Hi, everyone. 

Welcome to my newsletter where I share news about my comics and links that I hope you'll like. I think I’m going to start calling this thing “Blogroll”, because newsletters need a name right? Lot's to share, so let's get into it.

I've been re-listening to Stephen King's On Writing, devising ways to push my drawing past the “good enough” phase. Exploring the fantastic special features on the Apple version of Alien. Quins Qwest is getting me genuinely excited about Mothership, the horror sci-fi roleplaying game. Going back to read Stray Bullets by David and Maria Lapham. And dipping into Lucy Bellwood's Patreon. If you want to feel less alone in the fog of making things, she's a good place to go.

Finding Context

When I was younger I'd flip through longboxes at the two comic shop in my home town, memorizing titles, creators, absorbing what the industry looked like. Flaming Carrot. Elf Quest. Love and Rockets. Zap. Raw. I'd pull them out, flip through, think "oh, that's neat," and put them back.

They all seemed cool, but I never bought them. In 1995 they weren't for the teenage me. Give me Spider-Man. X-Men. THB. Bone. Sin City.

Until... I was talking with studio mate Colleen Coover the other day, I don't remember what she said exactly. I think it might have been something about Elf Quest, and it was the first time in 30 years I’d thought about that book. Something weird clicked.

In the last year I've been reading a lot about Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien and all kinds of fantasy stuff I just wasn't exposed to when I was younger. And suddenly Elf Quest made a weird kind of sense that it ever had when I was flipping through longboxes in the 90s.

Back then I could easily see the roots of Jim Lee's X-Men #1, since things like the John Byrne 80s X-Men reprints were right there in the same longbox. But the lineage behind Elf Quest was more burried in my particular small town in central Ohio.

The thing is, I've done this before. When Jesse and I started Incredible Doom, I had to research BBSs in depth. I'd known about them when I was younger and they were in vogue, had this vague impression of them as something kinda cool, but things that other people were into. Not me.

Getting there took years. An iPod that got me into the Mac. Reading Reinventing Comics and it getting me excited about the early web, then the iPhone, leading to years of listening to tech podcasts. By the time I was actually researching BBSs for the comic, I got to look at them through new eyes and discovered they were absolutely magical.

I don't know why it took me so long to realize I could do this with comics too and movies and music and everything else.

You probably have your own stack of things like this. Books or music or art that seemed adjacent to what you loved but never quite clicked, that you’d absolutely love now that time has passed and you didn’t even realize you’ve learned everything you need to fall in love with it.

I'm going to start with Love and Rockets. How about you?

Adding to my Blogroll

This is a new section I hope to do more often. A blogroll is an old web tradition, it’s a public list of the sites you read and love, there for anyone curious where you spend your time online. Every month I'm going to pick a link I like so much that it's getting added to the blogroll on my site. You can see the full blogroll here. This month’s link is Retro Strange.

RetroStrange: A hidden treasure that feels like the early web

There's a video store in Portland called Movie Madness. It's got authentic props from films, a knife from Psycho, a xenomorph head from Alien, but what I really love is the collection of rare, out-of-print movies you can rent. Stuff that's not on any streaming service, forgotten by most except the people who work there.

That's what the early internet felt like.

Every website was someone's passion project. You'd stumble onto a page about Victorian funeral photography, or Soviet space propaganda posters, and lose an afternoon. The early web was nothing but nooks like that.

I almost never get that feeling anymore. For all of its supposedly expertly crafted algorithms, the modern web is terrible at surprising me with stuff I'll become fascinated by.

Except when I tune into RetroStrange.

RetroStrange is a 24/7 streaming channel of public domain films and oddities, curated by Phil Nelson and Noah Maher. No ads, no algorithm, no corporate platform. It’s two people who love weird vintage media and have access to a truly inexhaustible amount of it thanks to archive.org.

I'll sometimes have it on in the background while I'm drawing. Every so often I glance up and think: Wait, what the hell is this? A bizarre 1950s educational film about posture. A psychedelic fever dream of an animation. A public domain horror movie I've never heard of that somehow has Jack Nicholson in it.

It feels like a small act of resistance against the enshittification of everything, and I need so many more things that feel like that. 

Go to retrostrange.com and see what's on. And if you find yourself fascinated, come back, follow them, throw them a dollar a month on Patreon.

Other Links Worth Your Time

• How to Use the Internet, 1995. A 1995 CBC clip of a young Cory Doctorow showing a reporter around the early internet. He predicts video on demand while a primitive webpage loads. Deeply charming and a little eerie.
• The vlogbrothers. Hank Green published a new song. John and Hank sold their production company to a nonprofit for nothing. And John made a short video about how risk requires a safety net that I've thought about a lot since watching it. "I've worked exactly as hard on the novels that sit in metaphorical drawers, unread, as the ones that have sold millions of copies." Good month for the Green brothers.
• How To Print Your Own Zines From Home. JP Coovert is one of my favorite people on the internet. This walks you through the whole zine-printing process start to finish, and if you've had the itch, this is the place to start.
• Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man. A Judd Apatow documentary. It's fun, and funny of course, but I agree with the folks on the Comic Lab podcast that the best part is how honestly it covers Mel Brooks's worst years, when people said he was washed up and there was little evidence that they were wrong. . Good reminder that the road is longer than it looks from any point on it
• Disneyland Handcrafted A full documentary of Disneyland being built. I had never seen so much this amazing footage. It's free on YouTube.
•  The Artwork That Imagined Middle Earth. A nice look at a few of the illustrators that spent decades visualizing Tolkien before Peter Jackson.

From the Blog

• An Honest Update on Incredible Doom Vol. 3. I posted the full story of what happened to Incredible Doom Volume 3, how it stalled, and what’s up with it now. This was, I think, the first time I've told this all publicly.
• The last attempt looks like the others. On the particular frustration of a draft and the creative moment that made me cry.
• What I Found in My High School Art Room. I found a weird connection to a famous Marvel artist to my high school art room in the mid 90s, I write about that and my fascination with the way influence travels.
• ComiXology Submit: Final Sales Numbers (2013-2021). Eight years of self-publishing sales data, finally published. Only years late!

From the Patreon

This month's highlight: Breaking Down My Process: Building a Page Layer by Layer — a complete walkthrough of how I build a comic page, with screenshots at every step from script to final inks. It's from a page of an upcoming project. Free to read.

As well as:

• I Built a Robot to Fix My Comic Lettering. Lettering automation from scratch.
• A Publishing Update (for members only). Where my projects stand.
• A Trick I Use to Push Past Good Enough on Comic Pages. Getting past good enough.
• Monthly Review: February 2026. How the month went.

February was a good month. Lots of drawing. March is going to have even more.

See you next month,
Matt

Random Panel of the Month