Today’s an odd one. My cat is not doing well, and I’m stressed about a lot of different things both large and small. I am, however, still making progress—the agent who offered feedback on my query liked my rewritten draft, I’ve had a very helpful conversation with my friend Lucy Bellwood about making comics, and I’ve been reading Molly Ostertag’s substack series on making graphic novels. With those last two details, I can confirm that…

…the comic project that I mentioned last fall—immediately after the election—is still chugging along.

I have outlines for the first five issues of The Unshakeable Ironsides, a modern day superhero comic about a Civil War soldier cursed to never find rest so long as one proud Confederate draws breath. Given what I’ve been told about the economics of comic publishing, we might not actually make the floppy single issues that dominate the structure I’ve been outlining. Despite that, I still like the narrative and dramatic constraints of thinking and planning in discrete comic issues. Even if we only ever produce larger trades, collecting multiple issues at once, the issue-by-issue structure encourages me to think about how exposition or action is delivered, and how it’s broken up both inside an issue and across multiple issues.

I’m still not sure how I want to script the comic when I go into more detail than the current outline. I think it will be most productive to wait to decide how to script the comic until I have an artist to work with—I want any artist we work with to have input on how the scripting process works. They’re the person who will be trying to convert my words and formatting into visual art, after all. Plus, given the huge variety of ways people have found to script comics, I’ll need to find something that works for me and Brandon (my friend who created Ironsides), as well as for the artist.

This all means that we are approaching the “make a pitch document” stage. Once we have the basics of that handled, with all the text hammered out, we’ll need to hire an artist to help us finish the pitch document with character designs and several finished pages. That, of course, means doing a good deal more research about who’s making art that feels right for the project these days. It also means reaching out to a bunch of different artists, which will include networking through my various comic-making friends to see if they know anyone with the right art style who’s excited about the comic’s underlying concept.

There’s still a lot to do. But it feels good to be working on something that offers such topical commentary on the present political moment. I have no idea when (or whether) this comic will ever see the light of day, but I’m eager to see it out there in the world and I hope that we can find other people who are just as eager to read it.

I’ll let you know how it goes.