My first newsletter! Starring Geof Darrow.

In my first ever newsletter I unashamedly steal some of Uncle Geof's glow.

Right, first things first. I have no clue what I’m doing, so it’s both perfectly possible no one is receiving this or, alternatively, I have accidentally imported every person I’ve ever emailed’s contact details. So, apologies if you’re receiving this against your will and feel free to unsubscribe (I assume this thing has an unsubscribe option!).

If you are reading this and you view that as a positive thing then WELCOME!

I’ve been intending to start a newsletter for over a year as a way to try and pull everything I do, and everyone who likes what I do, together into one space. However, as you may have guessed, I’m not the most technologically advanced chap and every time I looked at all the different newsletter options, costs and features I’d get a stress headache and give up.

Well, you lucky people, today I also got that stress headache but I ploughed on through and settled on this here Substack platform as being the one for me, mainly because it seems quite simple to use and doesn’t currently appear to be demanding I give them any money (keep an eye out for next week’s newsletter where I explain I was, in fact, being charged lots of money for this and the newsletter is now being retired).

OK, so this intro is getting a bit out of hand. If you’re not sure who I am, my name is Jordan Thomas, I’m from England but live in Spain most of the time and I’m a writer. You are most likely receiving this rambling collection of words because you backed one of my comics on Kickstarter (thank you!) and also agreed on the survey to receive this newsletter (double thank you!!).

That comic was most likely Weird Work with legendary British artist and peanut-butter fiend, Shaky Kane, or the collected edition of Frank At Home On The Farm, the series I made with everyone’s favourite shaven-headed, comic book hunk, Clark Bint.

I have written and produced some other comics, which I’ll likely talk a bit about in future newsletters, but let’s not overcomplicate things at this early stage.

With all that out of the way let’s get onto current events. My current events, not the UK’s rapidly collapsing government or anything like that.

I’m back in West Sussex as I prepare to handle fulfilment for my most recent Kickstarter, Metallic Dynamite, a sci-fi anthology featuring the best and brightest of UK comics (plus a delightful artist from Spain). I had previously gotten all big time and started using a fulfilment company but the person running that company quickly realised putting comics in mailers is not the glamourous business it appears from the outside and closed down their company, so I’m back to packing and posting all the books myself like a schnook - next I’ll be eating egg noodles and ketchup. On the plus side, the new books look amazing, courtesy of Comic Printing UK, with covers by Michael Lee-Graham and Russell Mark Olson.

With that campaign reaching its end, I’m heading straight into the ramp-up for the next campaign as I’m nothing if not a glutton for punishment. That next campaign being the final issue of Shaky Kane and my series, Weird Work! This third and final issue is an absolute banger as all the threads set up in the previous instalments come together in a hail of bullets. I finished writing the scripts ages ago, so it’s so cool seeing Shaky finally get to drawing the wild conclusion to our story.

The plan is to launch the campaign in the final few days of August, and like with the previous ones we’ve done for the series we’ll be making a whole load of Shaky’s original art available, so to avoid missing out I recommend you sign up here to get notified when we go live: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/burntbarncomics/weird-work-3

As this is the final campaign for this first Weird Work story we wanted to do something a little special to go out with a bang. What we decided on was having our first variant cover and somehow we managed to get one of the all-time greats of comics to provide the art for it.

So, without further ado, I’m revealing here for the first time, Geof Darrow’s inks for our Weird Work #3 variant cover!

Pretty damn cool, right? Shaky and I are both thrilled Geof agreed to provide a cover for our series. Brilliant colourist Jason Wordie is the lucky guy getting to colour this insanely detailed art masterpiece, and, once he has worked his magic, I will of course be sharing the final cover with you all RIGHT HERE!

I don’t think I can top that, so I shall be signing off, but, hopefully, this wasn’t too bad for a first try, and I’ll be back soon with more Burnt Barn Business.

Thanks for reading.

Jordan