The Virtue of Working Ahead

Shout out to John Lees for making my job easy by writing far ahead on his new series launching next week!

Next week, we’ll be launching our first brand-new comic book series of the year, from a couple of creators who have been making great comics with us since the very beginning.

Grawlgore & Shanks, a epic high-fantasy about lowly crimes and murder mysteries from John Lees (SINK, AND THEN EMILY WAS GONE) and Joe Mulvey (WAILING BLADE, HAPPY HILL) is something both completely different, and yet well within the genre-mashing, top notch quality style of book that ComixTribe is known for.

Now, I love Joe and John. They’ve been with ComixTribe since the very beginning. Longtime ComixTribers will remember that Joe’s first book SCAM, and John’s first book THE STANDARD, joined THE RED TEN from myself and artist Cesar Feliciano in the initial wave of ComixTribe books that launched the imprint and first put us on the map.

Joe and John are the perfect comics odd couple. I’ve long joked that a reality TV series that followed Joe and John, living together (one month in Joe’s Queens, New York abode and one month in John’s Glasgow) and working on a comic book would make for incredible television. While that dream show isn’t a reality yet, it is incredibly rewarding to be partnering with these two gents on a project of their creation.

Now, after over a decade of high caliber work, John Lees is regarded as among the best writers in indie comics. He has a new series coming out in August with final order cut off July 14th from MAD CAVE called ORLA! with artist Sally Cantirino. (I’ve read the first issue: no surprise, it’s amazing… and another example of the tremendous range John has a writer… while still delivering some of the horror and shock moments that he’s known for!)

One of the things that John does, that I am certainly envious of, and that more writers should do, is that when John jumps into a new project, he’s not afraid of scripting far in advance. During the pandemic, when a lot of projects went pencils down, John put his fingers to the keyboard. He ended up writing the next ten issues of SINK, despite knowing that it would be a few years before Alex Cormack freed up to work on them.

Likewise, when John started building out the world of Grawlgore & Shanks, he jumped in with both feet. I’ve had the chance to read scripts for the first eight issues of Grawlgore & Shanks, each a unique standalone mystery, like an episode of Sherlock Holmes set in Middle Earth. John’s also written a number of G&S prose stories, and despite the fact that the first issue hasn’t come out yet… I already feel like I know these characters intimately and can’t wait for the rest of the world to meet them!

There’s a ton of value that comes from working ahead. As publisher, I have a much stronger sense of how to pitch the book, the key selling points, and potentially opportunities to expand the world because I have much more than a single issue to work with. On Kickstarter, we’ve always loved being able to offer CAMEO PLEDGE LEVELS for future issues to our backers, and having the book scripted in advance makes it easy to figure out which roles would work well for that.

And the other cool thing about working so far ahead is that Joe Mulvey has plenty of script to work on and won’t need to be waiting on pages to keep the story going. Joe, who has been working on a number of licensed books over the past year, including Thundercats and Terminator, has really been leveling up his output, so we’re excited to push a bunch of Grawlgore & Shanks out into the world over the next year… and it all starts with the Kickstarter world-premiere DOUBLE SIZED first issue!

We’re excited to keep the streak alive for top-notch comics for the best fans on the planet.

If you haven’t smashed it yet, please hit the NOTIFY ME ON LAUNCH button on our Kickstarter Pre-Launch page so you don’t miss a single thing!