SPECTATORS - The First 100 Pages
Plus, your Halloween ghost stories!
Happy Halloween, you.
Brian here, thinking about recycling last year’s costume of One-Punch Man (undisputed king of the bald heroes) for this evening’s trick-or-treating. Are you going out tonight?
Artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon, letterer/logo designer Fonografiks, and I have been releasing this Exploding Giraffe dispatch for exactly nine months now, and I’m proud to share that today we’ve given birth to the 100th page of our serialized graphic novel Spectators (along with a glorious new cover of Val and Sam by Niko), and ALL of our work to date has been conveniently compiled in the below digital collection, recommended only for you mature readers who are cool with graphic sex and violence:
But our epic horror/sci-fi/romance/western/whatever story has only just begun, and we hope to keep bringing you two to three new pages of Spectators every Monday for many more weeks to come.
By the way, if you’re a loyal weekly reader who prefers experiencing our story in smaller installments, we’ll include images of just that new page and cover (and a double-page spread from last week for a little context/spectacle) at the end of this missive.
These comic pages will always be free to read, but if you’d like access to bonus content (including process videos from Niko, never-before-seen scripts and screenplays from me, and our soon-to-return podcast “Mature Readers”), we welcome you to join your fellow giraffes in The Tower.
Tower members also have exclusive access to weekly private chats with Niko, me and your fellow subscribers, as well as unique contest opportunities, like our monthly giveaway of an original page of invaluable hand-painted Spectators art:
We’ll be awarding that oversized masterpiece to one randomly selected Tower member later this week, so now’s the perfect time to join.
Annual membership normally costs $69, but for Halloween week, you can now join The Tower for a whopping 30% off, only 48 bucks and change for the next twelve months:
And one last bit of cool news: Niko recently uncovered a few extra full-color sketches in his workshop…
…so for a VERY limited time, we’re going to reopen our Founder Tier, where you not only get all of the above extra content/contests, but also your very own Exploding Giraffe Prize Pack, featuring a one-of-a-kind Niko sketch, a rare copy of the complete script to Saga #1, and a signed comic from my personal collection:
We only have about a dozen of these $250 Founder packages left, so if you’re interested, act fast, before somebody else steals your treasures.
But what if you’re already one of our more than 10,000 terrific subscribers? We’ll also be giving away a final Exploding Giraffe Prize Package to one of YOU who recommends (or even gifts?!) a subscription at any level to one of your weirdo pals who you haven’t already harassed to read this pervy comic.
Regardless, thank you so much for being here, and I apologize for all of this “pledge drive” nonsense, but your tireless generosity has enabled Niko and me to create our dream work with zero editorial interference while also providing for our families, so we’ll be forever in your debt.
Please let us know if you end up sharing this post with someone in the comments, where I also wanted to ask a Spectators/Halloween-themed question for this week’s chat thread: Have you ever personally encountered what you believe might have been a ghost?
When my wife and I briefly lived in San Diego years ago (before we had kids), I once went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and heard a gentle rapping on the bathroom door before an unfamiliar child’s voice quietly but clearly whispered, “Knock, knock.”
Freaked the fuck out, I flung open the door… but there was no one there, and Ruth was still fast asleep on the other side of our otherwise empty apartment. This remains the only occurrence approaching anything “supernatural” that this relentless skeptic has ever experienced. How about you?
Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful, specter-filled evening, and best of luck collecting every color of rainbow fentanyl tonight.
Your pal,
Brian K. von Frankenstein
And now, Pages 98-100 (and our newest “cover”) for you wonderful weekly readers, thanks again:
I’m gonna switch to yearly after I get paid Thursday I’m psyched! Never had a ghost experience myself I’m pretty skeptical by nature but long story short I’m a recovering addict and this is a humiliating story but my closest thing to a spiritual encounter. I rent the home I grew up in, same one my grandma died it. A few years ago I VERY nearly relapsed; like bought some Percocet and everything my kid was not home and I was seconds away from well sniffing it in my bathroom but my long term gf and better half snaps out from behind a shower curtain and stops me, I was so concentrated on using I didn’t notice her in there and she SWEARS up and down the only reason she was in there is she heard and old woman tell her to go look in the shower- which is exactly what my dearly departed grandmother would have done lol. Anyways didn’t use and now I’m 7+ years and counting clean (maybe) thanks to a benevolent ghost. Sorry to disappoint any scary ghost fans haha
Almost gifted the Tower membership to someone, then decided to upgrade myself to the Founder tier! (I still shared the info, of course).
And for my ghost encounter…Years ago, when I was in high school probably, it was night out and my best friend and I were talking on my front step. Suddenly we heard/saw the bushy-plant things next to the front door shaking and rustling about. It was like a small animal struggling with something, or an otherworldly creature readying itself to hunt its next meal. Either way, what we heard next was etched in our collective memories. We still reference the sound we heard over 20 years ago…NYUK, NYUK, NYUK! I realize this sounds like something out of The Three Stooges but in that moment I nearly shit myself.
Happy Halloween BKV.