Matthew Dow Smith has spent almost a full year posting his own comics to Twitter, and he’s not stopping now — this week he launches Doctor Secret, a three-parter that will wrap up a year’s worth of comics posted to social media.
Smith started posting comics the same week that Diamond Comics Distributors announced their pandemic-related shutdown. He started with the autobiographical My Life as Riley and continuing on with the serialized Johnny Chaos, Arch Nemesis and Amelia Shadows, the latter just wrapping up last week.
“I gave myself one year to see what would happen, hoping that the weekly comics would at least keep my career alive until the industry figured out a path forward, while secretly hoping it might lead to me finally breaking through as a writer as well as an artist,” Smith wrote on Twitter.
Most people would probably say that 49 weeks’ worth of comics was “close enough,” but not Smith. Doctor Secret will also add another character to the Skeleton Tree Media universe that Smith has been building out in the stories.
“Comic book creators are a very fearful lot,” Smith told Alex Dueben last year. “Something bad happens, and we really get worried. Making comics is a very difficult way to make a living. There are a lot of ups and downs – and the downs are really bad. So when something comes along like this, basically everyone goes, ‘The industry is over! We’ll never get paid! We’ll never make comics again! How will we pay rent? What will we do?!’ That’s just how we are. So I thought, ‘Okay, if the industry is ending, I’m going to go out doing some stuff that I feel strongly and passionately about.'”
And if you’re wondering if you’ll see any of these characters again, Smith teased the return of at least one of them: