Transgressions, Atonement, and Un-forgiveness
TL;DR: The Unforgiven #13, #13.5, and Volume 3: From Embers Rise will be out later this year! I have Unforgiven flame logo patches and glow-in-the-dark enamel pins that will be available at events (assuming any happen this year), and in the store on this very website soon! I’m also doing pencils and inks on a 4-issue limited series from Red 5 Comics called The Atonement Bell, also out later this year!
Things take the time they take.
I’ve never been good about living in the present. I’m always living in anticipation of the next thing I have to do, or get through, or survive—or, y’know, sometimes, there are things to look forward to as well. But we’ve been stuck in a pandemic for going on two whole years now, blasted by an insane level of exploitation and inequality and totally abandoned by The State to die for The Economy, separated from our friends and loved ones and things to look forward to, watching a habitable planet and everything that has to live on it succumb totally and finally to greed, with no end to any of this shit in sight, and I’m just a little, just a tiny bit, at my wit’s end and at the limit of my tolerance for…so much about the way this cruel societal grease trap is structured.
WHEW.
Look, I’m never been one to make polished, positive, bullshit-shellacked promotional posts, and I’m certainly not going to start now. That’s not me, has never been, will never be. If you see that malodorous bilge start wafting your way from my direction, you know I’ve been replaced by a robot, or an alien, or a robot alien. May not be roses and sunshine, but it’s honest. Anyone who doesn’t have the inclination to be honest or genuine with you doesn’t respect you. Usually it’s because they’re trying to sell you something, which makes sense—because capitalism doesn’t respect anyone. It only respects money.
Pretty tough to make a living when you realize that and you refuse to play that game and you aren’t quiet about it! In fact, quite a few people have been killed for—
Anyway. The pandemic. The chief pervasive raison d'etre for the rain on everyone’s collective parade. You’re tired of hearing about it. Tired of talking about it. Tired of living it. But here we still are, stuck in it , time becoming increasingly meaningless (it’s 2022? Fuck!) while remaining still the most precious resource any of us has, next to our health—and this thing is still robbing or threatening to rob us all of both. I’m very much given to being reclusive already, but I want to choose when to be reclusive, and I don’t want the things (and people) I love out there in the world to be potential threats. This hasn’t made being a homebody easier—it’s just made literally everything suck more, and be harder than it has to be—and things were already unnecessarily hard.
There were some months there in early 2020 where I got almost no comic work done, trying to wrap my head around and adjust to the new paradigm, and mourn the loss of the good parts of the old one. We’re all just expected to keep being productive, as productive as ever, to not miss a beat while a massive human crisis unfolds that our societal structure isn’t equipped to handle—because capitalism demands infinite, unlimited growth, through infinite, unlimited productivity, and humans have limits.
Then there was the excessive doomscrolling, of course. Swiping your fingers on that little box, trying to find some ounce of hope, some sign that all this garbage is on its way to the curb and we can at least get back to enjoying some of the things to look forward to while the planet burns up.
“Oh you won’t find answers in that dirty mirror/but don’t look up baby, it’s a wreck out here/Only one solution for the mess we’ve made/is a revolution, but it’s coming too late.”
I used to love the internet, when it was fun, when it was discovery—when it was more than a giant advertisement, and “content,” and algorithms designed to breed dissatisfaction and put people at each others’ throats on toxic waste dumps like Facebook. The Wild West Internet, before it got consolidated and monetized…y’know, ruined by capitalism.
As such, I hate being tethered to a screen. It was fun while it lasted, but I grew up in the woods, and my wild heart will always belong there. My parents didn’t get the internet until 2005. I don’t want to be reachable 24/7, I don’t want my relationships to exist primarily in a digital context, and I don’t want to pollute my already pessimistic brain with doomscrolling—which makes it pretty difficult to stay connected to your loved ones (or anyone, for that matter) when you can’t see people face-to-face, like, say, during a pandemic!
Which means I’ve been putting off updating everyone on what I’m up to in a professional context for quite some time now, given my already well-established disdain for the social media game, and now my efforts to exist offline almost entirely—which is probably not great when you’re creating stuff you want to share with other people you can’t see face-to-face, like, say, during a pandemic!
So I apologize. Not for taking care of myself, but for, I guess, potentially giving the impression that I don’t care enough about what I make or the people who enjoy it to keep y’all in the loop. I promise that’s not at all the case—it’s…well, you just read a bunch of paragraphs telling you what it is, if you’ve read this far. I care about the work I make to almost the point of detriment, and I am perpetually indescribably grateful for all the people who read and enjoy it. I make this for me, and I make it for you, and if either of us were missing from that equation, there wouldn’t be much point, would there?
All that preamble out of the way, here’s what I’m up to:
I’m putting in 70-hour weeks these days, so, mostly what I’m up to is being exhausted.
Since November 2021, two days of my week go toward The Unforgiven, three days are dedicated to The Atonement Bell, and two are consigned to my day job that pays the bills. 20|30|20, seven ten-hour days. I do miss having a day off on Saturdays, and it’s probably not great to push myself so hard, but things take the time they take—and The Unforgiven Volume 3 has been delayed far too long enough as it is. It’s coming out this year, no matter what. Which means #13 and #13.5 have to come out this year as well, since they’re included in Volume 3 (Issues 9-13.5); but, fortunately, I made sure most of the work for those was finished before I started work on The Atonement Bell. So as it stands, The Unforgiven #13 is mostly finished, and I’m aiming for a release around Free Comic Book Day in May (pandemic events pending, of course). #13.5 is just ten pages, with the storyboards all ready to go—so that half-issue will be out shortly thereafter, and then Volume 3 will be out in Q4!
Okay, but what’s The Atonement Bell? Tabling for Free Comic Book Day last year, I met writer Jim Ousley [Butcher Queen], and we hit it off—so when the artist for his four-issue story The Atonement Bell unexpectedly parted ways with the project, he asked me if I’d be up for coming on board for pencils and inks. I’ve never produced a collaborative comic work before, nor one with deadlines, nor one with an actual publisher attached (vs. my decade of self-published work)—so I signed on for my first opportunity to see what making less-indie comics is like! It’s a great story about a St. Louis family who gets tangled up in a conflict between a local witch coven and The Catholic Church. Check out some of the pencils:
The Atonement Bell Pages 4-5. The moon was, in fact, a Waxing Gibbous on December 24th, 1822.
After I get these pages all penciled and inked, Ben Sawyer [Butcher Queen] is doing the colors, and Ed Dukeshire [Fist of Justice] is on letters. Jason Green [Butcher Queen] is rounding out the cast as editor, and Red 5 Comics will have the whole package printed up and in stores later this year. I’m excited to see what it all looks like when it’s put together, and I hope you will be too—keep an eye on Jim’s socials for all the details!
As for me, I need to get back to the drawing board. But before I go, I want to show off the Unforgiven patches and glow-in-the-dark logo pins. I’ve been wanting to make these for a looooong time, and just now finally got around to it. I’m so happy with how they turned out! They’ll be in the shop soon—hopefully with more rapidity than this update.
Stay safe and stay sane, and see you soon (I hope)!
