My new comic book series is dropping June 8 and a five page preview of the first issue is online at Screenrant.
Here’s what I told them: Justice Warriors is taking the American obsession with police dramas, splicing it with the violent satire of Paul Verhoeven, and extruding it through MTV’s Liquid Television and the mutants and cyborgs of comic book culture. Justice Warriors is processing our deranged world the only way we know how: by creating a wholly new comic universe out of the pop culture and societal problems that have piled up over the decades.
We’ve got cops, mutants, and mutant cops. Go read the preview. Then call your local comic book shop and tell them you’d like to pre-order Justice Warriors from Ahoy comics.
Read the full preview here.
New Drawing
Longtime readers will no doubt recognize an affinity for Judge Dredd that I snuck into my work occasionally over the years. Its influence is clearly evident in Justice Warriors too. This is the first drawing I did after quitting political cartoons and it’s also the first drawing for pleasure and the first where I used ink brushes in many years.
This character was a one-off mutant wearing a Judge helmet in a random Dredd story drawn by Kevin O’Neill. But I loved the design and wanted to reproduce it to stretch my legs again on a real page with a real brush.
Go Back: Head First
Longtime political cartoonist Tim Eagan has a Kickstarter out for his first graphic novel. I gave a blurb for this one: “Head First’s mind-bending thoughtscapes and dazzling layouts put Tim Eagan’s beautifully bizarre brain is on full display.”
Eagan was doing a weekly political cartoon called “Deep Cover” that I become aware of during my early foray into what we then called “alt-weekly cartoons” in the early 2000s and I met him a few times at annual gatherings for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. I’m not sure how long his strip was running, but he hung things up in 2009 owing to, I would imagine, the dismal state of the industry and a form of actual retirement. Eagan is now 78 and Head First is his very first graphic novel. Honestly it looks like the best work he’s every done, as it builds off a strip he started in the 80s called “Subconscious Mind” — the surreal dream-like imagery is obviously where he thrives.
I find what he’s doing inspiring. I could only hope that at 78 I’ll be churning out some of my best pages and checking boxes off my bucket list. Maybe I will get to all the projects I have planned in due time.
