It’s August and as of yesterday I am rid of all the packages from my own Kickstarter, which means the website no longer seems to carry malevolent, threatening energy. So let’s take a look a this month’s bounty!
HEY, AMATEUR!
Shelly Bond
Black Crown (IDW)
Ends August 31
HEY, AMATEUR! started out as a series of single page comics at the end of the Black Crown Quarterly anthologies, and is now evolving into its very own hardcover book! This collected edition includes comics from the quarterly magazines, as well as a ton of brand-new single-page how-tos (hyphens) by creators like Kelly Sue DeConnick, Liz Prince, and Gail Simone. Buy this book, and you too can have incredibly limited knowledge about: surviving bear attacks, contour drawing, doing ollies on skateboards, lucid dreaming, spotting galaxies, and more!
ELEMENTS: Earth
Taneka Stotts
Ascend Comics
Ends September 9
ELEMENTS is an incredibly inspiring all-ages, LGBTQ+-friendly, POC-created anthology series, edited by Taneka Stotts. The first installation, ELEMENTS: Fire, won an Eisner and an Ignatz and instilled me with a deep, abiding excitement about the power of spot color in comic anthologies (listen, I work in production, this is what I care about). And it deserved every accolade it got—Fire was easily my favorite anthology of its year, and I’ve been waiting for Earth with bated breath ever since. Back this book!!! Buy it for your teacher friends! What are you waiting for!
Help Wanted Volume One
Payton Francis
Ends September 14
Anne Black, the main character of Help Wanted, gets to live one of my weirder post-college fantasies: moving away from all of my responsibilities and doing maintenance on a cool old building. In this case, though, the building is an apartment building, and the tenants are all, like, werewolves and vampires and junk. So that’s different? Help Wanted Volume One is a collection of the first six chapters of the ongoing webcomic, coming in at about 190 full-color pages including a bonus chapter and some extras!
Modern Mythology: The Hero’s Journey
Caleb Palmquist
Enkidu Studio
Ends September 19
Maybe it’s just that I’ve been systematically churning my way through all the existing Rick Riordan Presents novels this year, but I’m deeply pumped about a new anthology full of modern, slightly goofy retellings of ancient myths. And that’s what Modern Mythology is! With a broad array of styles and mythologies, this book looks vibrant and exciting… and educational, with a page at the beginning of each story that describes the history, mythology, and even linguistics behind the entry.
Life Finds a Way
Dan Anctil & Alina Pete
Cloudscape Comics
Ends September 28
Life Finds a Way is an anthology of collaborative post-apocalyptic fiction. Comics and anthologies are collaborative crafts, naturally, but the stories in this one are themselves about collaboration—about people working hard and working together to build their lives back up after world-shattering catastrophe. With stories from over 35 creators (including WWAC’s own Jameson Hampton!), Life Finds a Way is meant to bring hope to its contributors and its readers in a year that can all too often feel like the end times.
And more!
Hazel: A Witches’ Lifestyle Zine, issue IV: Ritual. Ends August 31. We wrote about issue III last year!
APPEAL! Pilot (a werewolf x vampire YA romance)! Ends September 13.
NEO-TOKYO 2019: An Resograph Akira Fanzine. Ends September 14.
Weekend Warrior Comics #1: A New Superhero Comics Magazine. Ends September 19. Read our interview with editor Mark O. Stack!
Nonbinary Folks in Tech zine series. Ends September 22.