What's Happening - July 2026

Welcome to my monthly newsletter, giving you updates on the things I’ve been lettering, writing and reading this month.

What am I lettering?

I was looking back at some of my previous newsletters and realized that, in almost every newsletter for the past six months, I've talked about how busy I was with lettering. And guess what! Every month for the past six months, that has been true. It was also true for the month of June! I've been so busy with lettering work, I've basically done nothing else. I've been averaging 125ish pages of lettering a month this year. For June, I've clocked in 200 pages. It's a lot! Partly why I didn't send a newsletter last month.

I'm still figuring out how to balance all of the comic lettering I want to do with everything else in my life (another thing I've said in almost every newsletter for about six months) but I'm really proud of all the work I've been doing. I think I've really come into my own as a letterer this year in a way that I'm really proud of, even if it means I've only managed to beat a single boss in Mina the Hollower since it came out.

Looking forward to a slightly less jampacked July as far as lettering goes. Along with my for hire work, this week I'm finally getting Hero of Legend #6 lettered and ready to send out digitally and to print. I've meant to letter pages for this as art came in, but again, just haven't had time! If you backed Chapter 6 on Kickstarter, be on the look out for your digital comics before the end of this week.

Speaking of things on Kickstarter, there's one book in particular this month that I lettered and you need to make sure you check out.

Live on Kickstarter

The Fool of Dorchester (Tales of Medieval Horror 1-3)

I've talked in previous newsletters about the Tales of Medieval Horror that my friend and frequent collaborator Dan Tappan has been writing with artist Christos Pittas. They're all really great! Dan is a fantastic horror writer, and Christos has a style that I can only compare to the amazing Kentaro Muira of Berserk fame. All of the stories are great, but The Fool of Dorchester is probably my favorite of the bunch. It's creepy, funny, and one of my favorite things I've lettered in the past year. And, now you can pay money to get your own copy of it! I really love this series and cannot recommend it more highly. Please take a minute and check it out.

In Prelaunch

• SCUM #1
• Below the Depths

What am I writing?

For the past two years, I've had a pretty set schedule for what books I was bringing to Kickstarter and when.

Every 4ish months I'd crowdfund the new issue of Hero of Legend, then roll right into making the next one. Even though we ended up falling a bit off that schedule for the last two issues (Five months between issues 4 and 5, six between issues 5 and 6) I'm pretty proud of how consistent Niccolò and I were when making this book. Niccolò would wrap up the art on one issue and I'd roll right into do the script for the next. One script and one Kickstarter, every 4 months. Like clockwork!

That's different now. Why? Well, the big thing is that Hero of Legend is finished. I'm doing my final pass on the lettering today and planning to have digital files out to folks this weekend. That means I have to figure out, what comes next? Both SCUM (my cyberpunk heist comic) and Below the Depths (the follow up graphic novel to Into the Deep) will be finished with art sometime in August. And though we're done making it, I still want to put Hero of Legend into a nice collected edition at some point in the near future.

And so I have two things on my mind. First, which of these do I bring to Kickstarter next? Second, how do I make sure I'm continuing to write?

Lets start with the second one first. Part of the reason I'm thinking about this at all is: I haven't written anything but this newsletter since January, when I finished the last script for Hero of Legend. That's the longest I've gone without making a new, complete script since we started work on the first chapter of Hero of Legend. And it feels weird! I don't want to go that long without writing something again. I know that SCUM #2 is going to be the next thing I need to write. After that, I'll get started on the final Irulian Chronicles graphic novella, to finish up the story that started with Into the Deep. But even giving myself way more time than I should need, those together shouldn't take me past the end of this year. SCUM is the next series I'm working on, but it's 48-pages and full color for each issue, so production on that book just takes longer than Hero of Legend. Rounding up, it's closer to a year for each issue than a few months. But I don't want to take a full year between each script I write.

So after I write SCUM #2 and Irulian Chronicles book 3, what am I going to write next?

I don't have an answer to that quite yet. I have a couple of ideas, but nothing set in stone. What I do have is an answer to what is coming next on Kickstarter. Here's the current plan for the next year or so.

• SCUM #1 - September 2026
• Below the Depths - January/February 2027
• Hero of Legend: Collected Edition - June 2027

And after that? Well, who knows what the world will look like by fall of 2027.

What am I reading?

Saga

I'm not sure it's possible to say anything new about Saga. I read the series in the nice hardcover collections that pull together three regular sized trades, and the 4th of those has finally come out after 7 years. Since I only read the book in the hardcover collections, for me the series is only just now coming back from hiatus. And, hey, it's still really good!

Fiona Staples art is, always, amazing. Like I said, i don't know that I have anything new to say here, but the variety of aliens and worlds she draws and creates for this series are probably the main draw of the series, and for good reason!

But the thing I always come back to with Saga is how well Brian K. Vaughn is able to write for the different formats that the book is released in. The hardcover collections give you an easy way to see this. Each issue is a satisfying story, each trade collection of 6 issues tells a satisfying story, and each 18 issue hardcover tells a satisfying story as well. Beginning, middle, end. It's just that the magnitude of each of those peices changes. How much set up needs to happen at the beginning of an issue vs the beginning of a trade paperback? Or how big of an ending do you need for a regular issue vs a deluxe hardcover? It's a master class in how you serialize a story without it feeling like you're writing for onr format in particular.

Who knows if I'll ever get to write something serialized like this, but if I do, I can only pray that it holds up this well.

Anything else?

Not this month. Bye!