Smash Pages Q&A | Otava Heikkilä

The Finnish cartoonist discusses the latest volume of ‘Letters for Lucardo,’ which is currently being crowdfunded by Iron Circus Comics.

Otava Heikkilä has been making the series Letters for Lucardo in recent years, and this week Iron Circus Comics will be crowdfunding the third volume in the series, Letters for Lucardo: The Silent Lord.

The series is about the relationship between a vampire and a mortal, and Heikkilä has brought a unique take and sensibility to the project. It’s a beautiful drawn and very delicately told love story with explicit sex scenes and it’s been striking to see how Heikkilä has grown as an artist and storyteller.

I’ve spoken with Heikkilä in the past, and we spoke briefly about this third volume, which is being crowdfunded starting today through April 28.

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Sunday Comics | A round-up from Hourly Comics Day

Cartoonists dedicated last Monday to making and posting new comics every hour; check out the results of their hard work.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

Every February comics artists wake up and just start drawing for #HourlyComicsDay, where cartoonists commit to making and posting a comic every hour for a day — or whatever frequency they chose. Most hourly comics typically fall into the “autobiography” category, as participants detail their day in comics form, but some will share fictional stories as well.

The official Hourly Comics Day was last Monday, and I thought I’d dedicate this edition of Sunday Comics to spotlighting some of them (with a big thanks to Brigid Alverson for sharing a long list of the ones she found).

So here we go:

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Smash Pages Q&A: Otava Heikkilä

The Finnish cartoonist discusses the latest chapter of ‘Letters for Lucardo’ from Iron Circus.

Otava Heikkila had been drawing comics for a while, but he made an impression when Letters for Lucardo was published by Iron Circus Comics in 2017. The book is about the relationship between a vampire and a mortal, which is a familiar and recurring story, but Heikkila managed to play with the genre in interesting ways — in this volume by making the vampire young and the mortal old, and by featuring explicit gay sex.

Letters for Lucardo: Fortunate Beasts is the second volume in Heikkila’s series and he answered a few questions from Finland about the book and the series, and how to approach drawing the sex scenes.

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