Holy cow, what a September it was! So busy that I couldn't send the September email until October!

The big news from September, of course, was that Incredible Doom Vol. 2 hit store shelves and mailboxes. It concludes all the threads we'd planted when we first launched the series. How strange it is to see those stories out in the world.

Copies of Incredible Doom Vol. 1 and 2 sitting on a bookstore shelf.

People seem to love it! Thank you to everyone who's been saying nice things about it online. Sharing it really helps folks know it's out there.

Speaking of which, we spent the month working like mad to spread the word about the book. I've been posting lots of drawing time-lapse videos to YouTube and Instagram, as well as a pretty polished, in-depth video series about the creation of the comic.

So if you wanted to know what it's like to make a project like this, the stories that inspired it, and what went into creating it, I think you'll like these:

  1. How we got started.
  2. How we've co-written comics together for 6+ years.
  3. The year it took us to prepare to launch the series.
  4. The first part of a creator's commentary for Vol. 1.

Also, I kind of fell in love with Final Cut Pro and made a book trailer:

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Matt and Jesse do a reading from Incredible Doom Vol. 2. Photo by Mike Rosenstein @mikejrosenstein

Then we took things on the road and did a book tour down the west coast. We started at Books With Pictures in Portland, reached the tours nadir at Mendocino Book Company in Jesse's hometown of Ukiah, California, and ended at Books With Pictures in Eugene. I wrote a bit about the tour on my blog. We had such a great time.

This book is the culmination of many people doing a lot of hard work. This time, we added Hanna Schroy, Joe Besch, and Caitlin Scannell to the creative team, who helped do background drawing. I'm so proud of the work they did. They are incredible artists, and everyone should go check out their work.

I'm putting the finishing touches on a few more videos for October, so make sure to subscribe on YouTube or follow me on Instagram if you want to see them.

Finally, just a fun illustration. I spent a day trying to ape some old 70s and 80s-style Marvel Comics illustrations. I haven't tried anything like this in years. It was so much fun I couldn't tear myself away.

On to what's next.

- Matt

LINKS

  • On a whim, I watched Brian De Palmas Blow Out the other day. It's hardly perfect, but there are some sequences and camera moves in it that have haunted me ever since. I wish I could do camera movies like this in comics. I followed up the film by reading Pauline Kale's excellent review and then digging into a cornucopia of links about the movie collected by Cinephilia & Beyond.
  • Just like the Ignatz voters, I thought No One Else by R. Kikuo Johnson was fantastic.
  • If you'll allow me a couple of local suggestions, I was shocked to discover that one of my closest friends, a huge movie buff living in Portland for years, had never been to Movie Madness. More than just a video store full of hard-to-find films, Movie Madness is a museum of authentic movie props and costumes featuring actual screen-used items from Citizen Kane, The Godfather, E.T., Blade Runner, Modern Times, and the list goes on and on. So if you're ever in Portland and are vaguely interested in movie history, see it. It's one of my favorite spots on earth.
  • One of the best comic shops in town, Floating World Comics, recently moved into the Lloyd Center Mall, a giant shopping center that had been dying for years, but now it seems like it might be starting to have a new life as a place for hip record and comic shops. This interview with the shop owner on OPB got me pretty excited about the idea. Perhaps you also have a dying mall in your area that might come back from the dead.
  • Finally, I'd missed this during the pandemic, but I'm happy to learn that Beaverton, Oregon made it official.