Substack Comics Update for the Second Time This Week
Sound the Alarms! Jeff Lemire’s on here!
Ahem. Pardon the frequency of these newsletters popping up in your inboxes, but please don’t unsubscribe! I promise I’m figuring it out and I’ll ease up!
Chalk it up to an abundance of gratitude for the small but lovely group of subscribers to the Comics Syllabus Substack so far. I’m thankful and probably a little overeager.
But I had to update because on Thursday I wrote with a tinge of disappointment that so far my massive Substack comics investment had yielded nice newsletters and almost no new comics.
The virtual millisecond that post flew out of my iPad into the world (or somewhere around there), Chip Zdarsky dropped his first dose of PUBLIC DOMAIN for subscribers only. I’m not sure about the legalities or ethics of re-posting any images as a sort-of “reviewer” for these Substack comics, but I’ll venture gently and beg the mercies of Zdarsky and legal team to share this tiny screencap of a fraction of the first panel.
The three pages we got of this first bit of “PUBLIC DOMAIN” are filled with Zdarsky’s characteristic wit and also that social relevance and soulfulness that can surprise you if you shortchange Zdarsky. It’s interesting to see Zdarsky’s art style, so familiar from “Sex Criminals” with Matt Fraction writing, applied to his own story. Confirms how both of those creators can lead with sidesplitting or wry humor, yet still maintain (or manage to mask?) such moving resonance with human insecurities and even a melancholic yearning. (And this is the second paragraph in a row where I’ve used the word “fraction!”)
Check out “PUBLIC DOMAIN” on zdarsky.substack.com if you’re able to subscribe. Or stay tuned here and I’ll keep tabs on how it’s landing for me. So far, in three brief pages, we’ve met a divorcee enduring the subway commute to the burbs where he seems to be living with mom, while the city is tattooed with huge ad posters for what looks like an upcoming superhero movie, “Eminent Domain,” about how “Some secrets were meant to be exposed. Some exposures were meant to be secret.”
I’m intrigued, Chip Zdarsky.
The PANELS app for Substack comics
Around the very same time, Substack announced, and its various comics proprietors echoed, a deal with the app Panels that will allow for an app-based reading experience for Substack comics. This begins to answer the question, “how is a newsletter platform going to serve up comics in a readable way, besides dumping drips and drops into our already-cluttered inboxes?”
I’ve used the Panels app before, but for my digital comics reading, when I’m reading PDF or CBZ files from publisher review copies or Humble Bundles, I rely mostly on the Chunky app on my iPad these days. On my Android tablet, I’ve come to appreciate the flexibility and features on Android’s cDisplay app. (As you can tell, I’ve played around with a number of comics reading apps, testing them out on shamefully huge numbers of GBs of digital comics. And paying for the premium versions of each).
I don’t love that Panels’ premium is a subscription rather than a single fee, but I’m keeping fingers crossed that the Substack deal means robust updating and support. Hopefully avoiding the lagging download and bugginess issues the Comixology app often suffers, although Amazon looks to be trying to mend those by absorbing Comixology altogether into the Amazon Kindlesphere. We’ll see. (Don’t even get me started on the Marvel Unlimited and DCU Infinite apps.)
Nonetheless, Panels looks promising, and will hopefully feel intuitive for accessing, organizing, and experiencing these very piecemeal Substack comics we’re going to get. I’ll talk about some of the basic functions of the app in an upcoming post, and how it currently compares to others I use. But no doubt, the very minute I drop that post, Panels and Substack will release an update that makes my whole review obsolete 😆.
And then, of course, the new news is that Jeff Lemire is on Substack! Or rather, he has been for a little bit, but now I have the opportunity to continue “investing in” and supporting a creator I’ve appreciated with funds that don’t enrich corporate comics pockets and leave rights and control in the hands of those creatives. Lemire’s subscription is $75 a year or $7 a month, so he’s priced himself on the higher end.
“Tales from the Farm” (the nod to “Essex County,” of course) promises to share tons of artwork, stories, and artistic autobiography from Lemire himself, digging into his comics journey beginning in the 90s.
And very soon, we can expect “Fishflies” from Lemire at five pages a week. Cover image below. Lemire says it’s “a culmination of everything I’ve done in comics,” over 500+ pages, and already has 120 pages drawn with the whole story plotted out. (The productivity of this man is amazing.)
It’s “…a culmination...” so I’m going to venture a wild guess and say there’s something in there about longing for a parental figure.
Finally, a few other updates:
Saladin Ahmed’s “Copper Bottle” Substack has had some action lately, with updates on TERRORWAR coming soon with collaborator Dave Acosta.
The “3 Worlds / 3 Moons” outfit held their huge interview event with Grant Morrison, with questions and engagement from their huge throngs of subscribers. I was unable to “attend” live due to My Busy Life, and there doesn’t seem to be a recording announced. The chatter in the comments has tons of praise for Hickman and Morrison as thoughtful conversationalists, but also tons of complaints about the sound quality and stream accessibility for this much-hyped event. Morrison is one of my favorite people to listen to in comics, but they also tend to mumble (it’s not the accent!) in fittingly mysterious ways that make me lean in… but I imagine if the audio pickup was poor, the experience could have been pretty disappointing and anti-climatic.
And I just want to give a nod again to Kelly Thompson’s Substack, which is so far free only, and where she takes a post just to amplify Sophie Campbell’s new Substack venture, which I’m already aboard for. But it’s just another example of why I really enjoy Thompson’s newsletter. Look, at some point I’m going to have to draw the line on these subscriptions, and just let the creators I have less attachment to be a “free signup” from me until proven otherwise. But Kelly Thompson, if you went to a subscriber tier, I wouldn’t be able to resist. Heck, I’ll just demand a refund from that Scott Snyder guy if I have to and re-direct it to you. (Just kidding. I don’t think Scott Snyder is giving me a refund.)
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(And subscribers, please go wild in the comments. Or tame.)