Time in comics is relative
Where I've been. Where I'm going.
Welcome back.
So, another year. Hasn’t it gotten off to a great start.
Not a lot I can do about any of that, so I’m going to selfishly talk about my work and hopefully shed a little light on the way comics publishing schedules work.
Here’s a handy little graphic I put together with every piece of my work that saw some form of released in 2025.
We have:
Skin Police vol.1 #4 plus the collected edition
Skin Police vol.2 #1-4
Epitaphs From The Abyss #7, where I had a 10-pager, plus the collected edition that features that story
Hello Darkness #8, where I had an 8-pager, plus the collected edition that features that story
The collected edition of our series Mugshots
Exorcism Island #1-3
The collected edition of Flash Gordon Quarterly containing an 8-pager I wrote.
Not a bad collection of work for a calendar year, but what I think some of you may find interesting is that almost none of it was actually written in 2025.
Skin Police was commissioned as 8 issues all the way back in Summer 2023 and I had drafts of all the scripts completed by Summer 2024. I continuously go back and edit and was still making small tweaks on the final issue up to it going off to print back in November, but the bulk of the work was done over a year and a half ago.
Mugshots of course is collected work that was released in 2024, and written way, way before that. The Flash Gordon story was also something done in 2024.
I wrote my Epitaphs From The Abyss story around Thought Bubble 2024, whilst the Hello Darkness script is even older than that, having been written in Spring 2024.
In fact, looking at my files, the three issues of Exorcism Island that got released last year where actually all written in 2024, with the final two issues yet to be released getting their first drafts in early 2025.
So, that’s it. Not a single thing I wrote in 2025 has been released in 2025. Kinda weird.
Obviously a major part of this is that it takes way longer to draw a comic than write the script. But something the average reader may not be aware of is just how far in advance publishers are planning, with it not being unusual these days for there to be 18-months to two years between signing a contract with a publisher and the first issue being released.
I’ve already written first drafts for three unannounced 4-issue miniseries for three different publishers but there’s currently no guarantee any of these will be released in 2026, one for sure is slated for 2027.
This disconnect between when things are written and when they are released creates two quirks. One is that the marketing cycle for the work means I tend to be promoting and doing interviews for stories I wrote several years ago. And secondly, it can appear that it can appear to the outside world that I have loads of work, when in fact I had a decent amount of work over the past 18-months but it’s all long finished and the money spent and, as is the case currently, I’m just focused on getting more work to keep paying the bills.
One of the very cool things about comics is that you can write something and an artist can be working on it the next week, however, in reality the majority of the work you see in the new release section is a snap shot of what that writer was scribbling away at a couple of years ago.
So, I hope you’re all excited for the things I’m working on currently which, may, if you’re lucky, see the light of day before the end 2027.
That’s all for now.
Stay safe out there.
Jordan