Kindt + Jenkins cough up a ‘Hairball’ at Dark Horse

Apologies for the headline; it had to be done.

Writer Matt Kindt will team again with artist Tyler Jenkins and colorist Hilary Jenkins for Hairball, a new horror drama centered on a family’s cat, Bestie.

The new miniseries will fall under Kindt’s Flux House imprint, which was announced earlier this year.

“I’ve written stories of international intrigue and locked room murder mysteries, but in 20 years of making comics, I’ve rarely been compelled to create a horror story,” Kindt said. “And for good reason. I was actually sick to my stomach when I finished writing the end of issue 1. I grossed myself out. I knew that I’d need someone fearless to draw it. (There was no way I was going to.) I knew that Tyler was the perfect artist and co-creator for the story. And when Tyler and Hilary started sending his pages in, it was just as horrible as I’d imagined —in the very best way.”

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Matt Kindt’s Flux House will publish ‘Spy Superb’

Kindt and his wife Sharlene will team up once again for the story of a spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy.

Super Spy creator Matt Kindt will go undercover once again in Spy Superb, which stars a different sort of secret agent — one who doesn’t even know they’re a spy.

Kindt will team with his wife, Sharlene Kindt, who he worked with on Dept H. It’ll come out from Flux House, Kindt’s new imprint at Dark Horse.

“In Spy Superb I wanted to explore a character, the idea of a very average person who is under the belief that he is utterly exceptional,” said Kindt. “There is a scientific term for this–The Dunning-Kruger effect–a person who insists they possess knowledge and skills that they obviously do not. What if a super spy was suffering from this? Well…they would of course be a…SPY SUPERB. It was actually really hard for me to keep this character alive past issue #1… there are hit men after him…a super assassin who kills only with rock, paper, and scissors… and a real super spy working in the shadows of our “hero” who may actually be the real spy superb. It feels really great to be drawing a new book–and I’m beyond happy that Sharlene Kindt is painting it. It’s definitely the most ambitious collaboration we’ve ever had.”

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Matt Kindt + Dark Horse team for new Flux House imprint

New imprint will kick off with a new Mind MGMT comic and will be the exclusive home of Kindt’s creator-owned comics.

Matt Kindt will team with his longtime publisher Dark Horse on a new imprint, Flux House, that will become the exclusive home of his creator-owned comics.

“Flux House is inspired by Fluxus – an avant-garde art movement from the 1950s that was an extension of Surrealists and Dadaists,” Kindt said in the press release. “The Fluxus movement focused on the creative process and experimental art forms. Their trademarks include accessibility, absurdism, and a sense of humor. If you’ve seen me burn or cut one of my books apart at a signing, you already have a sense of where I’m going with this. Flux House aims to embody all of these elements. It won’t be limited by traditional forms of books and print. And the story format will, as the name implies, always be in flux.”

The first title to be published by the new imprint will be Mind MGMT: Bootleg, which is set in the same universe as the previous Mind MGMT series. Written by Kindt, he’ll be joined by artists Farel Dalrymple, Jill Thompson, David Rubín and Matt Lesniewski for the four-issue series.

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Kindt + Jenkins deliver the chills in ‘Apache Delivery Service’

The horror miniseries begins in January.

Matt Kindt, Tyler Jenkins and Hilary Jenkins, who created Dark Horse’s history-spanning Fear Case, will venture into the jungles of Vietnam for their next miniseries from the publisher, Apache Delivery Service.

The horror story involves the search for Nazi gold during the Vietnam War — which, rumor has it, is guarded by witches. Kindt said the story is “easily the most unsettling story I’ve written and for-sure the creepiest art I’ve seen Tyler and Hilary come up with.”

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Sunday Comics | John Allison kicks off ‘Author Unknown’

Check out other recent online comics from Matt Kindt, Frankee White and Kat Baumann, Jason Loo and Dan Schkade.

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.

John Allison has created several webcomics and comics over the years, from Bad Machinery to Scary-Go-Round to Wicked Things and Steeple. Last week he kicked off a brand-new story on the Steeple site, called Author Unknown. The 44-page comic has been in the works since November of 2019 and will feature Charlotte Grote, his character from Bad Machinery.

“… it’s been through a lot of revisions to make sure it meant something even taken in isolation,” Allison said. “It needed me to make all the comics I did over the last year to give it a bit of weight. There is something for both long-term and newer readers, to the exclusion of no-one.”

You can start reading the new story by going here, or, if you don’t want to wait, you can read the entire story by becoming a supporter of Allison’s on Patreon.

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Matt Kindt jumps into the controversial world of NFTs with a new ‘Mind MGMT’ story

The one-of-a-kind story will go to the highest bidder of an NFT auction.

Creator Matt Kindt is exploring the world of non-fungible tokens with Mind MGMT: The Artifact, a full-length comic that’s currently up for auction on the NFT auction website OpenSea.

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have been making headlines recently; they’re a type of code that acts sort of as a unique certificate of authenticity for a digital piece of art, tied to bitcoin and block chain technologies. The Verge, Bankrate and NPR have Q&A’s up on what NFTs are and how they’re being used right now in the art world.

“I wanted to create an original Mind MGMT comic book narrative that would explore the nature of belief and the value of ideas and their intangible nature as a way of exploring the idea of NFTs,” said Kindt. “The best way to explore this idea was for the actual story – the Mind MGMT narrative – to become what it is about. This story is written as a Mind MGMT espionage narrative – an agent sent on a mission to retrieve a priceless artifact. There are secret codes, monk-ninjas. LOTS of monk-ninjas and a teenage immortal intent on stealing this priceless artifact. It is both a real apple…and a drawing of an apple.”

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Kindt + Lesniewski tackle folk tales + conspiracies in ‘Crimson Flower’

The four-issue miniseries starts in January.

Dark Horse Comics has announced a new series, Crimson Flower, coming from Matt Kindt, Matt Lesniewski and Bill Crabtree.

The four-issue miniseries will follow a woman who uses folk tales to cope with the loss of her family during a home invasion. But as she plots her revenge, she discovers a government plot to use folk tales to turn children into super assassins.

“‘Cold blooded Russian assassins?’ We’ve seen that before. But assassins trained using Slavic folktales as a brainwashing device? That’s something new that really needed a unique visual style,” Kindt said. “When I saw Matt Lesniewski’s book The Freak (nominated for an Eisner) I knew he was going to do something like we’ve never seen before. Our collaboration was alchemy – turning this book into a brutal, heartbreaking, psychedelic journey of a woman intent on revenge-killing every assassin that ruined her life.”

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Keanu Reeves comes crashing into comics with ‘BRZRKR’

Reeves will team up with co-writer Matt Kindt and artist Alessandro Vitti for a 12-issue miniseries.

Actor Keanu Reeves of John Wick and Bill & Ted fame will make his comic co-writing debut on a new title from BOOM! Studios called BRZRKR.

“I guess I’m in the writing room,” Reeves told USA Today’s Brian Truitt. He said he’s having Skype sessions with his co-writer, Matt Kindt, fairly regularly as he also works on the fourth Matrix film.

Kindt and Reeves are joined on the 12-issue series by artist Alessandro Vitti, colorist Bill Crabtree and letterer Clem Robins.

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Lemire + Kindt + Rubin create a new mythology in ‘Cosmic Detective’

The new Kickstarter project has already blown past its goal in its first day.

Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt and David Rubin have all collaborated together in one form or another in the past, but now the three creators have united to create their own world in Cosmic Detective, which went live on Kickstarter earlier today.

The story centers on a detective tasked with discovering who killed a god.

Cosmic Detective is a crime story that channels Jack Kirby, David Lynch and Raymond Chandler,” Kindt said. “It’s a story grounded in noir that ultimately becomes absolutely cosmic-bonkers insane.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Matt Kindt, Brian Hurtt + Marie Enger

The denizens of St. Louis-based HEK Studios team up on a new anthology, which is up for funding on Kickstarter.

The depth and breadth of what you can do in comics and with comics — and I’m talking story-wise, design-wise and format-wise here — is virtually limitless. Sometimes it takes a particular project and a particular set of creators to remind us of this, and The HEK Treasury serves as just such a reminder.

The HEK Treasury is a creative project by the members of HEK Studios — Matt Kindt, Brian Hurtt and Marie Enger. The three of them have a large assortment of credits within comics — Black Badge, The Sixth Gun, Dept. H, Super-Spy, Fhtagn and Loathing, Shadow Roads, Nosferatu! and many more. The Missouri-based creators formed HEK Studios in 2015 and have purchased a vintage Route 66 garage that they’re converting into “the first full-time exclusive comic book studio in St. Louis.”

In addition to their own projects with various publishers, they’ve decided to team up on a large prestige format hardcover (8 ¾  x 11 5/8 ). This deluxe collection will feature “all new epic, experimental science fiction, fantasy and genre short stories. The HEK Treasury will showcase each creator as they unleash new ideas, using experimental art and storytelling techniques.” The project went live on Kickstarter earlier this week, and the campaign runs for 30 days. If funded, the book will be delivered to backers in the fall.

I spoke with the three of them about The HEK Treasury, HEK Studios and what they hope to accomplish together with this project.

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BOOM! Studios announces ‘Folklords’ by Kindt + Smith

New miniseries follows a young man whose “forbidden quest reveals the shocking truth about his world.”

Dept. H and Black Badge writer Matt Kindt is teaming up with Barbarian Lord creator Matt Smith for a new miniseries from BOOM! Studios. Folklords is about” a young man whose forbidden quest reveals the shocking truth about his world and turns everything he ever knew upside down.”

“Ideas usually sneak up on you. But this one came in a flash. As soon as my plucky editor, Eric, said the word ‘Folklords,’ I had an image of this teenage kid in a black suit and tie…walking through a small folk tale-style village full of gnomes, witches and trolls. It looked jarring, seeing that kid there. He was completely out of place. What’s this kid wearing a suit for? Is he living in a fairy tale? Why is he there?” Kindt said in a press release. “I’m not sure why the word triggered that image in my head but I didn’t question it. The question I did have? Who the heck are the Folklords? This kid…in this suit and tie…who doesn’t seem to belong? He’s going to find out.”

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Valiant unleashes ‘Harbinger Wars 2’ on two fronts next May

Each issue will feature two stories for the standard $3.99 price.

Valiant is following up their 2013 Harbinger Wars event series with the aptly named Harbinger Wars 2 — which will actually feature two complete stories in each issue detailing two different “fronts” in the war.

Each 44+ page issue will feature two complete, full-length 22-page stories “chronicling dueling fronts in the nationwide battle that will soon consume the Valiant Universe’s most powerful forces,” according to Valiant. Matt Kindt and Tomás Giorello will chronicle “the head-on collision of the Harbinger Renegades and the newly returned X-O Manowar,” while Eric Heisserer, Raúl Allen and Patricia Martín of Secret Weapons fame “will thrust Livewire and her new team of recruits into the center of a power struggle with the potential to tear America apart.” Each issue will cost $3.99 — so essentially you’re getting two comics for the price of one.

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