Hey, did you also nail this morning’s Wordle on the second guess? An auspicious beginning to what feels like might actually be an excellent week…
Boastful Brian here, grateful to the two readers who made me feel like a big shot by recognizing me while I was on a hot date with my wife at the local grocery store this past Saturday night. Thanks for asking about our superannuated wiener dog Hamburger K. Vaughan, who continues to be living his best life.
Hamburger’s busy (?) assembling the next Saga letter column while the Exploding Giraffe team and I remain hard at work on Spectators, which passes its ninetieth page today.
Thanks so much to my brilliant collaborators Niko Henrichon and Fonografiks for their tireless work over the last nine months, and to YOU for continuing to support us as we create this graphic novel in “real time.”
This experience has been much less lonely/terrifying than when Niko and I spent years working on Pride of Baghdad in a relative vacuum, so we’re in your debt.
Okay, enough palaver, let’s get back to our spectral protagonists Val and Sam, as events over in the living world take yet another turn…
Yep, you don’t want to miss next Monday’s vignette, which as always remains 100% free to read.
That said, we’re eternally thankful to you paid subscribers in The Tower, who not only get access to exclusive bonus content like last week’s killer process videos from Niko, but are also automatically entered in contests like our monthly giveaway to win an original page of hand-painted artwork from Spectators.
Today, one of you generous Tower members will become the new owner of this luscious masterpiece:
And this month’s randomly selected lucky winner is…
Drew S.!
Congrats, Drew, and someone from Exploding Giraffe will be reaching out to you for your mailing address soon.
Lots more cool stuff coming exclusively for our monthly/annual subscribers, so thanks for considering joining up.
This week, Saga Volume 10 finally arrives on book/comic store shelves in multiple languages all around the world.
It’s probably my favorite storyline to date, in no small part because this arc somehow contains the finest work ever from artist/co-creator Fiona Staples (not to mention Spectators’ own Fonografiks, who lettered the fuck out of some musical sequences), so I’ll be very curious to hear what you extremely patient trade-waiters think of our story’s big return.
And stay tuned for your first look at January’s Saga Chapter Sixty-one! No spoilers, but this next “season” of Saga is going to be bananas…
Have you been keeping up with Xanaduum, the mind-altering Substack belonging to legendary creator Grant Morrison?
Recently, Grant’s been hosting what they refer to as a “salon,” basically answering reader questions and/or taking gentle shots at Mark Millar. Fun times!
I’m always happy to tackle any questions you might have in our weekly chat threads, but I realize plenty of you readers studiously avoid all comment sections (normally wise, but we really do have an absurdly lovely collection of folks who post here, so you should swing by sometime).
Anyway, shamelessly stealing a page from Grant, I thought I’d turn this week’s comments into a place for you to ask me anything at all about my past/present/future writing, and I’ll share my doubtlessly fascinating responses with everyone in this Friday’s bonus post, no subscription necessary.
As thanks for helping to generate some valuable Exploding Giraffe content for us, I’ll be giving away a few more signed copies of Saga Volume 10 to several of you who ask the most popular questions (as determined by your fellow readers’ likes), so hit that above comment button, interrogate away, and I’ll answer what I can, cool?
Thanks again for being here,
BKV
Which character death that you've written was the hardest for you to write?
Hamburger has the right idea. I need a nap, got stranded in San Francisco when the Tampa airport shutdown last week keeping me from getting back home so I rented a car and drove to SoCal to see friends.
They convinced me to join them on a camping trip to Utah for the weekend which was an exhaustingly good time.
Now headed back to SoCal through Vegas, fun times.