News & Sundry
Back to doing something like my regular old newsletter. Bunch of updates to cover.
Let’s get to it!
Work-wise, I’ve only lettered three issues of comics in the new year – w0rldtr33 #19, The Department of Truth #36, and my own In Your Skin #1.
In terms of releases, this month and change saw the release of the collected editions of The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos: Children of the Night (out this week) and Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma. In single issues, w0rldtr33 #18 and The Department of Truth #35 saw release. I’m almost sure I’m missing something there, but I can’t think what.
In Your Skin news:
Production-wise, I wrapped up a revision of Issue 3, which is now with Som, who’s currently doing thumbnails on it while drawing the Issue 4 cover. Issue 2 art has been wrapped up, and Francesco is halfway through colouring it at the moment.
I’m planning to revise the script for the final issue in early March.
We finished our final editorial and lettering pass on In Your Skin #1, and I’ve begun sending the PDF out to friends in the industry. This is a nerve-wracking but necessary experience for a creator, and so far I’ve just been relieved by how much people seem to like the book.
My old friend Deniz Camp (currently the superstar author of Ultimates and Absolute Martian Manhunter – but you should totally check out 20th Century Men as well), posted the following on Twitter:
I’ve seen a lot of this coming together & it’s brilliant, risky, sexy, grotesque both in body horror and the disturbing psychology of extreme fandom, it’s filled with beautiful gestures and characters and struggles. It’s like nothing else in comics.
If you like The Substance or Parasite, if you enjoy Bollywood and body horror, if you like good comics – give this a shot!
It’s also gorgeous.
Dan Watters (writer of Coffin Bound, Arkham City, and co-writer of the recent Eisner Award-winner The One Hand/The Six Fingers) read the PDF, and sent me a very kind personal note, and also posted about the book on his (must-read) newsletter. Among other things, he said:
I had high expectations for this, and they were easily met. It is grotesque and beautiful; disturbing and sexual. I said somewhere above that I enjoy a work that uses a lens to examine a topic. Here the lens is skin; a lens through which yearning and self-disgust and fame and jealousy can all be examined.
The book has shades of David Lynch in how it creates unease, though I pause before I bring up his name. Most art that invokes Lynch is not as thoughtful in its choices as this comic is.
If you are a comics pro, retailer or critic who’d like an advance look at the first issue, hit me up and I’d be happy to share a PDF.
Finally on the topic, in the book announcement, I wrote the following:
This is the book I’ve been talking about on the blog under the codename SEASIDE, so that codename is retired. Interested parties can go back through previous blogposts for hints of how this book came together.
Bleeding Cool did just that, looking through my blog for all mentions of SEASIDE and putting them together in one place. I’ve been talking about the book since 2022, and it’s a trip looking through all of that – I’d forgotten that it went from four issues to five and back to four at some point. Someday, far in the future, we might talk about all the versions this book has gone through to get here.
Some more lettering news.
First, this June, Tiny Onion and Dark Horse Comics team up for a Monsters in Love Pride Anthology (from the pages of The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos).
There’ll be short stories written and drawn by superstar LGBTQIA+ creators, and I’ll be lettering all the stories.
Image Comics also announced the impending release of The Cutting Garden, a standalone graphic novel by Darcy van Poelgeest, Erin Connally, myself and Ben Didier.
On a quiet street in New Orleans, a mysterious girl seeks out a florist to deliver an earth-shattering truth in a final act of kindness and redemption. The Cutting Garden is an intimate and elegant gothic tale that shares bloodlines with contemporary literary horror books like that of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and postmodern indie films like The Tree of Life.
We’ve already finished working on this book – I started working on this in 2021, and Darcy and Erin had already been working for a while by that point, so you can tell what a labour of love this book is.
The book will release in September 2026.
Finally, I want to shout out a couple of books by friends. (They happen to be the two friends who said nice things about my book above, but I became friends with them in the first place because I love their work, so there.)
My colleagues on 20th Century Men, Deniz Camp and Stipan Morian, are part of the vanguard for the new Vertigo imprint from DC Comics, with their unusual take on zombies, Bleeding Hearts, collaborating with Matt Hollingsworth on colours, and my old friend Hass on letters. The first issue came out last week.
I got to read PDFs of the first three issues, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from this team, in that it is a genuinely novel take on the concept of zombies, something that stands apart from the usual “faceless horde” idea. Deniz adds a wealth of details to his zombie culture, and for once, you get to see him in comedy mode on occasion. While Stipan’s art is unpredictable and full of energy as always. Hass is also doing some of the work of his career on this. This is like nothing else you’re reading right now, and a perfect thing to lead Vertigo into the future.
Dan Watters sent over a PDF of the upcoming Nightwing #136. Dan has been on Nightwing for three volumes now, and he begins the fourth volume here, and the great Denys Cowan joins him on art duties, along with Norm Rapmund on inks and my frequent colleague Francesco Segala on colours.
Dan has gone from strength to strength on this title, and with this one, he’s undergone a further level-up, only enhanced by the addition of Cowan on art. Dan’s one of my favourite current writers in comics – he makes incredibly literate superhero comics, if you know what I mean, and this is exciting stuff from him! If you’ve enjoyed Nightwing so far, you’ll enjoy this – and it happens to work great as a jumping-on point if you were thinking of trying out the title. This is out March 18th!
I think that’s a fair bit of news for one newsletter. As I was writing this, the solicitations for May 2026 came out, which includes In Your Skin #2, but I’ll post about that sometime next week, along with other stuff.