Raising Adolescent and Baby Comics
Double the Pleasure Today: Mindset + Forever Forward
Hey, it’s Zack!
Not much new stuff to report, that I can talk about! LOL. I’m deep in putting together several new series, while wrapping old ones, which is kind of like getting a teenager ready for college while changing diapers on a baby. Not that I have a teenager in my life, but I’m trying to create an astute metaphor here. Metal Society is getting ready to go off to college, ie graphic novel form, and my work is done, short of hosting it for holidays. Break Out is studying for finals and getting ready to graduate, and Mindset and Forever Forward, well I guess they are still in high school and I’m just trying to make sure they get through it okay. Lots of lettering checks and making sure they are on time. Then the new babies are all getting ready to walk soon, so yeah, being a comic creator with old and new projects is a weird thing. Definitely tricky to switch back and forth. Nonetheless, we get some mind control and time travel today!
Today, MINDSET #4 is out, from Vault Comics, with some incredible artwork by John Pearson, flat assists by Jimmy Savage, letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, edited by Adrian Wassel and Dershing Helmer, design by Tim Daniel and this amazing variant by Conor Boyle. So, if you have been reading, I am very excited about this issue, because I feel that it truly encompasses the metaphor of how technology weighs on us and controls us. Ben and his friends have launched Mindset to epic proportions, and this is the payoff of seeing how it affects the world. It was important to us as creators to keep the story as based in reality and as grounded as possible, not sci-fi or futuristic, but very much in the today, so that this metaphor would be seamless. Mindset is using crazy powerful mind control, but it mirrors tech companies today in its viralness and domination, so the parallel is there - whether a tech company has sci-fi mind control or ordinary today mind control, the result is the same. So it’s a lot of fun to explore all that, while doing the character drama and the thriller stuff.
Then, Scout Comics Forever Forward #2 is out, by myself, Arjuna Susini, Brad Simpson and Jim Campbell, with edits by Andrea Molinari, designs by Tim Daniel’s Second Rocket and some amazing covers by Skylar Patridge and Mateus Manhanini. I’m also very excited about this issue, because we are finally full steam ahead into the future, and that’s the fun of this concept. The idea here was not to just go from one random future setting to another, but to use settings that were 33 years apart, to sort of, tell the story of the future. What might our future hold? Sorry, I’m a bit cynical about it all. I do believe we have a real civilization crash/correction coming, although maybe it won’t be as bad as this. And robots, AI, yeah, maybe. So it’s fun to frame it all in a future historical context, exploring our possibilities while also telling this adventure story.
My updates are the exact same as last week, maybe I need to start to have coded updates like all those other creators. Project Mayhem is doing X and Project Cinderella is doing Y. I don’t know, I could probably tell you the names and it still would be meaningless until you see more. But here are my future updates again:
I’m headed to ThoughtBubble which is November 11th-12th. I’m in the Redshirts Hall at Table 23.
After that, November 16th is METAL SOCIETY TPB!
Oh wow, look at that - November 16th is also MINDSET #5 and FOREVER FORWARD #3!
BREAK OUT #4 is coming! We are shooting to make that happen December 7th. This is the finale in the series, so to all the fans of the book who are patiently waiting, I promise it will be worth the wait and thank you for your patience.
Oh, I can tease there is some major Hollywood stuff going on in the background. But you’ll just have to guess for which comics. Can’t wait to update you more on that stuff!
So definitely check out Mindset #4 and Forever Forward #2 today!
And thanks for reading!
Zack Kaplan
10.19.22