My new book for young readers, Queen of the Sea, hits bookshelves on the 25th of June! I’ll be all over my home town of Portland, Oregon, reading excerpts, explaining how I turned Queen Elizabeth I into a font, signing and doodling in copies, and answering reader questions.
I’ve got events at a comics shop, a children’s bookstore, and an all-purpose book palace subdivision, and each event is tailored to fit a different crowd – so if you miss me at one, you can catch me at another.
Wednesday, June 26th, 6-8pm
Books With Pictures
1401 SE Division St (note the new address – first event in their big new home!)
Big Ole Launch Party! Snacks, giveaways, a reading, cartoonists everywhere.
All ages welcome; there will be adult beverages.
Sunday, June 30th, 11am
Green Bean Books
1600 NE Alberta St
Kid-friendly reading and signing!
All ages welcome. Green Bean is a wonderful independent children’s bookstore!
Thursday, July 11th, 7:30pm
Powell’s Books on Hawthorne (note that this is the branch in the Southeast, not downtown or Beaverton!)
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Reading and signing in the Tabor Room!
All ages welcome. I’ll be doing some extended Q&A for folks interested in how the book was made!
Exciting news! My next publishing project, The Long Con, will be serialized starting this July from Oni Press! This is my first book to be published the old-fashioned comic book way – in individual issues with cool covers, available at your local comic book store, and then in trade collection (…if enough people like it!).
Comic Book Resources ran an excellent piece on it yesterday along with a four-page preview from Issue #1. Read it here!
The Long Con has a very simple premise: the Apocalypse hits during a Comic-Con. Most of society, and everything within a fifty mile radius of the convention center, is reduced to glowing rubble. Five years later, a desperate journalist braves the wasteland to revisit the site, and discovers that the con never ended…it only evolved.
Victor Lai, failed puff-piece journalist, and his erstwhile nerd-pal Dez Delaney, indie comics PR maven, must navigate LongCon’s many threats and obstacles in order to bring peace to warring fandoms, discourage cannibalism, and possibly uncover a sinister, decades-long conspiracy with implications for humankind’s very survival…
This is also an exciting first for me in some other ways. I’m co-writing the book with my friend and regular Twitter bantering mate, Ben Coleman. Ben is a deeply funny comedy writer who, thanks to his career as a film critic for the Portland Mercury, also has great discernment when it comes to smart storytelling.
We’re also working with an incredible artist, Emilee Denich, because we were lucky enough to catch her in the thirty seconds before she becomes insultingly famous. Finding an artist who can design dozens of character AND draw big ridiculous set-pieces AND crowded fight scenes AND physical humor AND character banter AND mimic different media styles AND do it in an overall style that would appeal to a broad audience AND make deadlines? That is the dream, my friends, and Em is so freakin’ dreamy.
Add in the color stylings of M. Victoria Robado, the type wizardry of letterer Aditya Bidikar and the laser-eyed editorial skills of Ari Yarwood and Robin Herrera and you have the recipe for an amazing comic shop debut. I hope you’ll all join us when issue #1 arrives at your local comic book store this summer!
From the latest edition of Publisher’s Weekly / Children’s Bookshelf, an exciting announcement!
You’ll be hearing and seeing plenty more about this in the months to come, but for now it’s exciting just to say in public that it’s happened! I love this story and the artistic challenge it represents for me, and I really look forward to speaking with a young audience. Thank you to Barry and to Susan for taking me up on it!
Hello, my dears!
Great news – up until now, my publication library (Bite Me!, Family Man Volume I, Danse Macabre 2.0, and Outfoxed) has only been available to retail stores and individual customers on request, mailed or delivered by yours truly, or in sold in person at conventions.
This means that plenty of great retailers, library systems and the readers they serve haven’t had the chance to get their claws on any of my work in print.
Now my work is finally available through Diamond, the premier distributor of fine comics to the North America and the UK. I didn’t expect to be listed in Previews, the publication Diamond provides to store buyers, until January, but I’ve made it in a month early!
If you’re a reader and you frequent a local comics shop and have been waiting to buy a copy of any of my books, now is an important and fabulous time to ask your retailer to order them! Tell your friendly vendor to place an order using these codes:
If you’re a book-buyer for a comics retailer, you can find my books listed in December Previews under Toonhound Studios. Be sure to check out all the offerings from the Toonhound Studios artists – we’re a small group of independent creators who work together every day, and teaming up to distribute our creator-owned works is a no-brainer. Final order cut-off is December 27, and re-orders go into January.
If you buy books for a library system, school, or bookstore, you can now order my books directly through Ingram! Diamond partners with Ingram for nationwide distribution, so you can add us to your order along with that special movie tie-in edition of 50 Shades of Grey.
This early release is a great holiday gift for me – I hope you all will enjoy it as well!
Every so often you get the proverbial offer-you-can’t-refuse. For me, sometimes that’s work with a creator or for a project that I love. Sometimes it’s when somebody you respect needs help. Sometimes it’s a fun artistic challenge, and sometimes it’s a really cool opportunity to make contact with a new audience.
And sometimes it’s all of those things, because maestro Scott Kurtz needs somebody to write and draw a guest story for his wonderful flagship strip PvP while he heals up a sore back and gets ready to launch a big new project. So! For the next little stretch here I’m happily dropping (almost) everything to do just that.
I’ve been sweet on Scott’s work, and on PvP in particular, for years now – and especially since the story moved to Seattle, my old hometown. That means that I also get to depict some of my favorite landmarks from around the city. Tough gig!
So I’m having an absolute ball taking Scott’s lovely, silly, brash, sincere characters out for a spin. If you’re already a fan of PvP, I think you’ll probably enjoy this little story; if you’re new to the strip, well, you have some very fun archive-diving ahead of you! Either way, head over to site, check out the first strip from my run, and (hopefully) enjoy.
I’m taking the week away from Family Man to compensate for producing a weekday strip; I hope to be back next week! It’s a small price to pay for having such a ball.
In the meantime, if you peruse my store, you might notice that I have soft-launched two new books! I’ll make a big deal about it later, but if you missed your chance to get in on my Kickstarter project from 2012, you can now purchase your very own copies of Outfoxed and Danse Macabre. I still have a lot of orders to fulfill from backers, so expect a slightly longer turnaround than usual, but…they’re HERE!