Artoo-Detoo, where are you?
Chapter 26: Getting caught up.
I get (caught) up and nothing gets me down!
Big week!
The Mixtape!
Stuff Worth Supporting!
You ever just leave the Netflix app open and let all the different ads for movies pop up? I find myself doing that a lot for some reason and it consistently shows me stuff I just watched. I know targeted advertising algorithms are an imperfect science but there has to be a better system than “this guy just watched Croupier and Trial of the Chicago 7. Let’s show him an ad for Croupier and Trial of the Chicago 7.”
Anyway, Hi. How are you? I know I asked for questions last week and a bunch of you were awesome enough to send me some. Well I am un-awesome enough not to answer them this week. But I’ll do it next week. So send in more questions if you feel like it.
In good news for me, I finally got caught up on my workload that has been at my throat for a few months. It’s a wildly liberating feeling. But at the same time being a freelancer just wires your brain in a weird way. As soon as I could come up for air my mind starts racing thinking of new projects I want to work on. The body wants to breathe but the mind wants to be buried. I think some of that comes from the fact that, like all freelancers, I lived through periods of drought and now I live in fear of it so I’m always underwater. Maybe the more optimistic take is that when I have the brain space and free time to do other things, my first thought immediately goes to what new projects I’d like to work on. I’m not 100% sure that’s an optimistic take, but I’m choosing to see it that way. Either way, if you’re wondering why I have like 3,000 books out this month, that’s your answer in there somewhere.
Like I said before, it’s a big week here in my dungeon. To start, WHAT’S THE FURTHEST PLACE FROM HERE? #2 is in stores right now! Yay!
I’m very excited to have people read this one. Things get a bit weirder, a bit funnier, a bit scarier, and also a lot weirder. If I’m being honest I may like #2 more than I like #1. Tyler of course kills it on art, we introduce one of my favorite characters of the series, and we up the stakes a lot. And, as always, we got some awesome covers from buddies like Declan Shalvey, Jenna Cha, Courtney Menard, and Jonathan Hickman. I really hope people dig it.
But you don’t pay all this money for this newsletter just to hear me blather on about why I like a comic. You pay for me to send you links to easily googleable stuff. So the very sensual and pragmatic folks at Screen Rant have a preview for the book if you’re one of those people who likes to ask for the tiny spoonful of ice cream to sample at the ice cream parlor. Here’s your tiny spoon-
For the record, even though that tiny spoon is my ideal ice cream spoon size, I think people who ask for samples at the ice cream parlor are cowards.
Anyway, you can pick a copy up at your local comic shop now. If you don’t have a local comic shop you can use comicshoplocator.com to find one or look online for the many awesome comic shops who do mailorder. Or if owning material goods isn’t your thing you can get a digital copy from the fine folks at Comixology right here.
And if you’re a collector of variant covers and whatnot, we have some exclusive covers for issue #2 up at our webstore on FurthestPlace.com right now.
We have this snappy second issue in our connecting covers set. Limited to 500. I will never not be happy that we put out a book that just says “THE” on the cover. That shit is so funny. There is also a much rarer foil cover, limited to 100. The foil ones for #1 sold pretty fast and I’m timing the release of those covers to go with this newsletter going out, so you get first crack at them.
Also out this week is our fifth issue of the wildly bizarre THE JOKER PRESENTS: A PUZZLEBOX.
Our story continues with myself, Jesus Merino, and Ulises Arreola joined by guest artists Chris Mooneyham and Freddie Williams II! And it looks awesome. Here’s one of the pages from Chris-
I was so happy to get to work with Chris on this issue. He is actually one of the people I have known in comics the longest, going back to his time at the Kubert School and my good buddy Frank Barbiere working with him on a bunch of stuff that would eventually turn into the great series FIVE GHOSTS from Image. As you can see, Chris crushed all of it but he was clearly born to draw Man-Bat.
Freddie Williams II also does a story this issue that is one of my favorite chapters. It’s the interrogation of various villains where we get to see a scene from each of their perspectives. It’s like Rashomon if everyone was insane and dressed like an animal or a character from a fairytale.
Issue 5 is in stores now. I told you this was a weird one.
Lastly, the collection of my 5 issue Grifter story with Ryan Benjamin and Antonio Fabela is out now in BATMAN URBAN LEGENDS vol. 1. It collects all 5 chapters of that Grifter story that is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. But that’s not all. This volume also collects all 6 issues of my buddies Chip Zdarsky and Eddy Barrows amazing Red Hood story. You get both of these for the price of… well like 1 and half? I don’t know. Book pricing is weird. But it’s a great read and if you missed it in single issues you should definitely consider picking it up now.
So head down to your local comic shop right now. Buy all of those comics if you feel so inclined. Or just go in and get yourself a nice funko pop. Those are nice enough.
I have no idea if you all listen to the songs I put in here. I guess I could actually go into the guts of substack and look, but I am not sure I care that much. So instead I’ll just admit that I do this because I always listen to music while I write and it’s nice for me to reflect on what has been playing for me recently. So we can chalk this section up as “self indulgent”… as opposed to all the other sections. Umm… Moving on.
This week we’re doing things a bit different. I feel like I’ve talked about it ad nauseum, but the title of our new book is taken from the opening line of luminary bay area punk band Jawbreaker’s song Accident Prone. They’ve been one of my favorite bands for pretty much my whole life and when we started working on the book they were records I kept coming back to. Something about the seething, gritted teeth sadness that permeates so many of their songs really spoke to a lot of what I wanted to do with our book.
In calling our book WHAT’S THE FURTHEST PLACE FROM HERE? I wanted to capture that same restless, anxious feeling. Or at least remind myself that I wanted to. But also it’s just a great fucking line, so I stole it. I honestly think Blake Schwarzenbach is one of the great lyricists of modern music. I hold him in the same regard as folks like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Nas, and Bruce Springsteen. If you’re gonna steal…
When we were far enough along on the book I reached out to Blake to sort of ask forgiveness and beg his blessing on the project. He was so kind and enthusiastic in his response and offered to share my note with the other 2/3rds of Jawbreaker- Chris Bauermeister and Adam Pfalher. From there we got to talking about my idea to do 7” records with each release and I finally worked up the nerve to ask Blake if he’d consider contributing a song. Again, he was beyond kind and before long sent me his song. I won’t talk about his ideas for how the song should feel that he shared with me, but I’ll just say that what he described floored me and what he delivered far exceeded that. Putting out this 7” with the deluxe edition of WHAT’S THE FURTHEST PLACE FROM HERE? #1 isn’t just one of the high points of my career, it’s one of the the things I’m most proud of in my whole life. I am so excited for people to finally get their hands on it next week.
The point of all of this is to simply say that without Jawbreaker I don’t think I’d be the person I am today. I can’t pay a higher compliment to pay an artist.
Yesterday editor extraordinaire and master tweeter Chris Conroy shared a post about The Rolling Library, an organization that offers mobile book fairs, free books, and events in their community. They are currently in partnership with the excellent Astoria Bookshop doing a book drive for incarcerated people in the national shame known as Rikers Island.
Like the folks involved, I believe in the transformative power of education and reading so I was happy to see a lot of books I love on the list. But anytime people ask for comics I get thrilled so I quickly purchased all 9 volumes of Saga for the Rikers library. But there are still plenty of great books on the list.
To donate go to: ASTORIA BOOKSHOP
Or to learn more go to: THE ROLLING BOOK LIBRARY
Stay safe. Take care of each other. Watch Croupier.
-Matthew Rosenberg
NYC 12/8/21
I enjoy the music recs because in the free time I get, I'm working on comics, and sometimes you send me to something I haven't listened to in years or something completely new.