Now In Stores

It took four or five different release dates, but the Screamland: Death of the Party collection is finally out in stores.  I snapped a picture of this one at Friendly Frank's in Prairie Village because my comp copies have not yet arrived.  If you haven't gotten a copy yet either, you can pick one up at your local comic book shop or on Amazon (where you'll still have to wait another week or two).  The book is also now available as a single digital volume on comiXology complete with all the extras.
Chris shared some thoughts about what the book means to those of us who slaved away on it, "[...]this will have to stand as a road map of the last year of my life. I certainly can think of way worse things to mark one's time[...]".
When I think about this past year, I'll mostly associate it with the birth of my second child,  hiking in the Smokey Mountains and taking Eleanor camping for the first time, but throughout all these other parts of my life, Screamland was the thick mortar that filled in all the cracks.  Estimating that I spent a conservative three-and-a-half hours on each page, that's still almost 400 hours of Screamland crammed into my lunch breaks and in the late hours after everyone in my house had gone to sleep.
The amazing thing is that those 400 hours (or however much it actually was, 4,000?) was just one part of the entire process.  I'd shutter to think how many hours Chris spent writing, flatting, lettering and laying out the damn thing.  He really was the wheel who turned all the other cogs
And I'd be an idiot not to mention all the work Buster put in.  Early in the process I had lunch with a guy I respect to get his opinion on my pages and he said, "Buster's really saving your ass."  Truer words have never been spoken.  Buster made everything I drew look way better than it had any right to. In another decade or so, Buster Moody fans will read Screamland as one of the deep cuts the way Beatles fans listen to those Tony Sheridan records from Hamburg.
And now that I've started, I can't help but thank Mellon, Kyle, Stephen and Dennis for their work on the back-ups even if it made me look bad.  And of course Kevin Gritzke for being the anchor leg on our deadline marathon.

But mainly thanks to those of you who read it and liked it.  This was my first widely read book, and that's all any artist really wants, someone to listen to their stories.  Thank you for giving me that, and I hope to see you in Screamland again some day.