Incredible Doom

An Honest Update on Incredible Doom Vol. 3

If you've been waiting for new pages of Incredible Doom Vol. 3, you've been waiting for a while. I owe you an explanation—and an apology for not posting this sooner.

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Cross-posted from incredibledoom.com

A while back, Jesse Holden and I launched what we were calling Incredible Doom Vol. 3, a new web and printed mini-comic series continuing our focus on the generation of kids who came of age alongside the early web. We designed a new website, made promotional videos, and drew over 150 pages of comics. We were off to the races, promising regular updates.

Then, several months ago, we stopped posting. Here's why.

What Happened

I've always loved independent publishing—owning all aspects of the work, hosting it myself, building an audience directly. After finishing Incredible Doom Vol. 1 & 2 for Harper Alley, I wanted to see if the old webcomic model I fell in love with in the early 2000s could still work in today's internet. The plan was to serialize these stories online and in self published mini comics first, then—if we were lucky—collect them into books with a publisher. That's how we did the original Incredible Doom run, and it worked beautifully. Best of both worlds: the intimate, one-on-one connection of self-publishing paired with the reach of traditional publishing.

My first self published comics from the early 90s.

I expected it to be hard. I expected it might fail because of algorithms, or the enshittification of platforms creative folk like me used to rely on. There were lots of external forces that might make it fall appart. What I didn't expect was hitting a wall within myself. After launching the series, I ran into a writing problem that took us a year to solve.

Like Incredible Doom Vol. 1, the plot for Vol. 3 consisted of two seemingly unrelated stories with two sets of protagonists who we planed to slowly interweave over several chapters, eventually merging both stories in a thrilling climax. The problem: the more we worked on these stories, the further apart they grew.

The Reality

We tried everything to bring them together. Every time we thought we'd found a solution, after a few weeks of trying to implement it we discovered a new problem. This cycle went on for months. I stopped drawing new pages until we solved it, but the problems only mounted. Trying to interweave the two stories was making both of them worse.

Matt and Jesse in an office struggling to tie both stories together.

We finally came to the conclusion that these two sets of charecters simply weren't meant to be part of the same story. They were two independent stories that should each exist completely on their own.

It was heartbreaking. The months we'd spent felt wasted—until we started working on them separately.

The Good News

We loved all the characters we'd created. We thought their arcs were exciting. It was only getting those arcs to interrelate that sucked.

Once we split them apart, things clicked. Within months, we had conclusions to both stories worked out that that I fucking love. We went from tearing our hair out over one never-ending puzzle box to having two complete scripts that are really damn cool.

Let me show you:

Hello Robo

It's the summer of 1999, and Anna has two goals: avoid talking to boys, and avoid puking in front of them. She plans to ride out the season at her aunt's house without another humiliating meltdown. But when she discovers a computer in the guest room—one connected to the internet—she logs into the forum of her favorite webcomic and unexpectedly connects with someone who lives across town.

What starts as an online friendship becomes something more complicated when the internet spills into real life. Anna gets pulled into other people's messy, painful lives—and begins to understand how people carry pain and connection side by side, and how love, even if fleeting, can still be true.

Eternal September

Eternal September follows two outsiders bound by shame, curiosity, and the strange promise of the early internet. Thia, a small-town overachiever whose carefully built life collapses after a public scandal, returns home to find her family in ruins. Doug, an awkward classmate turned early internet pioneer, has found a strange new kind of fame through something called a "blog."

When their paths cross, Doug's kindness draws Thia into a world so new that even the most far-fetched ideas about what it might become feel possible—a world that, despite Doug's insistence otherwise, carries far too real consequences beyond the glow of a computer screen.

Where Things Stand

Writing the intertwined version of these stories had been so difficult that I'd started to doubt my ability to ever finish another graphic novel script. Now we've completed two. That alone feels like a victory.

I still love independent publishing—that part hasn't changed. But the months we spent solving this problem meant not building that webcomic audience week by week, getting to talk directly with readers as the story unfolded. But we're hopefully ending up in the same place: books you can hold, stories you can read. Just getting there a different way than I expected.

If you signed up for Incredible Doom Vol. 3 updates, you were here for the messiest part of this process. If you've been backing my Patreon, you saw even more of it.

But you're also the first people to know these stories exist. These are still stories about teenagers finding each other through screens. Still about the early internet as a place of hope and weirdness and real consequence. Still about what it means to be seen by someone who has no reason to care about you.

I want you to be able to read these stories. I'm working on making that happen, but I can't promise when.

When there's news—a deal, a date, a book you can hold—I'll post it here and in my newsletter. I hope that's soon.

Thank you for sticking around. I know you didn't have to.