The Scent of May Rain

My latest graphic novella, The Scent of May Rain. It’s the story of Esther, a Jewish golem woman created in 1920, who over the course of 100 years becomes a mother, a fighter, an icon– and maybe even her own person?

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The creative team made this an incredibly exciting book to work on because everyone added something superlative at every step of the way.

  • Story by myself & Rae Epstein
  • Script by myself
  • Art by Kaylee Rowena
  • Letters by Cardinal Rae
  • Design by Jodie Troutman

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You can purchase it now at my store: weekendwarriorcomics.com!

Weekend Warrior: The Webcomic

I have a webcomic now! Co-created with artist Anne Marcano and lettered by Danny Djeljosevic, it’s about an office drone working a day job so that they can afford traveling to an alien world where they get to be a superhero one weekend at a time!

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Read the first chapter here!

Transitional, but in a good way.

I’ve got a good feeling about this.

All of this.

Maybe it’s the high of being at different but equally exciting stages of four comics projects or the thrill of attending a couple cool shows for the first time, but I’m feeling really good about my place in comics.

I’m starting to receive this sense of validation in my interactions with people in different areas of this comics industry. To have someone say “c’mon and show me what you got” when you talk about the book you’ve been working on is a real thrill. To have editors treat you like that after weathering the extreme doubt of self-publishing feels good. And it’s also really cool to know that I’ll be a guest in some professional capacity on a comics podcast I’ve been a fan of for years.

Things are happening. There’s no promise that they’re going to lead to anything, but they don’t have to. The fact that the opportunities are being presented really feels like enough. It signals a shift from “trying to do this” to “doing this.”

I’m gonna do my best to be present and enjoy this sensation.

The Year in Review

To say that this year was neither what I hoped for nor what I expected would be underselling it. I think a lot of us have felt like that this year. Maybe more people feel like this every year, and I just didn’t notice until I felt it myself.

I started this year with one goal: to put out one comic every three months. I didn’t reach that goal. My releases were Sail in January (with the print edition landing in March) and A Prayer to God in November. Sail doesn’t really count as a victory for me in 2017 seeing as how I spent so much of 2016 working on it with Jean Pe. I got to acknowledge the victory in January when we received a positive write-up on Comics Alliance (RIP), but that doesn’t really come from any actions that I undertook this year. It was a great experience getting that book out there, though, and getting to see reactions to it has been a highlight of this year for me as a creator.

A Prayer to God was supposed to have come out differently. Marta Selusi and I did that for this one anthology, and it was almost immediately accepted into it. That felt pretty good. Then the organizer asked us to increase the size of our lettering by a certain degree multiple times, and, after we went back multiple times to change it for him, our short was unceremoniously dropped from the book without any notification. That kind of… sucked. It would’ve been my first time taking part in a comics anthology. There’s a lot of importance placed on anthologies as a place to get your work out there for people to see, and I was just hoping to have more people read my work.

That’s the story about what I’ve put out this year that you can read, but it’s not the grand sum of my work.

A lot of this year has been spent on pitches. I put one together with Joe Hunter that we both liked working on, and we were working kind of quickly to get it together for presentation to a publisher I had been alerted to. There was this Chicago-based traditional book publisher looking to maybe get into comics, and a friend put me in contact with the editor who was taking lead on that. Based on the strength of Sail (thanks, Jean), he agreed to take a look at a pitch for an original graphic novel. So Joe and I spent a couple months working on Scoundrels, a middle-grade, medieval fantasy comic about a heist. It ultimately didn’t go anywhere at that publisher with the cited reason being that I simply didn’t have much of a portfolio for them to appraise. That stung a bit, but it was a fair and honest answer. Pitching that book was a great experience.

I learned more from that pitch, too, when I had it appraised by a pretty rad comics editor. She was kind, but more or less tore the pitch to shreds. And when I looked at the shreds? Yeah, I saw exactly what she was saying about it lacking a hook, ignoring interesting plot threads, etc. Some of it was stuff I had answers for, but it wasn’t in the pitch so my answers were worthless. I’m absolutely going to be referring to her notes the next time I assemble a pitch.

That next pitch should be coming soon. Ten Van Winkle and I are working on something that feels really special these past few months. I’ll be sure to get plenty of other eyes on our pitch material before we officially send it off to anyone because I want to be sure that I do right by this great thing that we have together. If it doesn’t come to life then it’ll be because I didn’t know how to put our best foot forward. That should be ready around mid-February with an eye towards getting eyes on it in March.

There’s also something near and dear to me that I can’t really talk about yet, but I can say that the plan is to serialize it online. We’ll see if that one develops, though. It’s been a bumpy road.

Sometime next year (I don’t know when), I’ll have another mini comic coming out that’s kind of a thematic sequel to what I was doing with Sail. That one is going to be with Emmett Helen, someone I am super glad to have met earlier this year. I’m tentatively planning on tabling the Denver Independent Comics & Art Expo in April, so I hope it’ll be done by then so that I can have three books available the first time I’m behind the table at a show. I’m excited about it. Emmett’s thumbnails were really strong, so I know the storytelling is going to sing.

The plan for next year is to worry a little less about plans. Ten and I are gonna have a book to pitch(!), and Emmett and I are gonna have a real cool mini. That’s all that’s set in stone on the creative side of things while I look for some people to collaborate with on some new book ideas I’ve been batting around. Pie in the sky, I’m hoping to maybe work with Sally Cantirino again on something that we’ve talked about previously at length. As for shows, I’m planning to attend Emerald City Comic Con in March with an eye towards talking to editors about the book with Ten, I’ll be tabling at DiNK, and I’ll be attending San Diego Comic Con. There might be other shows later in the year, but those are the only ones I’ve planned on.

I look forward to having more work to show y’all next year.

New comic alert!

I’ve spent most of this year working on pitches, so I haven’t released as many new comics as I’d like to. However, I’m happy to present to you my latest available work as a comics writer.

Marta Selusi and I co-created A Prayer to God, a short comic about a mortally-wounded barbarian who meets his maker, and she has serialized it on her Deviant Art account. Check it out here.

a prayer to god

You can purchase SAIL today!

At long last, our book is finally available for sale on Gumroad! Buy Sail!

James Leask wrote up a lovely blurb for it in Comics Alliance’s Best Comic Books Ever (This Week) feature:

As a child, your home can seem suffocating and the world outside the front door can be enticing. After all, all you have to do is step outside. Sail withholds the specifics of why Carrie leaves home and takes to the sea and is the wiser for it, instead focusing its short length on what she sees on the ocean. Her encounter with Kahley the mermaid, beautifully illustrated by Jean Pe, changes her perspective about her own home, and sets up the thoughtful finale. Stack and Pe use the 10 pages of Sail with a skill and economy that knows exactly when to pause and take in a quiet or powerful moment. I look forward to seeing what they do next, but in the meantime, I’m glad to have Sail.

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SAIL is available January 18th!

You can now pre-order my new comic with Jean Pe on Gumroad! It’ll be available January 18th since that will be my birthday. It’s about a young girl who sets sail from the only home she’s ever known in search of a place to call her own.

Buy my product

This comic is intended for readers of all-ages who have ever felt the need to find themselves in the middle of nowhere. 10 pages + process material. Full color.

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Hey, here’s the fan-comic I did with Jean Pe:

You can find Jean’s work here where I highly recommend you hire her because she did ALL the artwork you’re looking at.

We do not own any of these characters and are not seeking to profit off of this work. Our goal is to celebrate Aquaman during the year of the character’s 75th anniversary. All characters are owned by DC Comics. Aquaman was created by Paul Norris and The Demon was created by Jack Kirby.

Here’s a dropbox link for an easier read.

5. Finished Page 15. Finished Page 25. Finished Page 35. Finished Page 4

We hope you liked this!

And you might expect to see this reposted here in the future with new letters from someone I have wanted to work with professionally for a long time.