Three Things | David Petersen, Council of Frogs, Sonic Frontiers

Here are three things to read, to support and to download in comics today.

Three Things spotlights, as the title states, three things from comics today. It’ll be three things with links, no more, no less. Don’t call it a comeback.

1. To read: David Petersen’s The Amazing Screw-On Head fan comic from 2004

Mouse Guard creator David Petersen posted a blast from his past to his blog this week — a fan comic he made for Mike Mignola’s The Amazing Screw-On Head with Maija Graham.

“Back in 2004 I was an active member of the Hellboy forums on CBR,” he said in his post. “We had a great community who were fans of Mike Mignola’s work, but also a support community for our various hobbies, crafts, and artwork. A group of us decided it would be fun to put together a web-only fan comic, a few pairs each working on a short story of a Mignola creation.”

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Five Things | Ignatz minicomics

Here are five minicomics you can buy, read and vote for in this year’s Ignatz Awards.

Three Things spotlights, as the title states, three comic things. Usually it’s three things with links, no more, no less. Today, however, it is more, because it’s Five Things.

(Art up top by Alexander Laird)

To vote for: Your favorite Ignatz-nominated minicomics

On Sunday I ran down the five comics nominated in the “Outstanding Online Comic” category for the 2022 Ignatz Awards. With voting open to anyone on the internet, my assumption is that folks would like to make informed choices on their ballots, and webcomics are the most easily accessible comics out there, right? Just give me a URL and off I go.

But that got me thinking about some of the other categories, and whether it would be easy to read everything nominated. With the graphic novel category, for example, it would be easy enough for the ambitious sort to hunt down all five nominees, whether that’s via a good local book store or comic shop, or, of course, through online ordering. But the minicomics category might be a little more challenging, so here’s a rundown of where you can find all five of the nominees.

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Three Things | Major Sun, SDCC panels, Sequential Scholars

Here are three things to support, to listen to and to follow in comics today.

1. To vote for: Major Sun on Webtoon

Webtoon is currently running a Call to Action contest, where various creators compete for a spot on the site — as well as for cash and other prizes. The submission period will end July 31, and then voting will take place throughout the month of August.

And wow, are there a lot of submissions — more than 100 pages, with 20 submissions per page. I of course would encourage you first to find one you like to support, as these things should be, but I couldn’t help but note that one of my favorite webcomics cartoonists has entered the fray.

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Three Things | Keith Knight, TCAF panels, Joe Latham

Here are three things in comics to to buy, to listen to and to support today.

1. To Buy: Good On Both Sides by Keith Knight

Gentleman Cartoonist Keith Knight, creator of The K Chronicles and the inspiration for the Hulu series Woke, has a new collection of his (th)ink comic strip available through his Big Cartel shop. He’s offering both a standard edition and an artist’s edition (which is signed, numbered and includes a doodle) of Good on Both Sides. Both have fairly limited print runs, so buy early and often.

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Three Things | Faith Erin Hicks, Dark Side of Purity, Erica Henderson

Here are three things to read, to support and to buy today.

1. To Read: Faith Erin Hicks’ comic on, well, everything

Faith Erin Hicks is the creator of the upcoming graphic novel Ride On, as well as One Year at Ellsmere, The Nameless City trilogy, Friends with Boys and many more. In between her graphic novel work she created a short comic to express her frustrations with everything going on in the world right now and the feelings of powerlessness it brings:

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Three Things | Black Phoenix, Backstory, System Error

Check out three crowdfunding campaigns on the newly launched Crowdfundr platform.

To Support: A bunch of stuff on the new crowdfunding site Crowdfundr

Crowdfundr is a brand-new crowdfunding site that just launched recently and is already hosting several comics and comics-related crowdfunding campaigns. It can be used for other things, of course, like music and film, but who cares about that stuff — there’s comics to be had! Comics!

“Our goal is for Crowdfundr to be the most creator-friendly crowdfunding platform,” said ConnectionPoint President David Barach. “That’s why we offer it for free and include other creator friendly features like being able to roll a campaign over into a store and include more reward choices for supporters. We also have special features for indie publishers and studios to collaborate with their creators and run concurrent campaigns. I think creators are going to be pleasantly surprised at the ways we support them, now and with future enhancements, toward sustainable and continuous crowdfunding for their work.”

I thought I’d dedicate this edition of Three Things to highlighting some of the cool stuff that’s up on the new site now:

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Three Things | Jack Teagle, Kaiju Sunset, Omnis Temporalis

Here are three things to buy, to support and to hear in comics today.

1. To Buy: 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix

“Illustrator and painter Jack Teagle works from an old shipping container he converted into a studio on his parent’s farm in Southwest England.” That’s the opening to a great interview with Teagle that appeared on Threadless.com (yes, the T-shirt website) that I first saw on LinkedIn, of all places, the other day. Threadless and LinkedIn! What is even happening here?

Anyway, in that interview Teagle talks about a fun side project he and several other artist friends had a few years back, the Simpsons Drawing Club, where they would draw zany pictures and comics featuring Simpsons characters. They stopped posting art to their Tumblr in 2020, but Teagle has collected some of his comics from the project into a 52-page collection titled 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix.

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Three Things | Roachmill, George Pratt, Kevin Conroy

Here are three things in comics to support, to see and to watch today.

1. To support: Roachmill returns from It’s Alive!

The 1980s saw a huge explosion in the number of comics coming from independent comics publishers. It was mainly driven by a couple of factors, one being the creation and growth of the direct market, and also by what’s known as the black-and-white comics boom (and subsequent bust) that was sparked by the creation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and fueled by a speculator’s market of low print run, and often low quality, B&W comics. But there were certainly some gems amongst the garbage.

One of the companies in the mix back then was Blackthorne Publishing, a company born when Pacific Comics closed down, who would go on to be quite successful for a number of years publishing 3-D comics, comic strip reprints, licensed comics and original stuff. One of those originals was Roachmill, by Rich Hedden and Tom McWeeney, which was definitely a gem.

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Three Things | UNBANNED, Humble Bundle, DC Pride

Here are three things to read, to support and to watch today. Happy Pride Month!

[Image above: Heathen cover by Natasha Alterici]

1. To read: Vault announces “UNBANNED” initiative for Pride Month

June is Pride Month, as you’ve probably noticed if you’ve visited any corporation’s website or social media account this week to see that they’ve updated their logo with a rainbow flag. Some companies are doing more than that, though, including three comics-related ones that I wanted to draw attention to today.

First is Vault Comics, who today announced UNBANNED — “a Pride month initiative to give away free queer books to everyone, everywhere.” If you’ve followed the news over the last few months, you know that there’s a very orchestrated campaign going on right now against books with LGBTQ+ themes (among others) as politicians attempt to win points with constituents. Vault is not only making some of their titles by LGBTQ+ creators available for free on their web store all month, but also shared a very heartfelt message with LGBTQ+ readers in doing so. I try to keep these Three Things posts “press release free” and just share things I’ve discovered organically, but hey, what are rules made for if not to be broken? Here’s the press email they sent out today in full:

Banning books is nothing new to the world of comics and literature, but in recent months we’ve seen an unprecedented uptick in new bans across the country. These bans have targeted many queer books and creators. And while politicians and extremist groups may be working hard to erase LGBTQIA+ voices, we at Vault Comics continue to maintain that this space, our space, has always and will always be safe — but more than safe, it will be loud, proud, and unapologetic.

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Three Things | Outlaw’s Apprentice, Woodland Creatures, They Can Talk

Check out three things to see, to support and to read today.

1. To see: Chris Schweizer teases Outlaw’s Apprentice

Over the past few months in various online places like his website, on Facebook and through his Patreon, Chris Schweizer has started to share artwork for a new project — Outlaw’s Apprentice, a “high-adventure fantasy series in the spirit of some of my favorite types of stories: swashbucklers, episodic westerns.”

It looks fun as heck:

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Three Things | Gogor, Steeple love, Mary Marvel’s eyes

Here are three things to support, to buy and to know today.

Three Things spotlights, as the title states, three things from comics today. It’ll be three things with links, no more, no less. No. 5 is alive.

1. To support: The Book of Gogor by Ken Garing

Gogor was a five-issue miniseries written and drawn by Ken Garing and released by Image Comics back in 2019. I was looking through our archives to see if I ever wrote about it beyond the initial release announcement from Image, and it doesn’t look like I did — which is a shame, because I remember enjoying it a whole bunch. So did my son.

Garing created a really interesting fantasy world ruled by a bunch of jerks called the Domus. A student named Armano awakens this mythical champion called Gogor to fight them, and together they go on an adventure across the many islands that make up their world, which float in the sky vs. the water. I remember what I really liked about it was the world-building, as you could tell Garing put a lot of detail and thought into it, even the parts that didn’t make it onto the page.

Image collected the first five issues but the story never continued beyond that — until now. Garing is crowdfunding a follow-up story, The Book of Gogor, which will offer a definitive conclusion to the one he started.

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Three Things | Anders Nilsen, Johnnie Christmas, Maia Kobabe

Here are three things to buy, to watch and to listen to today.

Three Things spotlights, as the title states, three things from comics today. It’ll be three things with links, no more, no less. This is the fourth one in the series, collect them all.

1. To buy: Tongue #5, the yearly series by Anders Nilsen

Anders Nilsen, the award-winning creator of Big Questions and Rage of Poseidon, has released the fifth issue of Tongues, his self-published comic that features Prometheus, Teddy Roosevelt and a whole lot more. It’s … kind of hard to describe, actually, but it’s a labor of love for the creator, with emphasis on the labor.

In a post on his blog, Nilsen details how much work and time went into this fifth issue — and into every issue — and he reveals that he has about five more issues left to complete. For the process junkies, he also goes deep in how the sausage gets made…

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