Happy to pre-announce my upcoming book, Flong Time, No See! I’ve gathered my most interesting reported stories and essays of the last seven years, and will revise and expand them for this print and ebook collection! Click through to get notified as soon as it launches later this month!
For many years, I’ve maintained a personal announcements email list, which I send out about six to eight times a year, running through my latest projects and upcoming ones, and sometimes offering discounts. I’ve also had an active Patreon for several years, but I never quite got into the groove over there. Patreon has been very successful for people with a larger audience feedback loop, who are creating a recurring sort of thing: videos, podcasts, cartoons, fiction, and so forth. My particular writing niche never quite fit!
So last week, I upgraded the announcement list with a premium option. Regular subscribers still get infrequent project updates. But folks who pay a suggested $3 a month (you pay from $1 to whatever you like) receive at least one new article or essay every month, plus access to premium archives, where I’ll be posting my back catalog of articles.
My publisher, Andrews McMeel, just sent me a few advance copies of the upcoming bookstore edition of How Comics Are Made, which hits the shelves June 3, 2025. I did a modest unboxing so you can see the new cover components and the great job their printer did on this mass-market edition. I’m quite pleased in every regard!
You can snag a copy ahead of time by pre-ordering from many fine bookstores of all sizes. I’ve provided a list of pre-order links for a range of from local stores up to international behemoths. The book will be available June 3 in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and in the rest of the world either in June or early July!
An extended Pi Day sale is currently underway at Take Control Books, an ebook publisher where I have nine active titles. You get 31.4% off all titles; if you own existing books, that discount applies to upgrade pricing, too! No coupon is needed, and the sale lasts until Monday night.
Last week, I finished out sales of my 2024 book How Comics Were Made, a look at the history of newspaper comics production and reproduction. The book was acquired in late 2024 by Andrews McMeel Publishing, which has a new printing (same contents) hitting bookstores June 3, 2025, around the world! You can pre-order a copy today under its new title, How Comics Are Made, from independent bookstores and large ecommerce sites, alike.
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.
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
The Kickstarter campaign for How Comics Were Made ended yesterday, and it was a rousing success, raising nearly $170,000—over 110% of the goal I’d set to make the book financially feasible due to the overhead involved. This puts it in the top 150 publishing projects at Kickstarter of all time (out of nearly 70,000). Thank you if you backed the campaign, provided moral support, or are just reading this post!
Even though the crowdfunding stage is over, I’ll be selling the book as a pre-order until it’s printed later this year and offering limited-edition/quantity high-tier rewards while they last. You can go to the pre-order store for more information! I don’t have to give the printer a final number for how many books I want printed until this summer, giving me time to expand based on demand.
I vaguely remember when I first encountered the “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip. I am sure I was in my teens, when I was reading some underground stuff, though my interest was largely mainstream. Zippy was in the middle: started by Bill Griffith as a character and then a heavy focus of his underground/alternative work, the strip was picked up by his local San Francisco paper and then, not long after, put into syndication by King Features nearly 40 years ago. It blew my mind: something this surreal and not-at-all-square (except the panels) in regular newspapers?! Zippy scratched an itch in my head similar to when I discovered Dada and surrealist art when I was a little older. I became a lifelong fan.
In preparing to launch How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, I knew that Bill would be a
I’ve just published a massive essay on Medium detailing how I helped Marcin Wichary run a $750,000+ campaign on Kickstarter for his book Shift Happens. I explain our strategies, hard-won lessons, unexpected problems, and budgeting within the parameters and fees collected by platforms—and making sure you consider a post-campaign service to help deal with the actual job of managing deliveries. (The book sold out its final tranche of copies on 8 February 2024.)
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Take Control Books is discounting all titles it offers to just $5! This includes eleven books by yours truly! No coupon is needed. The sale ends on 26 October 2023 at the end of the day Central Time. What’s that again? This:
Back in 2003, Tonya Engst of TidBITS asked if I wanted to be part of an experiment in ebook publishing. Several computer book authors and I had been talking about whether someone could launch an author-oriented publishing company that split profits fairly due to a far lower overhead for ebooks. Tonya and her husband, Adam, decided around that time to take the plunge—I can’t recall if inspired by that
I’ve just launched a website for How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page, a book that I’ve been cooking up writing for a few years. On the heels of editing and projecting managing Shift Happens for Marcin Wichary (thus part of raising over $750,000 in that campaign), I am excited to get back into print and share the comics and printing history I’ve been assembling for the last six years.
I’ve already started prep, and hired Mark Kaufman (of the recently late and forever-to-be-lamented The Nib) to design and illustrate the book. He’s created a preliminary cover that we’ll be refining as we move towards a Kickstarter campaign in February 2024. The book’s expected publication date: October 2024. I’ve done a far
A modern printing press is a thing of wonder. It’s highly automated. It has cameras inside it. There are digital controls for making fine-grained adjustments. A scanner checks color bars as pages are pulled during a print run to make sure the density (amount of ink laid down) remains consistent. A press makes constant course adjustments, and the helmsperson—the press operator—is in constant motion to keep it trim.
I found myself thinking of it like a ship on the first day of a multi-day press check that I’m on with my author client Marcin Wichary for his massive book Shift Happens at our printers, Penmor Lithographers, in Lewiston, Maine. The press is long—maybe 40 feet end to end. At one end, one pressperson feeds
The event last weekend at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum went fantastically. First, I was able to visit and get a tour from the co-curators of the “Man Saves Comics!” exhibition, Caitlin McGurk and Ann Lennon. Really tremendous. They packed the museum space with as much material as they could, but with 2.5 million items they could work from, they had to make choices—and they were great ones. I learned a lot from the exhibition, which is available in an archived form online. I posed with my video!
Then, the event! No one took an exact count, but the place was hopping from get-go and across three