Blogroll - A new Incredible Doom comic is out

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Blogroll. Matthew Bogarts newsletter of new comics and interesting links. That's me. I'm Matthew Bogart.

The Last Days of Evol House

I just published a new comic.

The Last Days of Evol House is a 32-page story set in the world of Incredible Doom, same small midwestern town, same era, a few familiar faces in the corners. But it's its own thing. You don't need to have read anything to follow it.

The main character is Ethan, the younger brother of one of the old Evol House crew. Ethan's the easy kid. The one nobody worries about. He comes back to Edgefield and finds out the bank has decided to tear the house down.

Evol House was where the scene lived. The place where people found their people and a reason to get out of bed. It's been a while since that was true. But it's still standing. For now.

What unfolds is a story about what we owe to places that shaped us. Whether a building can carry the weight of what happened inside it, and what you do when someone decides it can't. It's about brotherhood and found family and just a touch of the early internet.

I'm glad this comic exists. It had been a while, and it was good to go back.

Adding to my Blogroll

A blogroll is an old web tradition, a public list of the sites you read and love, there for anyone curious where you spend your time online. I'm adding one entry here each newsletter. You can see the full blogroll here. This month's link is Standard Ebooks.

Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-run project with an incredibly cool mission: take public domain e-books from sources like Project Gutenberg and make them really, fantastically good. Good typography, proper formatting, careful proofreading, real covers. Everything's released to the public domain, and completely free of charge. The people running it are meticulous in a way that would make most publishers blush. They're organized as a "low-profit LLC" funded entirely by donations, which is a legal structure I'd never heard of before and kind of love.

It feels weird to call it "punk" because it's clean and serious and the people running it are so interested in getting the kerning right on a Dickens novel. But there's something in the structure of it, volunteers building something beautiful, for free, for anyone, because they decided it should exist, that feels so counter culture.

If you want a place to start I'd recommend Winnie-the-Pooh and David Copperfield. Which are both so cool.

Other Links Worth Your Time

• XOXO is now a permanent archive. Andy Baio and Andy McMillan ran, and brought to a close, XOXO, a Portland indie conference, for eight years. Last month they launched a permanent archive of the whole run. Andy's post about building it is worth reading. Making a good long term home for important things on the web is important, and this is both an amazing archive of some of the best talks you'll ever see, and resources for folks who want to do this themselves.
• The Last Quiet Thing, by Terry Godier. A piece about a twelve-dollar Casio watch versus an Apple Watch, and what makes something feel like a product versus a relationship you have to manage. I've been thinking about it for months.
• Sofa. An app for tracking what you're watching, reading, or playing, and what's next. My habit is opening it before anything else to remind myself what it is I'm digging into now, instead of just getting pulled into the dopamine stream.
• Why Can't Writers Seem to Quit Substack? The lock-in is real, and so is the case for leaving.
• Helioscope Studio on Surf. Surf is a new social reading app from Flipboard. It's great. I use it as my Bluesky and Mastodon client, and to keep up with several blogs. I made a Helioscope page that pulls together posts from all the studio's cartoonists in one place regardless of if they're on YouTube, Bluesky, Threads, or just a personal blog. Good way to follow a lot of the coolest people at once.
• Why Is the Alphabet in That Order? Demi Adejuyigbe asks Hank Green lots of good questions.

From the Blog

• Small E-Ink Reader That Changed My Reading Habit. On the $69 Xteink X4, Standard Ebooks, and building a reading library outside the Amazon ecosystem.

• How to track your comics progress with one line of code. People keep asking what app I use for my website progress bars. It's pretty simple and I think every cartoonist might benefit from having them.

From the Patreon

The full comic, of course, The Last Days of Evol House — is up now for all paid members. Also there's a behind the scenes video on putting Evol House together.

If you've been on the fence about joining, this is a good time.

One last thing: I've started running games on StartPlaying, a service where you can find and book professional game masters for tabletop role-playing games online. After a couple of years of my players telling me "you could do this professionally," I'm deciding to try to sidestep my impostor syndrome and run some games. I'm running it using the multiple ENNIE Award-winning Shadowdark game which is easy to learn and a great place to start if you've never played a role-playing game before.

So if you've ever wondered what playing a fantasy game with the guy who made graphic novels about 90s internet teens would be like, this link gets you $10 credit.

As always, spreading the word about any of these things to folks who you think might get something out of it is very appreciated.

See you next time!

- Matt