I am pleased to announce that the long wait for my next graphic novel is over. The Walk was released today. It was an ordeal to get to this date. I’m happy it’s here.
I started communicating with Harry Markos at the end of 2005. I had finished my first graphic novel and he wanted to publish it. I was 28 years old. This was a great step in the right direction for my career in comics. But the sole distributor for comics in the United States changed their order minimum. Right when we were in the middle of soliciting orders from the direct market. That killed my opportunity to get my book into stores. Done. Kaput.
But Harry and I kept talking. He gave me my first pro-lettering gigs. And I did some design work here and there for Markosia. It was a bummer my book didn’t work out, but that happens all the time in comics. Fast forward to 2012. I was in my senior year at CCS working on my thesis, and Harry emailed me about that first graphic novel. Market conditions had changed and would be more favorable to me as a creator now. But I had also changed. I wasn’t very interested in doing much with that book at 35 years old. I’d started Golden Boy when I was 23 and had learned so much about comics, about life, by then. But I told him I had a little graphic novel that I wanted to expand upon.
See I had done a short story for a CCS project about a lonely astronaut. I’d been thinking about expanding it from 12 pages to 48 and making it look like a 1950s EC Comic.
Sequence from the original version of THE WALK.
We agreed on the details and I got to work in the August of 2013. Then nine years passed. I became a creative director in October 2013, which took a lot of my time. I had open heart surgery in 2015, which, yeah that takes it out of you. And while every heart patient deals with depression, mine was particularly dark. And painful. I was dealing with a lot of doubt and angst about everything. My life, my art, what I was doing.
Having my son saved me. In the fall of 2022, mere months before his birth, I completed coloring and lettering the book. I had to get it done before he was born. He pushed me over the finish line. I didn’t want him to grow up and find out I didn’t complete this.
Sequence from the new version of THE WALK. 2023.
I sheepishly sent Harry an email letting him know that I was finally done. He never said a word about the time gap, and he was excited to see what I’d done. And now here we are.
The Walk is a dark book. It’s about stubborn resolve. About how maybe you should let go of some of your dreams, or they may kill you. About how what you want can become toxic and poison you along with it. But it’s also about wonder.
I’m looking forward to my next work, which is going to be more light-hearted despite being set in Hell. Let me know what you think of The Walk. You can buy it in print/digital comic/eBook at a variety of retailers. Thank you for reading. I appreciate you all.
