Every year, I like to recap what I did professionally in the previous one. This year built on work and events already planned and in progress, so I have less to report in volume despite having a quite busy twelve months.

How Comics Were (and Are) Made

The most significant thing I did in 2024 was to crowdfund and publish How Comics Were Made, my book digging into the production and reproduction of newspaper comics from the 1890s to the present. I took the book to Kickstarter in February, where it raised more than enough funds to proceed and then shipped it in October, the promised month! Between March and October, I sold hundreds of additional copies and I’m on track to sell out in early 2025 of remaining copies in this first printing.

You can buy a copy of this edition and find exciting unique extras at my store.

I asked Michael Chabon (Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and many others) to write the book’s foreword, and shockingly, he agreed! He has a deep love of comics and printing and wrote about his family connection and the recovery of lost memory. The New York Review of Books reprinted his foreword in its December 19 cover date issue as “The Midnight World.” (You can register at no cost to read one article.) You can’t beat the surreality of seeing your name in a publication with that kind of history!

In November, I sold the rights to my book to Andrews McMeel Publishing, part of the company that handles syndication for extremely popular comic strips, like Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, Pearls Before Swine, and For Better or For Worse. I will continue to revise the book and produce new editions while they handle the pesky business of marketing, printing, distribution, and accounting!

The first Andrews McMeel edition is really a second printing—the contents are nearly identical—and it will be available June 3, 2025, under the name How Comics Are Made from online and bricks-and-mortar bookstores worldwide!

This is the first book I will ever have published by a publisher outside of a niche segment: my previous books were all for the computer book or graphic design markets. This is an “adult trade“ title: a general book sold to grownups via the bookstore trade.

I’m excited and happy about it, but particularly delighted that Andrews McMeel has both bookstore and international distribution. It’s nearly impossible for a self-published single title to get into bookstores. And selling my book outside the United States is sadly very expensive due to shipping costs, adding 25% to 75% to the cost of purchase!

The price for this trade edition, which will be hardcover in a dust jacket, is $40 in the United States and just about that in pre-order listings in Canada, the United Kingdom, and several European online booksellers—often with free or cheap domestic shipping. You can pre-order a copy now!

Shift Happened

You may recall that 2023 was the year of Shift Happens, a multi-volume book by my client Marcin Wichary. I edited and project managed the book, and we had hoped to ship all copies from around September to December 2023. Due to both sheer volume and discovering problems with damage in test shipments, this turned into November 2023 to February 2024 (we prioritized holiday shipments for those who asked). The last copies held in reserve against damage were released and sold out quickly in February 2024, and the last ones shipped by March. It was a lot of books.

Will another printing ever happen? Marcin has not yet decided! It was a lot of work over several years to write it and get it into production, and then several months of production and logistics. We spent eight solid days on press supervising the printing—about 100 hours!

If you’re interested in a future printing, you can sign up at the Shift Happens website to tell Marcin you’re sad you missed obtaining a copy.

Take Control Books

After years of writing and updating many new and enormous books in the Take Control Books series, editor Joe Kissell and I agreed to break, merge, and shed some of the larger ones. They had grown out of control and we couldn’t determine if readers were still gaining an advantage from the exhaustive work it required to update them.

So this year, I wrote a single new title, Keep Safe Using Mobile Tech, which covers iPhone, iPad, and Android, with some information related to macOS and Windows for laptops and using apps on those platforms that help with mobile safety. We merged two titles to create a more comprehensive book, Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices, and updated the Apple ID book to Take Control of Your Apple Account, as Apple renamed its account system in September 2024. I also updated five other books, making eight active titles in total.

Sell Out!

This year, not only did we sell out all remaining copies of Shift Happens and I sold the rights to my How Comics Were Made book, but I also sold out of two previous print books that I still had back stock of: Not Too Put Too Fine a Point on It, I book I printed by hand using letterpress and which was finely bound by Jules Faye, sold in a limited edition; and Six Centuries of Type & Printing, a title written to go along with my 2019 Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule project, and which was letterpress printed by an automated press in London.

Ebook editions of Not Too Put Too Fine a Point on It, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, and How Comics Were Made are all available for instant purchase and download. You can also buy the ebook edition of all stories published in The Magazine, as well as obtain a free download of the ebook version of The Magazine: The Book (Year One) (sold out in 2023) and London Kerning (sold out in 2022).

2024 Videos

I keep hoping “20xx will be the year I get into video production!” So far, not quite, but I created one fresh explanatory video related to my comics-history book, used live video streams to show materials that would be in it, and interviewed several cartoonists and others over videoconferencing.

• Doonesbury history video: I took the details of a chapter of my How Comics book about some lost and recovered 1973 Doonesbury comics and created “The Week in Doonesbury That Wasn’t.”
• Book-related: I answered questions during the Kickstarter campaign; in December, I did a live Q&A with book purchasers.
• Interviews: Several people let me talk to them about their careers: Georgia Dunn (Breaking Cat News); Derf Backderf (The City cartoon and graphic novels like My Friend Dahmer); and Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From). Benjamin Clark, the curator of the Schulz museum noted below, talked about Peanuts and Schulz’s life and work.

On the Road

This was a lighter year for travel than 2023, in which I logged 10,000s of miles in the air, including two weeks in Paris and London. In January 2024, I visited the Charles M. Schulz Museum & Research Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., to meet folks connected with preserving and continuing Schulz’s legacy. It was a tremendous trip. I met with curator Benjamin Clark, looked through hundreds of items in their archive, toured the museum’s collection, ate a grilled cheese sandwich at the Warm Puppy Café at Snoopy’s Home Ice (the ice-skating rink across from the museum), and bought a fuzzy Snoopy at the two-story freestanding gift shop on the campus.

I also met with Paige Braddock (Chief Creative Officer) and Lex Fajardo (Editorial Director), two key figures at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, which creates, manages, or oversees all the Peanuts art needed for reprinting comics and for new projects, like pins, T-shirts, books, animated TV series and movies, and much more. Yes—I got to see the office Schulz used for about the last 30 years of his life.

In April, I did a rapid dash to visit cartoonists in their studios in Connecticut (Bill Griffith of Zippy the Pinhead and George Corsillo, the colorist for Doonesbury, among many other lifetime achievements), and then had appointments at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia’s special collections libraries to review historic comics material in their collections. I wrote up this visit in a Kickstarter update.

May featured a very short round-trip to Columbus, Ohio’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at the Ohio State University, the home of many items featured in my book—my fourth trip there. This time, it was for Nancy Fest, a celebration of all things related to the Nancy comic and its creator. The event launched a new exhibition of Ernie Bushmiller’s work.

Finally, I went to Vancouver, B.C., Canada, to Hemlock Printers in late September to watch my book be printed. Normally, a press check like this involves discussions with the press operators, negotiations over color matching, finding off details…at least some of that. Instead, due to their proofing and preparation processes, I found nothing in the book’s contents and just a cover error that was entirely mine but easily fixed. It was a great experience to see a well-oiled machine in operation. My book was vastly simpler than Shift Happens, where we were pushing a lot of machine and physical limits—and it showed in the printing oversight!

I wrote a detailed overview with some videos in a Kickstarter update.

Next Year’s Plans

Maybe 2024 was more full than I remembered? So far, 2025 has no giant immense projects on the horizon. I’m working with several clients who have come to me for editorial, crowdfunding, or printing advice or involvement, and at least two of those projects should come to fruition. I’m currently looking over ideas for my next book and other work.