joekeatinge:Image Comics and Comixology are simultaneously...

joekeatinge:

Image Comics and Comixology are simultaneously offering digital sales (so, no physical objects, just stuff you read on a screen) on my Image Comics-published work.

Here’s a brief rundown:

Hell Yeah: This was my first ever attempt at doing an ongoing series and boy, oh boy does it show. I had a lot of basics to learn – and didn’t until it was over – and for years I had such a hard time looking at the series. That said, as time goes by I appreciate it for what it is. It’s basically my high school garage band demo tapes or Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner if it wasn’t written by Thomas Pynchon and was an attempt at doing a modern ‘90s Image Comic so basically not like Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner at all. It’s a rough read with a lot more flailing around than storytelling, but it sure throws out a ton of ideas even if the skilled delivery of said ideas wasn’t there. Whenever it gets reprinted, I hope we can recontextualize it in this way, more of a document of two guys trying to figure out the craft on the page. Criticisms aside, I have a lot of affinity for it, even though it can be a rough read. Andre Szymanowicz, the artist/co-creator, is a stellar human being and I enjoy his work; I miss working with him and hope to do so again.

Glory: Writing Hell Yeah caught Rob Liefeld and Eric Stephenson’s eye, so they offered me to pitch on Glory. I had a pitch which was entirely out there and probably wouldn’t have worked unless the perfect, like-minded collaborator was found. Sophie Campbell was perfect in every way. Sure, we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but looking back there was a harmony here which led to some of our best work at the time. All this is me saying if you like a giant warrior punching heads off a bunch of monsters, followed by Ernest Hemingway guest appearances drawn by Roman Muradov, you will LOVE Glory. The book helped launch/relaunch our respective careers and I owe it all to having the perfect partner on the series.

Shutter: After Hell Yeah being what it was, Glory was an attempt to do a maxi-series and felt like it was time to try a larger scale ongoing again, and as of July 2017, we’ll have seen the entire way through. The first couple of issues are rough on my end. I had just come off a stint doing work-for-hire and while those experiences were mostly positive and I was able to work with some great people, I had a hankering to go back to doing something which was entirely under the control of my collaborators and myself. It’s the most autobiographical work I’ve done to date, which is saying something for a book which has lions in pinstriped suits brandishing Liefeld-guns. I started this book single, worried about the future in a tiny apartment I couldn’t stand and will end it a married man, excited about what’s to come in a house I love more than any other. In a sense, that’s what the book is about.

I’m grateful to have been able to work with Leila, Owen, John and Ed on this - Shutter wouldn’t have seen its entire run without them. 

Ringside: My primary career goal is to tell all sorts of different stories over all kinds of different genres (and, “not genres”) with all sorts of different collaborators from the world over. Ringside’s the first thing to be entirely distinct from the previous work in terms of approach and style, with a collaborator (Nick Barber) from an entirely different place (New Zealand) than any of my previous collaborators.

If you hate pro wrestling, you’ll probably love this book. If you like pro wrestling, I hope you like this book. Frankly, all things in retrospect, I wish it wasn’t so heavily promoted as a wrestling book because that seemed to eclipse nearly every single other aspect of the series. People also get weird about “wrestling books” – we had our fair share of people come out and say, “but I do a wrestling book!” or “but I wanted to do a wrestling book!” and we were befuddled because A) if wrestling’s the only unique aspect of our books, we’re both doing it wrong. “Wrestling book” is barely an idea, definitely not a concept and B) we have 87,000 different books with ladies and gentlemen punching each other out in brightly colored suits as it is. My hope is comics will eventually diversify genre and setting and creator so much that without a predominant genre/creator race/gender/etc. everything is viewed as possible. I’d love to read a dozen Rugby comics.

Anyway, so those are some thoughts on some comics I wrote. You can purchase, read them at significant discounts until May 8th. I hope you enjoy them.