It’s been a long time coming and it’s three years late, but we finally did it. We’ve finished our first comic book since the start of the pandemic. The latest issue of The City and it will be available to sell at the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival (VanCAF) on May 20th and 21st. If you’re going to be there, I hope you’ll visit our table and say hello. If not, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering a copy or sharing it with a friend that might like it.
We’re pretty proud of this one. Like the previous books in the series, it’s a short anthology of three stories set in an absurdist pastiche of interwar Europe. This issue features the King struggling to assert his authority (which you can read a sample of here on the site), Cassegrain Sanglot, Melancholic Detective, and miserablist artists Hans Tüber and Delling. It’s our most ambitious issue yet, slightly longer than any of the previous books, and the most thematically coherent book that we’ve made. As you can see above, Melanie did an amazing job as usual illustrating Cassegrain Sanglot, really capturing the look of a classic serial comic.
This project often feels like an eccentric way to spend our time, and Hans Tüber, the artist as pretentious derelict, feels like the most autobiographical character in the series. Ultimately, I think of it as an elaborate way to process my interests in history and literature and the strange things one can find reading old newspapers, to express my appreciation for the work of others, and to exploit the outsized talents of my wife in a shared activity.
I know that there is a precious little audience for these books, but we hear very little from them unless we see you face-to-face at conventions (as mentioned, an occasion that Fate has denied us since 2019). So if you’ve read any of these, we’d love to hear from you. And if you haven’t read one yet, but you think there might be a place in your heart for a mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Proust or a monarchical homage to Yes, Prime Minister, then I hope you’ll give our little book a try.