SPECTATORS - Part 47
Plus, the winners of a signed SAGA #61!
Did you feel that earthquake on Saturday? Just a 2.3, but felt like it was directly under our house. Good ol’ Hamburger napped straight through it.
Brian here, shook by the sheer number of new readers who showed up last week, presumably in the hopes of nabbing a signed copy of Saga #61 (available unsigned at your friendly neighborhood comic shop in a few short days).
We’ll give those away in just a moment, but first, it’s time for more Spectators, from artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon, letterer Fonografiks, and Hamburger’s full-time butler. If this is your first time joining us, be warned that many installments (including today’s, excitingly) feature explicit sexual content and/or graphic violence… but if you’re already a reader of Saga, nothing in here should send you to the fainting couch.
When this graphic novel is complete, we hope our planned epic will ultimately be over 300 pages in length, but for now, we’re serializing the story for you—our first audience—as we create in “real time,” with two to three new pages (and maybe one from the previous installment for context) delivered straight to your inbox/app every single Monday, always for free. You can catch up on the first 100 pages here, and the rest in our Exploding Giraffe archives, cool?
Take it away, Sam and Val…
A big-font-level update!
If you’ve been considering supporting Exploding Giraffe and the completion of Spectators by becoming a paid subscriber, THANK YOU, but just a heads-up that we’ll be offering our new, lower rates ($5 a month or only 40 bucks for the whole year) starting closer to the end of this month. We’ll let you know when new pricing goes live.
And if you’re already a subscriber and you choose to stick with us for Year Two, we love you, and you should be automatically renewed at those new rates. We’ve got some extra goodness is store for you O.G subscribers, too. More details in next week’s dispatch.
Our new mega-missives (which will feature free Spectators for everyone AND bonus content and prize opportunities just for you members of what we call The Tower) will normally go out on Mondays, but next week’s debut should reach you on Tuesday, January 31, as we celebrate officially beginning our second year with Substack.
Some huge contests and very fun extras coming up, so stay tuned…
All right, time to give away a few of these beauties:
Holy shit, you had so many hilarious and thoughtful responses to the apparently ancient internet question: If you were an action figure, what two accessories would come included with you?
Here are our five lucky recipients (and their accessories), randomly selected by our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe…
Julie Abella:
A Rice to Riches rice pudding spoon (no lie the best rice pudding ever) - so useful for so many different things. And a hoodie because who doesn’t want something comfy cozy?
Mark Dennison:
My figure wouldn’t come with anything, but the figure’s hands would look like they should have something in them and the blister pack would be shaped as if something should be there. Even in action figure form, my adhd ass would’ve mislaid any form of accessory.
Emma H-S:
A crochet hook and a cat companion. Unfortunately at the age of 20, I’m living the dream life of most grandmas.
Blake:
Refillable mouth goo and hornets. That’s a 1-2 punch that bad guys won’t easily recover from.
Meg S:
Migraine pills and an iPhone loaded with graphic cult and murder podcasts.
Thanks for being one of the few people honest enough to include your iPhone as one of your accessories, Meg S. My action figure would probably have two.
And thanks to the hundreds of you who responded, and are still responding as I type this. Sorry if you didn’t win this week, but I’ll be offering more signed copies of #61 and all future issues of Saga, so don’t go away?
Genesis has been yelling at me to sign some past books and other prizes they’ve been trying to mail all month, so I’ll do my best to help get everything out the door this week. Thanks for your patience with our tiny international operation!
Have time for some more free comics this afternoon?
My good friends at Panel Syndicate (home of The Private Eye by Marcos Martín, Muntsa Vicente and Hamburger’s aforementioned life-debt servant) have always got you covered, with plenty of books by some of the best creators in comics, like the latest Bad Karma:
BAD KARMA is back!
The unbeatable team of Alex de Campi, Ryan Howe and Dee Cunniffe are back with the penultimate chapter of their action/thriller series BAD KARMA!
Trouble follows Cheryl home, and Taneka too... Can Ethan and Sully save them, when they can’t even save themselves?
Panel Syndicate comics are always available for whatever price you can float at the moment (including $0.00), but creators keep 100% of anything you pay them, so thanks for sending something their way if you find a story you love.
Okay, so no Exploding Giraffe dispatch this Friday (though we might eventually do some more Friday posts/contests just for you Tower members), but we’re going to kick off our second year in style with a blockbuster message in your inbox/app next Tuesday.
Before we part, your question of the week (open to everybody one last time): What, if anything, would you like to know about writing?
Look, I’m fucking useless as a teacher.
There are many other writers out there (including several fellow comic creators on Substack), who are much more gifted at offering instruction on this still-incomprehensible-to-me craft/affliction than I could ever hope to be, but I get the impression from our recent chat threads that some of you are current or aspiring authors, so I guess I was curious what stuff I might have picked up over the last 25+ years of doing this for a living that you might… also be curious about?
Please do not ask me to diagram that poorly constructed sentence,
BKV
These fantastic questions are already stressing me out (especially Chip's), but I'll endeavor to answer whatever I can in an upcoming post, thanks!
how write good