#drivethru comics

[santapau]

My comic Lydia Ray is the deal of the day on Drivethru Comics.

This is a 40 pages PDF comic book, that includes 3 wacky adventures of store windows' decorator Lydia Ray, in various surreal mysteries. It also includes additional texts about the inspiration for these stories, reference pics and process sketches. I put a lot of love into it. I hope you like it!

It’s on sale today, for just $1 here.

[youtwitinmyface]

Alice: New Adventures In Wonderland

The two Lewis Carroll classics, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass are two of my all-time favorite novels, so I was quite surprised and intrigued when I saw this comic. I had to look up the history online to find out where it came from, and there’s not much info, other than back in 1951, some year the original classic animated Disney film was released, a publisher…

[townytowncomics]

Tbh the ultimate pay-it-forward would be someone stepping up to pay off the U.S. national debt. 💰

[undergroundoracle]

New Occult and Paranormal Adventures For Your Superhero Games!

Cypher Shorts: Dark Supers Shorts Vol. 1 is live! 

I'm not going to lie, this is the volume I've been waiting to get out in front of you for more than a hot minute. We're big, big fans of the supers genre in general here at UO headquarters, but the occult/paranormal corners of comics are flush with storytelling potential. Plus, it's full-on fall and we're getting in that appropriately spooky mood. 

If you were a reader of 90s Vertigo comics, you'll undoubtedly see a lot of their influence in this volume, although Kayla went with a more modern/Zach Snyder approach to 'Doom is the Cost of Power' that you're also going to love. 

This was an incredibly fun and refreshing volume to write and I would love to hear how these scenarios play out at your tables in the comments below or on the socials. 

If you're a member of the Sage or higher tier, use promo code 'SAVIOUR_MACHINE' to grab your free copy from the UO store below. (This code will expire when the next volume of shorts drops.)

Read more about what's inside below and then head over and grab your copy at the links.

UO Store | Drivethru

Enjoy and happy gaming!

~ Jess

This Volume of Cypher Shorts Includes:

A Darkening Light: The characters are each a part of the occult and supernatural underworld who have been brought together to stop a fallen angel from opening a gate to a dark dimension. Can they outmaneuver the sinister powereds protecting her before she cracks the door to the end of days?

Doom is the Cost of Power: Years ago, the characters each made a deal that made them the most powerful heroes on Earth. All that was required in exchange for their power was a favor that would be called due sometime in the future. Now, it's time to pay their tab, and it could spell the end of the world they traded their souls to protect.

The Far Side Of Town:  The characters are a team of outsiders who have been called in to deal with Reverie, a powered who has trapped a psychiatric hospital in her dreamscape. Can they get her to release her psychic hold or will they find themselves lost in the psychedelic recesses of her subconscious?

[fantasyfantasygames]

Timebreakers

Timebreakers, Uwe Jones, 2017

A lot of time travel games involve you effectively playing the time cops. You're putting things back "the way they should be". Timebreakers is not that kind of game. Timebreakers is a time-travel heist game where you seek to disrupt very specific events in very specific ways.

See, you can't just go around murdering people. That's going to cause too much change. All sorts of unrelated things go out of wack when big important people, events, or objects ("keystones") go missing. You have goals that involve keeping the good parts of the world in place. You need to be in just the right place, at just the right time, to make the small change that snowballs into the perfect effect. Well, maybe not perfect, but better anyway.

The mechanics for the game are fairly typical for a modern-day expert-level game. You have seven mental / physical / social stats, some skills, and advantages. (No disadvantages in this one.) They're rated 1-20. The system is roll-under, blackjack style. Failures on Stress Rolls (rolls made in combat or under life-or-death situations) cause Stress conditions, which penalize your attributes in specific ways. For instance, the moderate-level Sprained Leg condition penalizes all your attributes in the short term, and your Speed in the long term. There's a bit of a death spiral. There are also Juncture points, which let you do dramatic editing. You build those up by making changes to the timeline.

The mechanics of time travel involve an "operator" in the future pulling you back and forth. It's very Matrix-feeling. The GM always plays the operator, which kind of feels like a missed opportunity. There's often static on the line, and your communications device has to be either in your ear (which means people can spot it) or built into your clothing (which means someone might damage it or take it away), so you can't always jump. It's mostly a mercy-of-the-dice thing. You don't track things as carefully as Continuum does, but it's not as anything-goes as Time Liner.

The art is thin-line drawings of time travelers doing things in the past, sometimes with a chain of them all doing the same thing or reversing it back and forth. Part modern comics, part art nouveau. I think it might be a very-well-employed vector graphics bundle, but I'm not 100% sure. It's very sparse - there are only six pieces throughout the book. The layout is not great. It uses a single column across a full-sized page, which is hard to read.

The book has an antagonist section, with 19th-century stats and directions for how to alter them for previous eras. There are, naturally, time cops to deal with, but one of the potential paths you can take is to neuter them first. The GMs section gives about a dozen different "chains of coincidence" you can meddle with and that's one of them. Meddle with it wrong and you end up having to time-cop yourselves!

Timebreakers is hidden away on DriveThru. There's a typo in the name that makes it unsearchable due to a non-ASCII character.

[r-rook-studio]

Writing and Rewriting Bracknell Horror

So here's a terrible secret: in 2019, hot on the heels of the original Moonlight on Roseville Beach zine, I put some notes for a little adventure called "The Bracknell Horror." I had no illusions that it was a great investigation scenario. Still, it showed off a few things about Roseville Beach, including places and people in the town as well as the queer people who lived/visited there. It went to a location inside the setting without requiring deep lore, added some jokey Easter Egg references to Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness, and included some comically easy to use alien tech.

The problem was, I didn't really like it.

People at con sessions had fun, but there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the scenario itself, and any scenario would have been great in its place. Also, while I like to say Roseville Beach is a game of "horror comedy," there wasn't much actual horror here other than some Lovecraft references. That's also true of my other Roseville Beach scenario "The Haunting of Flora Bly," though the book has four more scenarios that are richer in horror potential.

But this summer, just before running it at A Weekend with Good Friends, I rewrote it. I talked about some of those rewrites on my blog just after the first run-through, but more have come up as I've continued to playtest this.

First, while the initial scenario centered around a wealthy occultist-adventurer named Simon Mathers, the revision has greatly warped him from that initial vision. In the early drafts, he was an occultist willing to give Dreamlands entities the bodies of Roseville Beach residents in return for access to the Dreamlands. In the new one, he's returning to our reality after 20+ years in the Dreamlands, hoping to find a body for himself (the temporary one he constructed is collapsing) and his two Dreamlands familiars.

In the original, the cult-like group of followers worked for Mathers and planned to keep doing so. In the new, none of them like each other, and each of them have their own reasons for working with him (and one might even try to kill him).

Third, I let some of my OSR influences show. Beyond making each of the named NPCs a faction of one, I've also added some NPC rivals (all of whom might end up becoming collaborators) who also all have their own motivations and agendas for finding out what Mathers' cult is up to.

Finally, while the original notes told GMs to pull from the PCs troubles and connections to determine who Mathers' cultists have captured, the new one includes a chance to target the PCs themselves, giving at least some of them a chance to sneak in and explore the Bracknell while the cult is setting up the ritual, adds some specific NPCs the cult targets, asking instead how the PCs and their contacts/troubles connect them with those people, giving their troubles and connections a motivation to insist on coming along whether they'll be helpful or not.

Dai Shugars, Roseville Beach's art director and visual designer, has put together some incredible maps that allowed me to spend less wordcount describing the space and more giving info on NPCs, creating news stories and book snippets that can serve as physical clues, and creating a better sense of how the Doom Clock progresses.

The text will come to Itch for slowfunding next Tuesday, and the final zine will include the adventure, pregens, new strange events that tie to this mystery, and the basic rules of play, so you can try it out even if you don't already own Moonlight on Roseville Beach. Think of it like a horror-comedy investigation version of a Fighting Fantasy Game Book, but maybe gayer.

This is my chance to draft and preview some of what's coming. You can pick up Moonlight on Roseville Beach (Itch | DriveThru | Spear Witch | IPR) and the current two-issue zine bundle (Itch | DriveThru), or just follow-along with the zine project that will get bundled up in Dim All the Lights. Or you can back our upcoming reprint and hardbacks Kickstarter!

[acesincomics]

Ace Characters in Comics: Shen

Shen, a main character of the comic book series The Last Session, is aromantic and asexual.

The Last Session (2021-2022) is a DnD adventure comic about friends learning to cope with all the changes that come from growing up, created by Jasmine Walls @mythjae-blog, Dozerdraws @littledozerdraws, Micah Myers, and published by Mad Cave Studios @madcavestudios.

The Last Session was nominated for YALSA's 2023 Great Graphic Novels for Teens and was named one of NYPL's 2022 Best Books for Teens.

ROLL FOR INITIATIVE Jay, Lana, Drew, Walter, and Shen began playing Dice & Deathtraps in high school. Now dealing with college and all the twists and turns of their lives, their weekly game has been a wonderful constant. But, as college graduation looms and it feels like their lives are all moving down very different paths, Lana’s thrilled to finally finally complete the party’s unfinished original campaign. But when Jay’s partner Cassandra joins the game, Lana refuses to let her inexperience ruin the best part of her week! But in the end, that may be Lana and the party’s undoing…

Read The Last Session: Mad Cave Studios | Amazon | Drivethru | Global Comix | Bookshop | IndieBound [Available from Libby and Hoopla]

Created by

Jasmine Walls: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr | Ko-fi

Dozerdraws: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr | Patreon | Ko-fi

Micah Myers: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Shop

[More ace characters in comics]

[gunkfactory128kbps]

every cartoons nerd that dubs some lame fan comic has the exact vocal intonation of the type of person who complains about every experience they have in the starbucks drivethru

[dataverse-comics]

🌌🚀Armed with superpowers and an array of unique weapons, Datacell battles evil aliens, mutants, and cyborgs threatening our world.🚀🌌

💥Read #0 FREE: https://datacellhq.cfw.me/

💥Buy PDF Comic Links: ✨AMAZON: http://tinyurl.com/Datacell1 ✨DRIVETHRU COMICS: http://tinyurl.com/Datacell1alt

[night-dark-woods]

ID. the reaction image that is a comic of an anon saying something to a drivethru employee who stares at them in shock while holding a drink tray. in this version the dunkin' donuts Ds have been drawn on the cups. End ID.

Hello from Cambridge, where I almost just ran over Elizabeth Warren at the Porter Square Star Market with my shopping cart full of Dunkin brand coffee grounds. Seemed like the kind of thing worth sending to you

[santapau]

My comic Lydia Ray is the deal of the day on Drivethru Comics.

This is a 40 pages PDF comic book that includes 3 wacky adventures of store windows’ decorator Lydia Ray, in various surreal mysteries. It also includes additional texts about the inspiration for these stories, reference pics and process sketches. I hope you like it!

Reviews are also much appreciated! Thanks.

It’s on sale today June 5, for just $2 here.

[unscriptedcomic]

5.5 Goodbye Me Cailinis

A PR stunt, a rebellious musician--and the end of a group?

Today finally answers that question. Chapter 5 ends the first story arc of UNSCRIPTED! O.M.G!!!

Don't worry. There's plenty more of Felix's story left. In fact, I'm seven pages away from finishing Chapter 6.

Thanks for all the support! It means so much to me as an indie artist still trying to find her audience. Thanks for the likes, follows, shares, and comments.

Looking forward to sharing UNSCRIPTED's second story arc, which will be chapters 6-10.

If you've liked anything that you read so far, I just started a blog on behind-the-scenes, spoilers, character sketches, and sharing my art processes on drawing my comic series--Unscripted Comic.

Digital copies of Volume 1 and issues #1-5 are available in my digital shops: Website, Ko-fi, Gumroad, DriveThru Comics. Physical copies are also sold on my website.

See ya next week with the direct aftermath. Some mysteries need to be solved: Who wrote that post? Will Me Cailinis' members hate Felix? What evidence made SSCN think Felix had passed away?

Keep smiling,

Yawatta Hosby

P.S. If anyone's familiar with One Direction, then you'll see my variant cover pays homage to their Four album.

[townytowncomics]

Remember to pay it forward. No matter the cost. Just pay it forward. Stop asking questions.

[thegreatshono]

Resurrecting "Make Comics Not Excuses"

So like.... 10...ish years ago I used to do a blog called "Make Comics Not Excuses." In which I took the reader submitted reasons as to why they thought they could not make a comics and I show them it was just an excuse they were making. I'd then go through how to overcome the problem so they could make comics.

In an age where indie comics were really taking off, showing people that they can be apart of this media I love so much. But it just became too time consuming to write. I'm not great at writing and to make something meaningful to read took me several drafts and edits, and I just couldn't take the time anymore so I slowly stopped doing it.

But now we're in a new age! Comixology, Webtoons, GlobalComix, Tapas, Drivethru comics, as well as other print on demand services has made comics more accessible than ever before, and there are even less excuses! In that spirit I want to bring back my old series, and hype people up to make some comics.

But no one cares about blogs anymore. It's time to update the series for a new age too. I'm going to start doing "Make Comics Not Excuses" as videos on Tiktok and Instagram, and thats where you come in: You need to give me your excuses! Why do you think you can't make a comic book. Or why do you think you can't pursue the creative discipline you like? Do you not "know how to draw"? Do you not have the "right" equipment? do you not have the "best" software? Give me your excuses And I'll start showing you how you can make comics instead of excuses on tiktok and instagram!

Oh I guess I should link to those two huh?

Follow Me on TikTok

Follow Me on Intagram

I look forward to hearing from all of you!

[laurellynnleake]

People looking for primary sources on the Burned Furs:

The Burned Fur's Wikifur page, covering 1998-2001

The Burned Fur's original manifesto (written by Charla Trotman/Iron Spike/Squee Rat)

(6/12/23) Xydexx Unicorn shares screenshots from his personal archive as evidence Iron Spike/Squee Rat contributed art to a "Try Suicide" poster that the Burned Furs distributed at Anthrocon 1999

#ComicsBrokeMe:

(6/11/23) Editor Andrea Purcell describes being "fired" and "blacklisted" by Spike when she asked for a raise to a livable wage and was told to wait for contract renegotiations, also mentions late payments.

(6/11/23) Artist Dechanique @dechanique talks about being overworked and underpaid at ICC, having to fight legally for late payments, and not getting royalties for any reprints. Says she was publicly dragged by them in 2016 after posting about their page rates.

(6/12/23) Artist Kino @kinodraws discusses bad experiences working on Burnout Star with Iron Circus Comics; mainly Spike delaying writing the script for 3 years with poor communication and leaving Kino unable to take the book elsewhere

(6/13/23) Iron Spike argues that Andrea lied about being "fired" rather than "quitting" and doesn't address paying less than poverty wages; ICC members Amanda Lafrenais (Love Me Nice) and Kel McDonald back up Spike but assert the company has a lot of financial issues. No mention of any other artist speaking out about poor wages and late payments. Andrea responds.

(6/13/23) Diana Nock of Girlbot wrote on twitter about Iron Spike and ICC mistreating her while working on the Poorcraft books. Includes underpaying, delayed scripts, late and missing payments. Describes how in 2013 she finally shared with Spike how bad her mental/physical health had gotten - soon after discovers that someone at ICC cut her out of her webcomic creator social sphere by secretly starting a new almost identical Skype group that excluded her.

(6/15/23) Jaquilline Lesnick @jaqqqln (Girly) has reshared her 2022 posts about her negative experiences with ICC, Amanda Lefrenais, and Hiveworks buying out her website Slipshine, telling her side of a notorious confrontation between her and Spike on FB. Points out her original description of Spike cutting her out of the ICC Skype social sphere, and says that Diana Nock was actually the main victim of the exclusion and she herself was collateral damage. Nock confirms, saying she wasn't ready to come out publicly about it when Lesnick first shared the story.

ComicsBrokeMe: Daisy Finch McGuire (Gastrophobia), Matt Wilson (Cartoon Drivethru), and Anne Notation back up previous ICC worker's stories (including the secret 2nd skype chat).

I also did a thread in 2019 analyzing Charla Trotman/Iron Spike/Squee Rat's own words from the time and trying to figure out their involvement. For the record, I haven't found any evidence that they were involved in the transphobic and homophobic hate that took over the "movement" (and their original website has a brief "don't be homophobic" thing in the FAQs)....obliviousally on twitter says she witnessed this at the time, confirms Spike is Squee Rat, but doesn't confirm that they were directly involved in the hate part. In the future, we may learn more from Xydexx Unicorn's archives if he chooses to share them.

FINAL NOTE: I have collected these sources with the intention to archive claims of abuse and exploitation in the indie comics publishing scene. I DO NOT CONDONE harassing Iron Spike or any member of ICC. Period. They do not need to be "punished" or driven from the internet. I also do not endorse calling anyone involved a "sociopath" or "narcissist" as that demonizes people with extremely stigmatized mental illnesses, who already face staggering rates of abuse. Public discussion about workers rights at ICC must stay focused on ENDING EXPLOITATION, and not on punishing ICC's top staff.

I also encourage all non-white people reading this to keep in mind Spike's status as a queer, Black person living in the USA. They've faced a great deal of racist abuse and bigotry over their career, and the nature of the dominant American white supremacist culture means it is far EASIER for non-Black people to believe negative rumors about Black people at face-value. And both Black people and queer people face much more violent repercussions, to both unfounded rumors and rumors based in fact.

We can criticize their payrates, question their treatment of workers, and withdraw support from ICC, without demonizing Spike. Remember that Spike is not a monster you need to destroy to protect white creators. Please read these sources for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

The Facade of Iron Circus Comics and Spike Trotman

I feel like this needs to get some more traction on social media…

#comicsbrokeme trended recently, with comics creators and artists telling horror stories of extreme low wages, cruel bosses, and the constant struggle to make ends meet.

One company, and one person came up in an alarming amount of posts… Iron Circus Comics and its founder, Spike Trotman.

What Trotman has been accused of is not just run of the mill mismanagement or low wages, though they are infamous about underpaying and missing payment dates. They will actively and precisely bully, berate, and mentally destroy creators working under them. Trotman uses their clout as an internet famous comics publisher to keep people in line, and a recurring threat that if creators ever spoke out, Spike would sic their fans on them.

If you ever wondered why so many creators from Slipshine and Iron Circus up and vanished, THIS IS WHY. Several artists and creators have said that Spike Trotman sapped them of their desire to make comics.

This is downright sociopathic behavior to be sure. But then one starts digging into Spike Trotman’s past, and there’s a lot of skeletons in the closet. Squee Rat and Darth Versace were their previous handles on the internet. Squee Rat may sound familiar to people who have heard of the ‘Burned Furs’ movement.

Burned Furs was a puritanical, homophobic, transphobic offshoot of the furry fandom, founded by Spike Trotman, who also wrote the ‘Furry Manifesto’, which outlined their goals of getting rid of pornography, degeneracy, and expression of sexuality in the furry community. They distributed pamphlets at cons encouraging ‘degenerates’ to kill themselves.

A very inconvenient past to have when your brand is leftist and sex positive. Spike very much knows this, and they have tried to scrub all evidence of their past as Squee Rat from wikis and articles about Burned Furs.

Right now, Spike is hoping that this all dies down. In fact, they just had a big party for the success of the Lackadaisy cartoon pilot.

Especially ironic given that Spike once encouraged people to eat one meal a day to make ends meet in the comics industry.

What you can do is make sure this reaches the eyes and ears it needs. Find the dissenting voices against Spike and Iron Circus, and boost them as much as you can.

They shouldn’t be able to hide behind this facade and continue to hurt people.

[mariahlstudios]

Only twelve pages left to render artwork for issue 4! Finally getting this close to editorial after what feels like FOREVER is so exciting. Issue 4 "Olde Brushar" is my longest issue so far with 51 pages of artwork, I can't wait to get it into your hands!

Collect issues 1 - 3 now through Drivethru comics: https://www.drivethrucomics.com/browse/pub/9851/MariahLStudios

Amazon Kindle, and of course locally at Captain Bengal's Comic Cove!

Also get access to previews and goodies by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/mariahlstudios

See you for the stream today!

-xoxo mbl