I’ve always loved comics. My father would come home from his job with a surprise stack of comics sometimes. I would vibrate with anticipation on which one I would read first. They were cooler than most movies. They were light years better than any television show. And since I started reading them in the early 80s as a kid, video games weren’t even on my radar yet outside of the arcade.
I didn’t expect to somehow fall deeper in love with comics as an adolescent. I had discovered there was a comic book shop a mere 10 minute walk from my house. It contained so many comics I had never heard of before. Including a ton of independent black and white comics. The most notable one being Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
As I got into high school, I found other friends who had aspirations at creating comics. We started to think about publishing our own black and white comic. It was so cheap to do back then! We all had this dream of… not getting rich. That wasn’t it. It was the simple act of publishing a book. That we could do it. There were no gatekeepers. That was the dream.
Then the comic industry went through the speculator bust. It became impossible for distributors to take a chance on an unknown book. Not that it mattered because most of the direct market comic stores went out of business anyway. Little did we know that the World Wide Web was around the corner. The dream of publishing your own work was going to still be there for us. But I have always regretted not attempting to get a black and white book published. I loved them. The paper had a different smell to them. They were covered in halftones. They all felt like individual expressions of the artists who made them. Unlike the mass produced, team assembled Marvel and DC comics.
I watched this YouTube video recently (I recommend his whole channel). The feelings came flooding back.
I’ve been thinking about doing a small run of See You In Hell issues as I complete them. There is a printer here that can do it. A small run for my fans. And I want the issues to be in black and white. If you follow me on Instagram, I share process videos of my pages as they are created. And if you watch close, there’s a second between when I finish the inks and before I color it that I lay down halftones. Because I’ve been thinking about doing this for awhile. I love the idea of doing black and white single issue comics that I can sell direct to my fans. I’ll be doing ebooks for sure. But printing a black and white comic in the year 2024 makes my heart flutter with nostalgia. It gives me butterflies in my stomach thinking about it.
Anyway, watch that video if you want a taste of the excitement in the air that we felt as comic creators. It was infectious. And I want it. I want it bad.
