Mail Call is a roundup of cool things we’ve received in our mailboxes from comics creators, publishers and more. Hit the links for more information.
Love Everlasting, the Substack comic created by Tom King and Elsa Charretier, will make the jump to print, courtesy of Image Comics. The ongoing series kicks off in August.
The comic, which is up to issue #3 on Substack, plays with the tropes inherent to the romance genre:
In Love Everlasting, Joan Peterson discovers that she is trapped in an endless, terrifying cycle of “romance”—a problem to be solved, a man to marry—and every time she falls in love she’s torn from her world and thrust into another teary saga. Her bloody journey to freedom and revelation starts in this breathtaking, groundbreaking first issue.
Here’s a look at the variant cover to the first issue, along with two variants by Clay Mann and Tula Lotay:
And here’s a look at a few pages from the first issue:
chris eliopoulos on getting the rights back to ‘Cow Boy’
In a post with the subhead “Always Hire a Lawyer,” Chris Eliopoulos details the trials and tribulations he and writer Nate Cosby went through with their series Cow Boy, which was published by Archaia/BOOM! Studios roughly 10 years ago.
After the book was done, we tried shopping it around. We were able to land at Archaia, which was eventually bought by Boom! What we did next was dumb. They presented us with a boilerplate contract and we signed it without talking to a lawyer. That would bite us in the butt later. But, at the time, we were excited to see this thing published. That was our main motivation. And when it came out, it was really well-received. It was funny, sad, violent, touching, and empathetic. We were really proud of the book and were looking forward to doing more.
From there, BOOM! decided to shop the book around Hollywood without involving Cosby and Eliopoulos in the pitch. It was optioned by Dreamworks Animation, where it sat for six years and eventually ran out, along with the contract they’d signed with BOOM!
I’m happy to say, the rights belong to Nate and I again and we’re talking about doing more. For me, I want to do more because I love Nate like a brother and love working with him. He makes me a better artist and a better person. The thing that protected us in all of this is that Nate and I had each other’s backs and that doesn’t always happen. They tried to divide us to get what they wanted, but I wanted to protect Nate and he wanted to protect me. As long as we had each other, they could never take what was rightfully ours.
You can read the entire story on Eliopoulos’ Substack.
Glass Eye Studios launches A Way From Here
Glass Eye Studios, the Substack run by Khary Randolph and Joanne Starer, has launched another comic called A Way From Here. It’s written by Starer and features artwork by GABO. It’s a young adult series set in 1938 Vienna. The comic will be free, with subscribers getting bonus content.
As a bonus, Starer also shared this short comic she made with Lynne Yoshii, which gives some of her own personal history with being Jewish and working on a paper on the Holocaust with the granddaughter of an SS officer.
If you haven’t check out Sirens of the City, the comic Starer and Randolph launched their Substack with, you can download the complete first issue here.
Read the first chapter of Ahmed + Acosta’s ‘Dragon’ for free
Speaking of free comics, Substack followed Free Comic Book Day earlier this month with their own version of FCBD, where various comics folks on Substack shared free content. For his part, Saladin Ahmed shared the first chapter of his crowdfunded graphic novel Dragon, which he did with artist Dave Acosta. You can find it here.
Kelly Thompson teases The Cull
Another creator who shared a free comic on Substack was Kelly Thompson; you can find the first two issues of her comic The Black Cloak with artist Meredith McClaren here as downloadable files. She also recently teased another comic she’ll offer through Substack, The Cull, which you can see a preview page for above. It features art by Mattia De Iulis.
Grant Morrison’s ‘Going Home’
Finally, let’s end with a comic that Grant Morrison shared on his Substack recently, a science fiction story called “Going Home” that Morrison says he wrote and drew about 40 years ago.
“‘Going Home’ was born during that uneasy period in the early ‘80s between the demise of Near Myths and the rise of the British Comics Renaissance following the launch of Warrior,” he writes. If you haven’t been following his Substack, well, you’ve missed a lot of treats like this.