsy shop! This is the cheapest the book has ever been.  

The book, if you haven’t heard, is scripted by me, and drawn by a team or rising stars, including Anna Readman (2000AD), Nick Cagnetti (Pink Lemonade), Ryan Lee (Goobers), PJ Holden (Judge Dredd), Luke Horsman (Enemy Earth), and Pat Skott (Next Door). All of them are doing HUGE new comics things now. Get their work here, so you can say you knew them way back when.

>>BUY THE BOOK<<

Plus, we’re bringing back all these characters for more stories — either in Death Vol. 2 or standalone series — so you’ll want to be familiar. Also, I’m really just so proud of this book.

Plus, we’ve got covers by the legend John McCrea (above), and the super cool Spanish artist/designer, Raul Allen (below), one of the best in the industry. And a superhero variant by Nick (see the shop)!

Thing 3, Top Comics to Buy at The Beat

As for comics journalism, in this first newsletter, I’d like to point folks to my weekly column, Top Comics to Buy. It’s for true comics sickos (like me) who read books as they come out…and I’ve been doing this for going on 7 years now. 

This was the most popular regular column on Comics Bookcase, and it does really well at The Beat. The concept is simple: every week I read ~20 new releases, and I pick five favorites. I write about why they’re cool, pair them with a list of other books I enjoyed, and add a reference of new #1 issues and graphic novels/trade collections. 

I love doing this for a couple of reasons: 1. When I was just a reader (and less encumbered, sigh), columns like this were invaluable. They helped me discover new series and take chances. 2. As a writer it’s important to read what’s out. I want my work to be in conversation with others, adding to the medium, rather than existing in a void. This keeps me reading a wide swath of new work, week in and week out. I don’t have a choice

You can bookmark this page if you want a super simple way to follow it. New columns go up each Tuesday at 11 a.m.

Thing 4, Movie Pick: The Hit (1985)

The past two years, I’ve been making my way through director Edgar Wright’s 1000 favorite films on Letterboxd. I’m at 330 or so as of this writing, so alright, just an easy 770 to go. But I’m having a great time.

I find Wright’s list very well aligned with my tastes, mixing dramas with genre fare, always with interesting storytelling that doesn’t sacrifice entertainment or accessibility. It’s definitely a film geek list, but it’s utterly without pretension. Even the movies on there that don’t work for me, I usually find something to enjoy about them.

It’s also a great way to discover new old movies, and this month I came across one I absolutely loved — 1985’s The Hit, directed by Stephen Frears, starring Terrance Stamp, John Hurt, Tim Roth, and Laura del Sol.

I thought I knew what this movie would be about. A career criminal, Stamp, testifies against his cohorts publicly, and must then go into hiding in Spain. A decade passes, and some tough guys show up, kidnap him, and take him to face retribution. Essentially, The Hit presents as a pretty standard British crime affair, albeit set on a road trip through Spain.

I presumed the tension would be in whether the bad guys are able to carry off the titular hit, or whether Stamp could outfox them and escape. The movie telegraphed as much, but that’s not it, not really. It’s actually about folly (often played for dry humor) and preparing for death. I won’t go into exactly how they carry that out, as a lot of this film’s success is in the execution (heh). 

But I will say that it got me thinking about the ways that subverting expectations by grounding your stories can be entertaining, and how the vast majority of successful genre subversion stories have well-drawn and real characters at the center. This one certainly did. 

Check it out, I highly recommend it. It’s streaming now on Amazon Prime, if you haven’t managed to shed that habit yet. Let me know what you think!

Thing 5, Thoughts: Comics’ Online Public Square and Bsky

And now a few words about what is in my opinion the biggest story of the past month in comics: the online community moving to Bsky. I’ve been on Bsky myself for roughly 18 months, really enjoying the vibe and more deliberate social media experience. For me, Bsky has felt like going to a quieter bar with friends after a nightclub or party gets out of control and unpleasant. It’s nice.

But the masses have joined, presumably fed up with the management of Twitter/X under Elon Musk. I get why they’re just moving now…but for me Twitter/X stopped functioning in any meaningful way long ago. Musk throttled outgoing links, which was most of the point for me, creating an oblique ecosystem wherein everyone was complaining about how poorly it worked, even those who paid his monthly fee.

Twitter/X has been the walking dead, and this month it keeled over, no longer rambling in search of brains. As a result, Bsky has surged to more than 20 million users, and I’ve seen a steady flow of old and new faces in my mentions.

We shouldn’t repeat old mistakes and become over-dependent on one social media network. That is clear. You hear horror stories about crowdfunding success totally dropping off, and to some extent, I experienced that myself. My first Kickstarter, Next Door, while something I’m very proud of, was not as big or flashy as Death of Comics Bookcase, yet it attracted 4 more backers than the latter. I believe this is due to Twitter/X dying, and taking the comics’ online public square with it.

A centralized and entertaining online comics community probably only reaches 5 to 10 percent of comics readership (I’ve seen that number suggested), but that’s still insignificant. You need that group talking about comics every day, creating a sense for would-be new and returning readers that there’s something to join, and — as it pertains to crowdfunders — something to support.

Comics websites are going away (see the literal death of Comics Bookcase), and I think a big part of that is site runners were fueled by peer validation or camaraderie, by being welcomed and contributing to something bigger. Take away functional social media, and there goes that motivation. Very few comics creators or publishers buy advertising on comics sites. Supporting comics journalism financially is not an industry priority. So you need that social media love to keep sites going. Without it…well, we’ve just seen what happens.

The other thing is the crowdfunding. The comics market has been weird since the pandemic. Things got bloated, the market flooded, and it’s been a painful return to the mean. This has trickled into crowdfunding, which is now more crowded. I’ve seen truly excellent projects do decently, yet still not reach highs obtained by even rough books in 2020 and 2021. 

I don’t know that a couple thousand of us reconvening on Bsky will change anything on Kickstarter or Zoop, but to my mind, it can’t hurt. I suppose I’ll find out when I launch my next Kickstarter. But that’s a conversation for later…for now, give me a follow on Bsky!

Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed this relaunched newsletter. I’ll be back (a bit earlier) next month, with more cool things, including:

• A new commission

• My favorite comic of the year

• News about the first story in Death Vol. 2

Take care!

-Zack Q.