Shadow season update.

It’s the most wonderful season of all, as shadows grow longer— here’s what I’ve been up to:

• I’m wrapping up the last batch of these commissioned pieces, having a blast and kinda leveling up along the way. Above is my favorite: a Magik piece with Illyana as ruler of Limbo, reigning over the skulls of vanquished demonic captors, manipulators, and abusers. Three more to finish in this batch. I’ll open up a new round of commissions early next year via Athenaeum Comic Art— you can email Sean (athenaeumcomicart@gmail.com) to snag a spot for a custom piece, or to buy a page from one of my books. (Shoutout to everyone requesting X-Men characters for these pieces!)

• I just finished a variant cover (below) for Jeff Lemire’s fantastic series, Minor Arcana— issue number and release date will be updated once it’s set! Look out for my taking on art duties for an issue or two sometime next year.

• I’m writing and drawing a single-issue story in The Twilight Zone #4, coming early next year from IDW— about to jump into lettering and inking this week. More to share soon! What a thrill to make an official Twilight Zone story—it’s also one of the most challenging creative exercises of my life.

• I just finished an 8-page story with Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Dr. David Easterling for Islands In The Sky, a star-studded comics anthology of collaborations with survivors of Hurricane Helene, as the inaugural release from the Appalachia Comics Project. You can pre-order a copy here.

• About to do the final edits, cover, and packaging for my next graphic novel, Diana, which will be out next fall— I’ll have plenty to share about this book as soon as we officially announce it early in 2026.

I’m sure there’s more, but considering (waves generally at the terror, desperate fascism, and likely social collapse which will leave a huge number of people utterly unprepared, despite a decade’s worth of clear warnings from experts, journalists, activists, and academics), this will do for now. I hope everyone’s maintaining all right, showing up in real space with their neighbors to speak up and look out for each other, and summoning all the courage and perseverence we’ve got.

Love to humanity. Death to fascism.

'DIANA' is finished.

Clocking in at 308 pages, Diana is finished. I started work on this book exactly two years ago, and have spent the last 13 months inking, lettering, and painting the pages full-time, 6-7 days a week. (I also had to completely re-pencil 200 pages of the book as I went, due to a defective batch of Strathmore paper!) These characters are so alive to me, and it’s bittersweet to know that this wraps up the whole saga. Release dates, ordering info, etc. will be available in the coming months.

This will also be my final solo fiction graphic novel for quite a while. A fresh start will take patience and openness for new ideas to brew. My fiction is my lifeblood, but it’s increasingly difficult to make these books in a way that’s even partially sustaining— so if my work is meaningful to you, please buy my books, spread the word about them, and have your local library order copies. Thank you!

Diana is both a stand-alone character-centered novel and a prequel to my 2024 book Fall Through, for which I’ve been nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Lettering. If you’re a comics professional, creator, journalist, or anything else you can likely register to vote in the Eisners here— please consider your vote for me amidst a sea of fantastic books released last year! Voting is open until June 5th. Thank you so much!

Bloomington book fair Nov. 2nd + 'LIES' roundup + work in progress.

If you’re in Bloomington this Saturday, Nov. 2nd, I’ll be selling and signing books from 10-3 at the Bloomington Local Author Book Fair at the Monroe County History Center, just a block from the library.

For some inexplicable reason, there is also a Bloomington Book Festival happening that day via the great folks at Morgenstern’s Books featuring some exciting authors. I have no idea why these events were not coordinated and combined, and have nothing to do with it— I encourage you to attend both! This is not a big town, so please consider them to be part of the same thing on Saturday. It would be ridiculous to do otherwise. See you there!

I’m officially halfway done with the finished pages for Diana, my character-centered prequel to Fall Through— 152 pages done of 304 total in the last six months. I’ve been script-tweaking, lettering, inking, coloring, adding a few pages and re-penciling the first batch of many pages on defective paper as I go.

This book means a lot to me, and feels like a big leap forward as a writer and graphic novelist. It’s also one of the only reassuring things in life right now offering joy, nuance, ambiguity and vulnerability. Diana will also tie my 2018 book Come Again (which debuted the main characters within its pages) firmly together with these books, making these books the Free Space trilogy. When it’s all done, the reading order will be Come Again, then Fall Through, then Diana, and then Fall Through a second time (as Diana will retroactively make Fall Through read as a different book).

In news for my other still-new book Lies My Teacher Told Me, here’s a great writeup in School Library Journal, and the book is also referenced in this CBR piece on the graphic adaptation of A People’s Indigenous History of the United States.