Today (or I guess yesterday at this point, though personally I don’t consider it to be another day until after I’ve gone to sleep) was a big day for me: after 2 days of launching some great projects for my publishing company RADICAL FORTRESS, on day 3 I launched my own. Around the printing Surf’s Up Bros! last year I stopped printing up my own stuff and stuck to digital comics and contributing strips to anthologies, so I could focus mostly on long form projects. I am still working on those, but my problem has always been that I think of new stuff too fast and want to get right to work on it, making the current work stale. It’s not a bad problem, but only if you’ve learned to balance it – now I just work on everything.

But that’s a long time to be out of the game. And while I conceived a zine project late last year that I am still working on, it just wasn’t enough. I am focusing on comics, so I need to produce comics. With more expos/conventions/nerdboxes or whatever you want to call them coming up, I need some printed works of my own. So I conceived Scenes, a series of (yeah) scenes that will eventually make up a complete graphic novel. The best part is that the reader can take all of the issues and edit together their own version of the comic. I think that’s pretty cool.

So when working on this idea I started on a crime strip because that’s what I like the most and am trying to be noticed for. But I’m already working on a quickie noir comic (the Robert Pike teases I posted last month, more on that around June), so I decided to broaden my range and I remembered a complete graphic novel I wrote in late 2009/early 2010 that never was produced.

I wrote the whole script and the plan was for a friend of mine to draw it, but he didn’t end up having the time and so this monster of a comic has just sat on my hard drive collecting digital dust, hoping one day to be drawn and produced. It’s a comic that I’m still very proud of, and I created some characters in it that I really fell in love with. I hated to see them unused, because they’re special to me. So I decided to include some of them in this series, which takes place before that comic does.

It’s 8 issues in 8 months, available in single zines or as a subscription. You can make that happen here: http://radicalfortress.bigcartel.com/product/scenes-by-joey-gantner

To read a 4 page preview of the first story, titled Honey Girl (above is page 1), go here: http://www.radicalfortress.com/2011/05/17/scenes-by-joey-gantner-an-8-month-comic-series/

This one is gonna be real fun, thanks for being here for it! And finally I started a tumblr account just for my art. Please follow or whatever: http://joeygantner.tumblr.com

Good night, and farewell.