Introducing 'The End Times'
Part comic, part newspaper, all absurdity
As I write this I am sipping beer from a boot. I’m at my local watering hole (bet you’d like me to spill my secret spots, wouldn’t you?) drinking a fall beer in the dead of summer. Despite being a summer baby—born June 26, to be exact—summer is my least favorite of the seasons. Some people get seasonal affective disorder (or SAD) in the winter, but I usually get SAD in the summer, though I prefer to call it MAD, for mother-fucking affective disorder. Summer usually means long days of heat and sweat and humidity, especially here in Portland. Typically, I feel lazy during these days, finding it impossible to stay focused on creative work when I am too busy worrying about the river of sweat rolling down my back. It’s hard for me to feel creative when I’m physically uncomfortable. (Now, mentally uncomfortable is where it’s at!)
All this is to say, despite hating summer and generally being less creative in the summer, I’ve been busy, mostly with a comic project—the focus of this week’s Substack. I’ve been hinting at this for several posts now, but with Rose City Comic Con around the corner, I’m thrilled to officially introduce: The End Times.
Readers of this Substack and friends of mine who don’t zone out at my first mention of comics know that my buddy
and I worked on a comic project last year called Rodente’s Pizza, wherein we created six pizza-related zines, which we debuted at the 2024 Rose City Comic Con. Our table was made to look like a pizza place, you know, with your checkered table cloth, pizzas (zines) served on paper plates with packets of crushed red peppers and parmesan cheese. We sold stickers and even pizza pins! The idea was to transform our presence at Rose City CC, specifically within Artist Alley, into an immersive experience. In a word: a gimmick. And it was such that people either got it or they really did not get it. Which was fun. We loved it and we had a good time.Continuing with that immersive experience, we wanted to do something new, again, something that debuted at Rose City Comic Con here in Portland. And sure enough, we fell upon the idea of newspapers, familiar territory for me as a former journalist.
Pretty early on into coming up with the idea, before we even had a name for this thing, we knew we wanted it to be focused on some uniting event, something that was the focus of this newspaper, something we could write to and create from. Given, well, the state of everything right now and it feeling, in many ways, like the end of the world, we thought it should be about that: the literal end of the world, and this paper would be the last paper to come out before the Earth’s final days. So we settled on this idea: Due to the cruelty and hubris of Earth’s many nations, but specifically the U.S. in this current moment, the literal Four Horsemen have emerged, bringing about death, disease, and the end of the world. This paper, The End Times, was born from the various disasters with a mission to bring “clarity to the calamity,” as editor in chief Cornelius A. Wembley often says.
The paper, which will be debuting and selling at Rose City Comic Con, is the final issue, and covers everything from fleeing billionaires seeking refuge from nuclear fallout, a package detailing the history and backgrounds of each of the four horsemen, a feature about what it’s like living as a lizard person, a crossword, a horoscope, comics, and more. It’s truly ridiculous and absurd and everything I like about writing and comics. I got to exercise some rusty layout skills, something I haven’t quite done since my newspaper/magazine days, and I got to write and illustrate more work. Like last year, we’ll be selling a few stickers and ancillary merch. Our intention is to make our table feel like a newsstand. I was even able to secure newspaper box, which we intend to use to house our papers and add to the gimmick.
It’s been a blast working on all of this, and we hope to see you at Rose City Comic Con, if you are able to drop by! If not, you can follow us on Instagram.