Greetings, friends! I gave the website a much needed update, today. There was a lot of outdated information that needed to be corrected. I also added information about my two newest books, HamletMania and Autographical! If you want to stay up to date on all my newest comics, I recommend following me on Patreon! I still publish a monthly newsletter, but will no longer link here on the Second Thought Comics blog. Thanks for your interest in my comics
-Aaron Walther
THE INTRO
December is often a time for year end introspection and retrospectives, which is something I’m not often given to do. 2024 was a complicated year for me. There was a lot of stress and strain, some of it as a result of my own actions and some of it beyond my control. On the other hand, I was incredibly blessed with good fortune in unexpected ways and my year is ending on a high note. All in all, I’ll call it a marginal net gain with 2025 poised to be an overall positive year.
In this newsletter, I reflect on a few of the more positive experiences of my year and then I recommend a Holiday themed comic book that I really like. Spoiler alert, it contains one of the greatest Ghost Rider pages of all time.
Read the full newsletter over at Patreon!
THE INTRO
I feel as though I’ve had my foot on the gas pedal for the last two months straight and it wasn’t until this week that I could tap on the breaks for just a bit. I’m sure many people are overwhelmed by the recent Presidential election here in the United States, but I have absolutely nothing to say about it at this time (though, it is a topic I may write about in the future).
In this month’s newsletter I’m going to expound on my feelings on my recently successful HamletMania Kickstarter, as well discuss my work/life balance and how things are changing for me. Then I’m going to talk about the 1980 novel The Number of the Beast by one of my favorite authors, Robert Heinlein, and the alternate version of the book, The Pursuit of the Pankera, recently released in 2020.
THE BODY
This is not exactly a fresh opinion OR a hot take, but I think the future of indie comics is going to revolve around crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon. What a blessing it is that creators can fund their art through direct contributions from fans rather than have to work around (or through) the various publishers, distributors, and other market hurdles. So, if you’re like me and have very little connections in the comic book industry but still want to make comics, you have a clear and direct path to success. Unfortunately, if you’re also like me and hate running a crowdfunding campaign, you’re going to be stressed out a lot.
Running a Kickstarter is a lot of work. I am not opposed to lots of work. If I can overshare for just a moment, I have been working two jobs for the last three years. I work all the time (much to my wife’s chagrin), and as such, I have limited time to devote to creative pursuits. Whenever I run a crowdfunding campaign, I inevitably spend all my free time on administrative work. It takes time to write out all the campaign information, design rewards, reach out to as many people as possible through social media, schedule interviews and public appearances, etc. That is all time spent on work that ISN’T writing or drawing. Even though it is work that needs to be done in order to make the physical book a reality, it’s not creative work and therefore doesn’t FEEL like part of the creative process.
I try to not let it wear me down, but it can be stressful. On top of that, there’s always the chance element that your campaign will not succeed, which then makes all that work feel even more pointless. HamletMania squeaked across the finish line, thanks in no small part to a couple of Angel Investors who, all combined, gave us about 50% of our funds.
Most people that run a successful Kickstarter go into it with a certain amount of money already promised or planned, if not the entire amount needed, already in hand. Sure, you use it to raise funds that you might not have, but the real value is in rallying people behind your product and making people aware that it even exists. To my mind, running a Kickstarter is as much a preorder system as it is an advertising system.
If there’s a system, it can be gamed, and a lot of people running successful Kickstarters know how to manipulate their campaign into success. For example, you can create a puppet account and pledge a significant amount of money to your own campaign. This makes your campaign appear that it’s on the path to success, if not succeeded already. This will encourage more people to back it because nobody likes to back a loser. It’s a subtle psychological manipulation of the consumer into thinking you are more successful than you actually are. Then, once the campaign surpasses its goal, you lower (or outright cancel) your initial pledge. By this point, you should have gotten enough people to back your campaign that even without your puppet pledge you still have reached your goal.
I say all this because I think that if you are running a Kickstarter you have a responsibility to have a plan for success, not just for your readers, but also for your collaborators. You are sorely mistaken if you think you can just launch a Kickstarter and expect people to find it. If you are lucky, you might get 1% of your funds from random people searching Kickstarter for new projects, but everything else has to be driven by your own promotion.
I am very pleased that our HamletMania campaign succeeded, and although the Angel Investors were very important, it absolutely would not have happened without the handful of friends and fans who (presumably) actually want to read the comic! I look forward to getting into people’s hands, and if you missed the campaign you don’t have to worry. Greg and I are already planning the campaign for the second issue. Thanks again for checking out our work.
THE ANNOUNCEMENTS
If you didn’t know, I work at a comic and game store called Fantasy Books & Games. I very recently received a promotion and am now the Assistant Manager for the store. I don’t normally share this kind of personal information, but I am making an exception in this case because it does relate to my comics work. With the new position at FBG, I will be able to quit my second job and have more time to devote to my comic work.
My first order of business is to finish Autographical 3. I have been working on that issue off and on for two years now and am very disappointed that it has taken this long. If you read my six page story, Disaster at the Deadpool Dance Party (you can find it in the Autographical Comics collection of this very Patreon), you will know that my wife, Jessica, started helping with Autographical. She is an amazing artist and is inking and, in some cases, finishing/redrawing, my Autographical pages. I think Autographical 3 is going to be a significant improvement over the first two issues.
Once Autographical 3 is finished, I would like to work on a different project with Jessica, but that is still in early developments and I don’t have a whole lot to say about it at the moment.
THE BOOK CLUB
This month, I am not going to recommend a comic series. Instead, I am going to write about a novel that I read several years ago, The Number of the Beast, by Robert A. Heinlein. In 2020, an alternate version of the novel titled The Pursuit of the Pankera was released. This new version was purportedly the first draft of the novel, before Heinlein decided to almost completely rewrite it and release it as The Number of the Beast.
For the record, The Number of the Beast is not my favorite Heinlein novel. In fact, it’s one of my least favorite, despite having an interesting premise. I’m not going to go into detail about the novel, but I’ll provide a brief summary of the plot.
The story revolves around four main characters, two husband and wife teams, who are all adventurer scientists. One of them has invented a time machine which opens up the possibility of visiting a near-infinite number of parallel worlds. Soon after making the discovery, they are targeted for assassination by unknown assailants and are forced to flee to an alternate universe. They explore the new universe’s planet Mars and notice some similarities to Edgar Rice Burrough’s Princess of Mars series of novels. They discuss the possibility that every piece of fiction is an alternate universe. This is seemingly proven true when the characters visit the Land of Oz.
Read more of my thoughts of The Number of the Beast and The Pursuit of the Pankera over at my Patreon!
-Aaron Walther
November, 2024
PS – Can I just take a quick moment to say how much I love classic sci-fi novel cover art and how much I hate modern digital photo-realism sludge? New book covers look so awful. Honestly, what is wrong with everyone? Look what they took from us! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
THE INTRO
Hoo-boy, do I have a lot of things I could talk about this month. First, I guess I should announce that American Chop Suey, the graphic novel created by myself and artist Ed Bickford, was NOT released last month as it was originally solicited. Ed and I found out about this a week before the planned release date (also notably, we did NOT learn it from the publisher that presumably knew the entire time that the book would not release). I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I will save them for a future newsletter after I’ve had some time to sit with the information.
Instead, I’d rather talk about Kickstarter. I have a new comic book launching on Kickstarter on October 16th called HamletMania. It is created by myself and artist Greg McCrary and, simply put, it’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet by way of Dragonball Z and Scud: the Disposable Assassin (if you can imagine such a thing). Take a gander at the preview pages and please follow this link to the Kickstarter pre-launch page to be notified when the campaign goes live. I promise you won’t want to miss it.
THE BODY – Running a Kickstarter
HamletMania is not my first Kickstarter. I have run several small, but successful Kickstarter campaigns over the last ten years. All of them had modest goals, the intent of which was not to make money or even fund the production of the book but rather just get enough money to cover printing costs for a few hundred copies of the book.
In that way, I funded the printing costs of Zero’s Heroes volumes 1 & 2, The Uncontrollable Wreck-Lass, and The Amoral Stingray graphic novel. All of those books were between 120 and 170ish pages long and were fully illustrated before the crowdfunding campaigns even began. The funding goals were all around $2k and as I said before, was just the money we needed to cover printing and shipping costs for a couple hundred “print on demand” (I’ll explain the difference between Print on Demand and Offset printing later). If I had tried to raise enough money to cover the production costs of the books (aka, the money needed to pay artists to draw the darn things) I would have had to raise a minimum of $10k, and although I think I and my fellow artists make some pretty good books, I am aware that I am not popular (or social media savvy) enough to raise that kind of money.
In August of 2023 I embarked on my most ambitious Kickstarter campaign to date. I wanted to fund the complete production of a brand new issue of The Amoral Stingray.
I had a great art team lined up for the new issue. Penciler and Inker Chris McJunkin (a regular collaborator of mine) was returning, along with colorist Paul Little, to illustrate an all new 22 page story about my character, The Amoral Stingray.
I had previously produced four issues of The Amoral Stingray out of pocket between 2015 and 2020. It was very expensive and I had trouble finding distribution for the book. I pitched it to a few publishers, but nobody picked it up. Despite that, I went ahead and produced the entire thing because it’s a story that I really like and has the potential to grow. I printed the first three issues and sold them on my website and at comic conventions. By the time the fourth issue was finished, I decided to skip printing single issues and just move straight to the collected edition. In 2020, with the help of 69 backers (nice), I raised enough money to print a couple hundred copies of the book.
Chris and I unsuccessfully tried to Kickstarter the fifth issue of Amoral Stingray the very next year in 2021. This campaign failed for a number of reasons. The biggest reason, from my perspective, was that we didn’t run a lot of promotion for the campaign. I was already planning the Uncontrollable Wreck-Lass campaign which was going to go live a few months later in the Fall of 2021. Chris and I found ourselves in an awkward position of either immediately running the Amoral Stingray 5 campaign in the summer of 2021 or waiting a year and running it sometime in 2022. We were impatient and decided to run it immediately, and as a result, we went into it a little unprepared. I have seen a lot of mediocre Kickstarter campaigns succeed, so were were hoping luck would be on our side and comic readers would magically find us. Spoiler alert, they didn’t.
Let that be a lesson to everyone interested in Kickstarting their book. You can’t just put the book on Kickstarter and expect people to give you money. You have to do a LOT of promotion if you want to make some real money at it. Often times, promotion means spending money ahead of time. At a certain point, you may question if it is worth spending between $1k-$2k just to take in $3k, but that’s just the way the game is played.
I took all the lessons of the failed 2021 Amoral Stingray Kickstarter and put them into effect for our second attempt for the 2023 Kickstarter for the same issue. First, we renamed the issue to the “New #1” so as not to deter new readers that didn’t want to jump in on issue 5. Second, we got a friend, Mark Welser, to do an amazing variant cover. The cover was an homage to the classic cover of Amazing Spider-man 129 (the first appearance of The Punisher).
I also printed up a preview version of the issue (called an Ashcan) and mailed them out to people (for free) in a few different Facebook comic book groups that I am a part of. I also handed them out to customers of the comic book store that I work at.
The other notable thing I did differently was to secure outside funding through advertising. The comic book store I work at placed an ad on the back cover, and prepaid for issues to sell in the store. I also sold ads to a restaurant that I had previously worked at, as well as a local coffee shop. For them, I created and illustrated advertisements for their business that appeared in The Amoral Stingray New #1 issue.
Some of these things, such as renumbering the issue and homage variant covers, are things that I complain about when I see them being done by other publishers, but I can’t deny that they were integral to the success of our campaign. Simply put, The Amoral Stingray New #1 Kickstarter would NOT have succeeded without all the annoying sales boosting tricks that Marvel and DC are forced to do every week.
All of that extra stuff was a LOT of work; work that had nothing to do with the actually creation of the comic book, itself, I should add.
Though, we did succeed and the book is currently printed (and available for purchase at Fantasy Books & Games in Fairview Heights, IL or at secondthoughtcomcis.com), we did not succeed by much. A lot of work goes into running a Kickstarter campaign that only breaks even. In a future newsletter, I plan on doing a full financial break down of that campaign, just so people can see exactly how much money and effort goes into producing a single issue of a comic book, but I don’t have time for that this month.
All of this is really to say...YOU SHOULD BACK HAMLETMANIA on Kickstarter right now! The prelaunch page is up and running! Just follow this link!
ANNOUNCEMENTS – My New Comics and Convention Appearances
HAMLETMANIA KICKSTARTER! As I said earlier, Greg McCrary and I are Kickstarting our new comic, HamletMania. It is an exciting and action packed version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, reimagined as aliens and robots competing in an intergalactic wrestling league. It is the tragic story of betrayal, death, and love, as young Prince Hamlet seeks to regain the Heavyweight Championship belt from his deceased father’s ex-tag team partner, Claudius. It’s going to be a wild comic and I think wrestling and comic fans will love it. The campaign launches on October 16th! Be there!
AUTOGRAPHICAL 3! I am still working on Autographical 3, but it has taken a back seat to the HamletMania Kickstarter. I really planned to have it finished by now, and it is frustrating that it has taken so long, particularly because I think it’s going to be my best looking issue (thanks in large part to my wonderful wife’s beautiful inking over my sloppy pencils). But there are only so many hours in the day and we all have to work within our means. Included here is a one-page comic that appeared in Autographical 2. It shows, roughly, what my day to day schedule looks like (in case you want any extra perspective in the time managing skills of an indie comic creator).
SLICE! I will not be at the St. Louis Independent Comic Expo on October 26th this year, but HamletMania artist and co-creator Greg McCrary will be! He will have a HamletMania preview book, too! If you’re in the St. Louis area, you should definitely check it out!
BOOK CLUB
Since it’s October, I feel like I should recommend a spooky book. I don’t read a lot of horror comics, but there are some really great ones out there. My favorite horror book of the year is probably Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath. This comic series released monthly over the summer and wrapped up just in time to get it’s trade paperback released in October.
The elevator pitch to this series is VERY simple. It’s (the TV show) Dexter meets (Richard Scarry’s) Busy Town. Horvath’s lush watercolor art has the outward look of a charming children’s storybook, but that just covers up the dark and bloody story within.
The story is set in the cozy little county town of Woodbrook. An adorable brown bear named Samantha Strong is one of the well known and well liked members of Woodbrook, and she also happens to be a serial killer. She has rules that she meticulously follows in order to maintain her secret life as a killer, most notably, that she never kills anyone in her hometown. She always travels to a nearby city to perform her misdeeds, where they will be more likely to go unnoticed.
Sam’s whole life is thrown upside down when members of Woodbrook start getting murdered. The entire community is turned inside out as citizens begin to distrust and suspect each other of the serial killings. Sam realizes that she has to find the murderer before her own, unrelated murders get discovered!
As I said, I liked this comic a lot, and it has been one of the most popular and best selling comics this year at Fantasy Books & Games. I definitely think this is a comic that is carried by the art. The story is solid, but it is in service of the striking art which juxtaposes sweet and colorful character designs with ghoulish and grisly murder scenes.
This is a book that definitely works best as a comic book. Honestly, without the talking animal character designs, I think it would be a rather bland and uninspired rip-off of Dexter. I won’t spoil the story here, but there are a few moments where I would have liked a little more character development with Sam and her inner turmoil of being a serial killer while also being a valued member of Woodbrook. I hesitate to say that the series could have maybe used a few more issues to really play around with it, but at that point the premise may have worn thin overstayed it’s welcom (see a lot of Jeff Lemire’s comics for examples of what I’m talking about).
As it is, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody sees is a tight six issue story that makes for a standard 132 page graphic novel. If you are looking for something quirky and uniquely spooky to read this season, I highly recommend it!
-Aaron
October 2024
INTRO - Comics and Artificial Intelligence
I have now gotten the exact same type of cold two months in a row. I’m beginning to suspect that it is some kind of conspiracy by my enemies to destroy me. If I get sick again at the end of this month, we’ll know for sure.
Expanding further on some topics I touched on in the last newsletter, I want to talk a little about being an indie creator in the current social media landscape. I don’t do a lot of “hot takes” on social media, but I might offer some here…
Several weeks ago, news broke that football star and social activist, Colin Kaepernick, was promoting a new Comic Book Artificial Intelligence start up company called Lumi. A lot of the promotion made frequent use of the standard buzz words and rhetoric surrounding AI as it is used for art. The new technology would “democratize art” and “remove gatekeepers” and “make creation accessible to everyone.”
All those hollow buzz words really get my hackles up, and apparently I’m not the only one because the news of this new company was met with near universal disdain from the artistic and comic community.
While I think that AI technology will eventually find its place in the artistic world, I do get sick of people touting it as a method for “creating” art. In order for that to happen, I think copyright laws are going to have to be reexamined and possibly rewritten. As it stands, artists have certain rights when it comes to who can copy an image that they produce. If an AI program has been trained to copy pieces of art without the artists permission, then that makes the use of the technology unethical and illegal. But in the digital age, these kinds of copyright laws are practically impossible to enforce. The laws may be on the books, but a law is only as good as its ability to be enforced (and big tech start up companies know that). The music and film industries have been aware of this for a few decades, now, and have basically given up trying to stop pirating.
Personally, I think copyright law is long overdue for a drastic overhaul. Admittedly, I am more of a copyright anarchist when it comes to art. Copyright law can just as easily be used as a cudgel by a corporation to silence a competitor as it can be used to protect a single creator’s work. I also think it’s one of the biggest contributing factors to the homogenization and stagnation of American pop culture, but that might be a topic for a different newsletter.
My biggest concern with AI as it is used for art, apart from the dubious methods used to train the programs, is that it will never live up to the purported hype. I see a lot of interest in AI from people that seem to have little to no creative bones in their body.
I looked into Kaepernick’s new company, Lumi, beyond the initial headline and it appears to be a bit more than just an AI comic generator. Lumi is setting itself up to be a new kind of publisher for independent creators, which I am admittedly interested in.
Creating a profitable comics publisher is extremely difficult. At this point it doesn’t appear that Lumi is going to do anything interesting or groundbreaking in the area of publishing apart from offering AI tools to generate a comic book, which makes it look like a scam by and for people that know absolutely nothing about the comic book industry.
Let me be clear about something, I am not interested in reading anybody’s AI generated comic. I do not WANT it to become easier for the average person to tell their story. I do not think the average person has anything interesting to say. I am not one of those persons who think artists HAVE to suffer for their art, but I do think learning a craft and working within the best of your abilities is what makes it art. Spitting a few sentences into a machine algorithm so it can spew out a mishmash combination of the same several artists that all AI programs have been trained on is not art. It is the antithesis of art. If you thought pop culture was a generic homogenized mess before, just wait until everything looks like it came from the same AI program. We will be reaching new levels of the Uncanny Valley effect.
But, as I alluded to earlier, the algorithm demands content, and it doesn’t need to be thoughtful or challenging or even sincere. It just needs to be, and that’s what we are going to get with a deluge of oncoming AI content.
It’s all the more frustrating, because I can envision a useful version of AI. As an indie creator, I do not need a machine to generate content for me. I generate my own content with the skills I have honed over the years of studying comics.
If you want to democratize art or remove gatekeepers, then you can start with the predatory social media algorithms that bury, hide, and otherwise prevent people from seeing my work. It is no secret that Facebook’s algorithm buries posts that contain links to other websites, making it difficult to promote crowd funding campaigns or even just regular things like your digital store or public appearances. Twitter (X) has been shown time and again to shadowban users and certain trending hashtags. I do not need a machine to make art for me, I need the machine to stop insisting that I work with it in order to be seen all while doing everything in its power to bury me.
One of the main reasons I set up this Patreon was to have some kind of social media outlet, some kind of link to the digital world, no matter how small it is. I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with all current social media programs, and it’s possible that I just quit them altogether (2024 being an election year makes it all that much easier). But I recognize the importance and need to have an outlet for your voice in the digital landscape.
So, thank you for subscribing, this is definitely going to be the best place to hear from me and my comics in the future.
First, I guess I should announce my upcoming convention appearances. On September 7th, I will be at Free State Comicon in Lawrence, KS and on October 26th I will be at SLICE in St. Louis (representing the Fantasy Books & Games table).
American Chop Suey comes out this month on Sept. 25th! We are having a signing at Fantasy Books and Games on Saturday, Sept. 28th. Both Ed Bickford and myself will be there, so if you are in the St. Louis area, swing by and say hi!
We have a launch date for the HamletMania Kickstarter...October 16th! I think this is a really great comic and something unlike a lot of the other comics I’ve written up to this point. Greg McCrary and I had a lot of fun putting it together and we can’t wait to get it printed.
My Atomic Nazi Smasher zine is finished and printed! Like my Bizarro Hulk zine, it is $5 for a five page story that unfolds into a poster for the final page. Paul Little colored the final page and he did a whizz-bang job if I ever saw one!
If you watch my weekly comic preview livestream ( twitch.tv/fantasybooksinc ), you have undoubtedly heard me gush about Skybound’s new Energon Universe, particularly Transformers by Daniel Warren Johnson(henceforth to be referred to as DWJ) and G.I. Joe by are variety of creators, notably Joshua Williamson and Tom Reilly.
You can read my extended thoughts about the new Transformers and G.I. Joe comics over at my Patreon for free!
Thanks for reading!
-Aaron
I spent longer than I should have writing several different drafts of this newsletter. I’m still figuring out exactly how I want this Patreon to operate and it doesn’t help that I have a tendency to overthink these kinds of things, either. One of my biggest frustrations with social media is the pressure to constantly churn out “content” for the algorithm.
One of the things that I love about comics is that anybody can just sit down and make them. Of all the storytelling arts, I think they actually have one of the lowest barriers of entry. Easy as they are to make, it’s much harder to get people to actually read your comics, especially on social media. There is a lot of pressure on comic creators to take on some other form of promotional project. Whether it be a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, email newsletter (or all of the above), there’s a sense you have to be a successful social media personality before you can be a successful comic creator. I’m sure it’s not that way for everyone, but it’s definitely a trap that I fall into. Before I know it, I am spending all my time editing videos or writing reviews or what-have-you, and there’s not time left to write and draw comics.
As I write this, I am in bed recovering from the flu. It’s not Covid, but it did wipe me out for a few days. These two excuses (starting and abandoning multiple drafts combined with being sick at the last minute) are the reason why this newsletter is going out the second weekend of August, instead of the first. In the spirit of NOT overthinking this, I have abandoned all previous drafts and am starting fresh. I have a few announcements to make regarding my future comic projects and then I’ll give you my opinions on the recent Deadpool & Wolverine movie.
First, a few small announcements…
If you didn’t see my post from a few weeks ago, my next zine is going to be the Atomic Nazi Smasher. This was originally a four page story I wrote and drew for local St. Louis comic anthology, Ink & Drink. Looking at the dates, it was actually TEN years ago, if you can believe it. I am working on a new page that will be added to the new printed version.
The Amoral Stingray is finally available in my online store at secondthoughtcomics.com! I have gotten a lot of good feedback for The Amoral Stingray New #1, which we Kickstarted last year and got printed last May. I was incredibly satisfied with how the comic turned out, but I’ll be honest with you, we just barely squeaked by our crowdfunding goal and I wasn’t sure if we would be able to do another issue (I will write more about this in the next newsletter). But I really love the character and concept and could write Amoral Stingray comics for the rest of my life if it was an option, so I’m going to work on a new script and see if we can’t crowd fund a new issue. If it happens, it won’t be until next Spring or Summer, though.
Okay, now for the actual big announcements…
American Chop Suey is getting published by Scout Comics! This has been a long time coming and fellow creator, Ed Bickford and I are very excited to see it get released. Mark your calendars for September 25th! It should be available where all fine books are sold! Make sure to tell your local comic and book store to order a copy. I assure you the book is loads of fun for the whole family. Ed and I will be promoting the heck out of it until then. We plan on having a signing at Fantasy Books & Games in Fairview Heights, IL (just outside of St. Louis) on the 28th, so if you’re in the area you can swing by and chat with us!
I am also excited to announce that this October I will be crowdfunding my newest comic, HAMLETMANIA! Greg McCrary and I created HamletMania several years ago and ran it on WebToons. We are now in the process of formatting the comic for print and are eager to get the first issue out there! HamletMania is a retelling of the classic Shakespeare tragedy, Hamlet, but interpreted through an intergalactic wrestling league. It’s got aliens, robots, murder, betrayal, soliloquies, and pile drivers. You can expect to hear me talking about this book a lot in the coming months!
I saw the Deadpool & Wolverine movie on opening weekend and I am surprised to say that I enjoyed the movie much more than I expected I would. I will admit that I’m not completely flabbergasted that I liked the movie. It is worth noting that my absolute favorite issue of Deadpool ever is Deadpool 11, by Joe Kelly and Pete Woods. In the issue, Deadpool travels back in time and inadvertently takes the place of a young Peter Parker during the events of Amazing Spider-man 34. In retelling the story, they use original pages of story by Steve Ditko, but with Deadpool drawn in place of Peter Parker/Spider-man. It is very funny and contains lots of meta-humor at the expense of comic book cliches. While Deadpool 3 doesn’t really draw on this issue specifically, I do feel there is a spiritual similarity with the irreverent humor that is intrinsically tied to both the genre and medium in which it exists.
If you read my Disaster at the Deadpool Dance Party comic you will know that I have a complicated relationship with the character and am not particularly fond of Ryan Reynolds’ take on the character. I really disliked the first two movies. I think they are faux-edgy, paint-by-numbers scripts that rely too heavily on Reynolds annoying improv sex jokes. If you removed all the instances of Deadpool or Weasel saying something sexual (and vaguely homophobic) then the movies would barely warrant more than a PG-13 rating.
I also really dislike the character of his girlfriend and that she is the main motivation for pretty much everything Deadpool does. It just strikes me as a lazy way to make the character more palatable to a general movie-going audience. Deadpool is having the same problem that DC’s Harley Quinn has, which is that he is now going to be forever stuck in the “Second Act” of his character arc. He started out as a straight villain, and a purely sadistic and psychotic one, at that. Then, over time, as the character’s story developed, he became less of a villain and more of an anti-hero, eventually settling into his “basically-a-good-guy-but-just-a-little-wacky-from-time-to-time” personality. And as these characters are trademarked Intellectual Properties whose story is being told in the endless tapestry of a shared universe, they are not allowed to have an ending. As a result, Deadpool will be stuck forever trying to reach “good guy” status without ever fully reaching it, but he also can’t go back to being a villain without seeming like the writers are destroying all of the character growth that got him to where he is today. For another example of this, see Magneto.
My problem with the first two movies is that they both start with this Second Act Deadpool. His motivation and goals in each film are almost exactly the same. He’s basically a good guy, but wants to be better for his girl. There’s no real arc or growth over the three movies, he pretty much starts and ends each movie in the same place. I would have enjoyed the first movie a lot more if they allowed the character to be even a little villainous at the start, so you could see him grow into an aspiring anti-hero. Instead, he starts the movie as a quirky, wise-cracking, lovable rogue in a good relationship with his girlfriend, and then goes through the Weapon X thing and gets transformed into...a quirky, wise-cracking, lovable rogue in a good relationship with his girlfriend.
To be fair, the Deadpool movies are firmly in the comedy genre. So, the character stagnation wouldn’t be that big of a problem for me if the movies were funny, but as I mentioned before, I just don’t think Reynolds is that funny. There’s precious little scripted humor in the films.
Now, I only bring all of this up to drive home the point that I really disliked the first two movies, so when I say I was surprised that I liked the third movie...I really mean it. Deadpool’s initial motivations in the third movie...wanting to be an Avenger and do something for the “Greater Good” - while repetitive and basically the exact same as the previous two movies – doesn’t bother me as much because this is where the character should be in his third movie. If the previous two movies had been better, and we saw Deadpool start out as a villain and move into anti-hero territory in the second film, then moving up to wannabe Avenger is the next logical step. But we never got that, so once again, Deadpool’s motivations ring a little hollow since we’ve seen it all before.
Speaking of THINGS WE’VE SEEN BEFORE… I guess this is where I will move onto spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie, yet, I recommend stopping here. Though, if you spend any time on the internet, I’m sure you’ve had nearly everything spoiled for you, already. Regardless, I wouldn’t want to spoil anything because I was genuinely surprised by some of the things in this movie.
In short, Deadpool 3 had some genuinely funny moments, incredibly well choreographed fight scenes, and as expected, Hugh Jackman stole the show with his return to Wolverine. I was pleasantly surprised that Deadpool 3, aka Deadpool & Wolverine, was legitimately half of a Wolverine movie. At a certain point you realize that Deadpool hasn’t been in it for a while and the story just focuses on Wolverine, who I think is obviously the most interesting character if you want to have some emotional depth in your story. There are a LOT of deep cut Wolverine comic book references that I liked seeing. Also, I think this is the only Deadpool movie that truly earned it’s “R” rating.
One final thing to mention, though I don’t particularly care for this multiverse Wolverine’s “origin” for lack of a better word, I did like this movie more than Logan. I know everybody loved Logan, but I thought it was a mediocre send off to both the character and the film franchise. I especially did not like the way they portrayed Professor X. I never got a sense of where or when the+ movie was supposed to take place. It felt very isolated in its world, and I was very disappointed in the third act just having Wolverine fight a clone of himself. The movie really needed a solid villain in it. I get that already wasted villains like Sabertooth and Lady Deathstrike in previous films, but Wolverine has a whole cadre of interesting villains with a grudge that would have provided a little visual flair to the otherwise drab looking film. Wolverine literally fighting himself at the end was a little too on the nose.
Okay, spoilers ahead (and more complaints about bad writing for bad MCU villains). For the rest of the review, please head over to my Patreon!
—Aaron
Welcome to Aaron’s Indie View, my new monthly newsletter, which you can read right here on my brand new Patreon. This whole thing has been a long time coming, but I can be slow to action when it comes to things like this. I work on a lot of different comic projects and it can be difficult to keep track of what I am working on, when it is releasing, and where you can buy it. So, first and foremost, this newsletter will be the best place to stay up to date on all the different comics, crowdfunding campaigns, and any other creative venture I set out to do.
In addition to Patreon, you can find my work at secondthoughtcomics.com, which contains several free digital comics, and a store where you can purchase all the books I currently have available, You can also read this newsletter there! In the future, parts of the newsletter will be exclusive to Patreon supporters, but for now I’m letting it all hang out!
But fear not, this newsletter will not just be all promotion and commercials for my own comics. I also intend to use this space to share personal anecdotes, pretentious musings, and most importantly, foster discussion about OTHER comic books! I work at a comic and game store in my day job, so I read a LOT of comics, and the only thing I like more than reading comics is talking about comics. I do a weekly live stream for Fantasy Books, Inc. on Twitch. You can join us every Tuesday night at 7:30 pm CTS to see me flip through and discuss new comics that are releasing the next day! I intend to use this newsletter to share expanded thoughts on new comics that I am reading, as well as retrospectives on classic comic series (that I am also collecting and reading).
Let’s break down the Patreon rewards! First and foremost, you get this monthly newsletter. You will also get to read my autobio comic, Autographical, as it is completed. I am currently working on issue 3, and have just completed a six page story about an experience I had with a group of Deadpool cosplayers (pictured below)!
I am also going to start re-releasing my very first webcomic, Zero’s Heroes, with added commentary. I started Zero’s Heroes sometime back in 2009, and it ran for over 400 pages before it was put on hiatus so I could focus on printed comic projects. As of this year, Zero’s Heroes has gone out of print (I sold out of my books), so I am going to make it easily available on this Patreon!
Supporters at higher levels will also receive physical mini comics and zines. Last year, I wrote and drew a five page fan comic about Bizarro Superman meeting the Incredible Hulk. Jessica helped with some of the inks and it was colored by Paul Little. I had a lot of fun with it and would like to do more comics like that. For this first month, I will be mailing out the Bizarro Zine to all supporters at the $5 level.
If all that stuff isn’t enough and you are just overwhelmed with the desire to support my comics, you can support me at an even higher tier and receive access to a large selection of my library of work. Don’t want to wait for me to upload pages of Zero’s Heroes every week? Well, here you can get access to the entire series as digital pdfs! Also included are other past comics like, Science Hero, Autographical, and The Amoral Stingray!
That is pretty much everything you need to know about this new Patreon. Thanks for checking it out, and I hope you’ll stick around and help facilitate in the creation of new comics!
Before I sign off, I’ll leave you with a quick comic book recommendation. Has anybody been reading The Forged, by Greg Rucka, Eric Trautmann, and Mike Henderson? Issue 01 came out last year in March, 2023. The latest issue, #9, is due out at the end of July, 2024. I am enjoying this series and make sure to talk about it on my stream with every new issue. The Forged is a sci-fi comic about a squad of female mech soldiers that find themselves embroiled in a political conspiracy involving the military, their magical Eternal Empress, and mysterious aliens that live inside of T-Space, which is the means by which humans have spread across the galaxy.
There are shades of a variety of classic science fiction present in The Forged. Everything from Star Trek to Dune to Warhammer 40k appears to be an influence. This is definitely an adult comic. It is both violent and erotic, though never gratuitously so. I’m not familiar with Trautmann’s writing, but I am a fan of Rucka. If you like his work on books like Whiteout, Queen & Country, and Batman, I imagine you will enjoy The Forged.
Henderson’s art also looks really great on the page. The book is printed at an oversized magazine format, so there’s lots of space (pun intended) for vast, expansive depictions of alien worlds and big action. I really like his character designs, as well. He does a great job of playing with body shapes and sizes. All of the characters feel real to their world. There is a digital sheen across the art, which is not something that I always like, but it works really well for super sci-fi world of The Forged.
I believe the are two volumes available that collect the first six issues. Volume Three should release soon as well, shortly after issue #9 this July. Check it out!
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!
-Aaron
Hello!
If you don’t follow me on Facebook and only occasionally stop by the website to see what’s new then you probably think I’m a fairly inactive person…but I’m here to tell you now that that is NOT the case!
In fact, we just launched our latest Kickstarter to fund our newest issue of The Amoral Stingray! Chris McJunkin and I have wanted to do this issue for a long time now, and we are super excited to finally bring it to print! In this issue our rascally villain, Stingray, faces a new type of superhero, the dreaded anti-hero known as The Sinister Saint! He’s fighting a Holy War on Crime and isn’t afraid to kill in the name of the (edge) Lord!
We even have an incredible variant cover by our friends Mark Welser and Paul Little. They worked up this AMAZING homage to another famous character. This cover is ONLY available in this Kickstarter campaign and WILL NOT be reprinted ever again.
Please consider backing this project and help us bring this book to print. I know you’re going to enjoy it. Thanks for your support!
-Aaron
