MY DATE WITH ANNE HATHAWAY

My latest comic is also the one I'm proudest of so far...

A fucked up postcolonial love story. A heartfelt salute to celebrity and country. Sad "Terry and the Pirates" comics. MY DATE WITH ANNE HATHAWAY is a dreamlike, genre-hopping graphic novelette, mixing the spectacle of Hollywood movies with the candyfloss sheen of Jim Steranko romance comics and the suicidal vigor of Roy Crane's colonialist adventures to produce a statement both achingly nostalgic and brutally of-the-moment. The most assured and entertaining Very Fine Comix release to date, MY DATE WITH ANNE HATHAWAY reviews the American way of life in a voice by turns loving and scathing, but never less than utterly passionate.

20 pages | Full color | 8.5"x5.5" | $3.99 | BUY IT HERE!

Actual Comics Criticism, Written By Me

... can be found in the first issue of ADAPT, drawn by the inestimable Mr. Jonny Negron and published by the fine folks at Floating World. Not planning on doing anymore writing about comics in the near future, so if you really just wish I would have stuck to that, here is a physical artifact you can use to help you imagine such a world. You should probably click here and order it.

ZOMB

I promised you a new comic after the MoCCA Fest, and here it is now...

A zombie comic that owes more to "Seasons of Love" than "The Walking Dead", ZOMB is a sexy, psychedelic tour de force. Vividly colored images of life in voluptuous bloom clash with a deeply deathy aura as references to the Beach Boys and Ingmar Bergman flash by. The story of a beautiful, heartbroken woman whose love extends beyond the grave, ZOMB is the place where attraction and revulsion meet for sweaty hookups with each other. Don't miss.

16-page color zine | 8.5" by 5.5" | Edition of 100 numbered copies

BUY IT HERE

Initiate Countdown

Hey guys! Big news: I'll be getting on the other side of the table at the upcoming MoCCA Arts Festival, doing my inaugural comics convention repping Very Fine Comix. April 6th and 7th at the Lexington Armory, get on out there! I'll be at table E148 mobbed up with two of the best cartoonists going at the moment, Chuck Forsman and Joe Lambert, almost certainly cheezin' like the cat that ate the canary. The full complement of Very Fine Comix releases will be on hand and available for purchase, and I'll be debuting VF-04, or as I like to call it, ZOMB. It's the one you see up there, it's a sexy psychedelic zombie comic, and it might just be my best one yet. Hope to see a bunch of you guys there picking it up! MoCCA is one of the few places where it's easy to turn rhetoric about supporting new and different comics into action, namely throwing money at the people who are out there in the trenches making the stuff we love to read. So buy mine or don't (but seriously: do), but if it's at all possible, get out there and buy something from someone you think deserves it. This is the kind of situation where voting with your wallet can and does make a difference.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention: I recently got interviewed by the generally excellent Pop Culture Hound podcast about my comics and general publishing plans as Very Fine Comix. If you're wondering where the blogger guy who used to hang out here went, or where this new cartoonist/publisher guy came from, the full story's here for your pleasure. Click here to listen up, and I'll see you guys at MoCCA!

And now if you'll excuse me, it's time to get back to inking my May release, which just so happens to be a romance comic titled MY DATE WITH ANNE HATHAWAY. Stay tuned...

200 DEAF BOYS

Well folks, I'm finally dropping the big bomb. Part one of my new graphic novel is finally here, and it's called 200 DEAF BOYS...

Read and be enlightened. 200 DEAF BOYS comprises two intertwining stories of God and Catholicism. Set during the waning days of the Biblical apocalypse, the first dramatizes Pope Benedict’s involvement in the Church’s child molestation scandals as the mysterious Bobby Curnow Darkness wipes all life from the face of a forsaken earth. The second, a boldly imagined retelling of the legend of Galahad and the Holy Grail, sings brightly of the human soul’s eternal purity. Richly woven with metaphor and allusion, 200 DEAF BOYS places religious faith on the scales of Justice, laying bare both the good and evil that men do in the name of God.

48-page black and white zine | Part 1 of 3 | 8.5”x5.5” | $4.99

BUY IT HERE

TRAP: THE MAGAZINE ABOUT DRUGS

LOS ANGELES:::BUSHWICK:::OAKLAND:::DETROIT

A kaleidoscopic book of emotionally raw vignettes, TRAP: THE MAGAZINE ABOUT DRUGS aims to replicate the drug experience in comic book form, using feverish drama and beautiful imagery. Blending ripped-from-real-life tales of substance abuse and addiction with dreamily erotic hallucination fantasies, TRAP is the most fun you can have without hitting up your local dealer. This is comics at the outer edges, and very definitely on the wrong side of the tracks.

16-page full color zine | 8.5”x5.5” | Edition of 100 | Signed and numbered | $2.99

BUY IT HERE

BUY IT HERE

DAREDEVIL 12" : In Print In Color In Your Wallet

Below is some choice imagery from my new comic, DAREDEVIL 12" (pronounced dare devil twelve inch). The inaugural release of the monthly series Very Fine Comix, DAREDEVIL 12" is an erotic color magazine starring Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, and the Black Widow. It’s my attempt at making a fully formed sex comic in a unique, original style. An elegant book of pornographic compositions that’s also a shitty zine about some superheroes fuckin’, Daredevil 12” is by far the most sexually attractive comic book you will encounter for quite some time to come.

It's sixteen pages, it's in color, it's $3 + $2 = $5 shipping to get one. $10 if you want it shipped internationally (sorry guys, nothin' I can do). ACT NOW: paypal me those five clams at mattseneca4@gmail.com and I'll have one winging its way toward you in no time!

"This Morning I Saw A Ghost (True)"

Friday morning I was laying in bed thinking about nothing -- it was my day off work so I was savoring the chance to lay in the dark and just space out. My bedroom's the middle room of a railroad apartment so there's not really any light that gets in there. After I'd lain in the dark for maybe fifteen minutes I noticed a light source in the corner of my eye, one which didn't have any origin I could figure out. I turned and looked. Floating about a foot above the ground was a white shape that roughly corresponded to the human figure (minus lower legs and feet, which just faded off somewhere). It was shimmering the way the video feed on a bad Skype connection does, or really fake early-2000s CGI. Without seeming to take a step it rose up onto my bed and passed over my legs, which instantly went ice cold. Then it shifted, reached out an indistinct arm, and passed through the wall into the next building over. Signs and wonders...

"Drug Dealer"

SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THIS COMIC

- Lately I'm really not interested in messing around with different drawing styles so much (probably because switching from a croquille pen to a Micron fine-tip has opened up my hand immensely), so the first thing I think about after coming up with the basic plot of a comic is the color scheme. Anybody who hangs out with me on really life has heard me go "it's gonna be all x color" when I describe whatever I'm working on. This time around it was yellow and green, only because for some reason it seemed pretty important that the guy be wearing an Oakland A's hat. Bay Area represent. Sounds silly, but the first concrete indicator of the colors that are going to be in a piece is usually what I try to get the rest of the thing to rhyme with.

- This lettering style is gonna stick around till further notice. Much as I've always admired letterers (back before I taught myself to draw my aspiration was to break into comics that way), I kinda always hated doing the thing myself until I started using a brush for it.

- I'd assume everyone already knows, but just in case, the record player is playing Young Jeezy's "Standing Ovation". Maybe a little obvious as a strophe to this kind of content, but it's fun to try and mess around with suggesting sound palettes for a comic to work against. I also may as well admit that I've spent my entire "career" up to this point trying to be "the Young Jeezy of comics" (it makes sense to me)...

- The title lettering is ripped off from the credits font in the movie "Drive", a poster for which hangs right above my drawing table.

- In a panel at SPX this year, Sammy Harkham really hammered in the importance of designing fleshed-out room interiors -- like, ones as visually interesting as your characters. After doing a whole graphic novel that basically takes place in a white box, it's a fun challenge to try and work with. I'm not there yet, but it's in progress.

- This comic, among others, will appear in the first issue of TRAP: The Magazine About Drugs, hopefully out sometime next January. For more snippets of that book, as well as a bunch of art I don't post here, follow my tumblr. Laterz.