I'm a writer of comics + more, best known for my horror/medical drama series WITCH DOCTOR (Image Comics), as well as my work on Hellraiser, Doctor Who, Godzilla In Hell, and more. This is where I post things I like, and talk about my work!
This is an excellent video essay on "ecosystemic horror," brought to you by the always great Curious Archive.
And this is an upcoming game in the same vein. It looks like The Last of Use meets Annihilation (the film). Very excited about it!
Don't miss the Gameplay Trailer for The Florist, a classic survival exploration adventure game developed by Unclear Games. Players will traverse a town overgrown with deadly yet beautiful flowers. Solve ingenious puzzles, defeat horrifying enemies, and uncover the mystery behind a plan to create new life in the most inhuman way imaginable. The Florist is coming soon to PlayStation 5 (PS5), Nintendo Switch 2, and PC (Steam).
a tiny heist went down to rescue Rise and now he's being taken everywhere by Reid Wiseman because he's extremely important (he was supposed to be left on the craft, he has instead been adopted)
This looks like AI "art," but it's actually a postcard from before 1914 of a French battleship named the Charles Martel. This is a "pre-Dreadnought" battleship, aka what battleships looked like before they figured out what battleships looked like.
To go along with yesterday's comic about the elusive model ship builder who crafted the majority of pieces in the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, here's my accompanying Artist Statement. This piece articulates some themes I've been chewing on for a long time, digging into the complexity of revering symbols that have radically different connotations for different groups, pushing back on the assumption that handcrafts and niche hobbies are dying out, and making space for grief and humanity within the confines of institutional displays. Enjoy!
The Scale of a Man: Artist Statement
I joined the crew of my first tall ship at seventeen. I know more than most the temptation to cast a vessel as the hero of the story, but itās a lie. We name them, adorn them, and rely on them, but ultimately ships are tools enlivened by the people who use them. They encompass exploration and cultural exchange, escape and immigration, enslavement and genocide. Rather than flattening the ship into a hero, I want to examine the ship as a vessel in every sense of the word, one brimming with discoveries and losses alike.Ā
In her essayĀ The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin invites us to explore the implication of the container as the oldest human invention. What would it mean to acknowledge that we have carried sustenance and stories in baskets, nets, and bottles for far longer than we have centered narratives around a Heroās Journey built on aggression and conquest? āItās hard,ā she admits, āto tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then anotherāā but the essay encourages us to try.
Whether framing the hull of a ship or the panels of a story, we delineate the things we love. It is an affection that cannot be rushed. I was lucky enough to learn from many model ship builders in the course of creating this piece. Their generosity, enthusiasm, and expertise helped me appreciate whatās poured into each miniature vessel, and to recall something I need to keep close in my own practice: there is value in doing things that defy efficiency. These are fields where monotony walks hand in hand with craft. Some people throw their hands up and bemoan the death of such practices in the age of AI, but I believe weāre headed toward a resurgence in valuing the things machines cannot do.
There is nothing more human than dying. Steeped in my own grief at the loss of my father, I found my way into a story that took me places I couldnāt have foreseen. Early in the research process, I read that the colonists aboard theĀ AnneĀ slept below decks in suspended wooden cotsātheir similarity to coffins a reminder of how often such voyages become a passage to the underworld. Every journey requires a type of death. We leave behind our former selves, hoping to meet some new incarnation on the farther shore, but the past always comes with us in one guise or another.Ā
We donāt know what became of theĀ AnneĀ in the end; her own death, whatever that means for a vessel, went undocumented. Sometimes such losses are inevitable. But the containers we build, whether they be ships, comics, or museums, offer us a chance to see ourselves woven into the minutiae of the past. It is a form of immortality, one that relies on engagement, imagination, and tenderness, and it is always worth reaching for.
Small Spells: Softly, Your Life Becomes Enchanted by Lida Pavlova
is a really delightful... and yes, casually magical book.
For me, this relationship with the spirit world expresses itself in folklore, and in small, peculiar rituals, and in allowing myself to be exactly as strange as my heart wants me to be.
If you've played Kentucky Route Zero, you know Junebug:
Junebug and Johnny are two mechanical musicians. They change their appearances often, but Junebug consistently boasts a half-shaved hairstyle while Johnny wears dark sunglasses and a flattop.
More specifically... you definitely know this. One of the most breathtaking sequences in the history of video games.
My point is: This week, I learned that Junebug has an album! I'm listening to it right now. It's great, surprising no one! You should definitely check it out. :)
Magic thrives on the mean streets of the city, gliding between towering skyscrapers and hidingĀ in the shadowed depths of the subway lines.
Gungtavvy, Aelari, Glistrel -- faeries both benevolent and benign populate this imaginative catalogue of urban fantasy creatures.
Originally written for the 2025Ā Gothic Grimoire, hosted byĀ Emma Grier,Ā A Darker Shade of FeyĀ is a system-neutral supplement featuringĀ ten new varieties of faer-folk found only in metropolitan settings. Suitable for any modern campaign,Ā Ā this 24-page full-color booklet details their habitats, appearances, and abilities, as well as listing offerings thatĀ mightĀ help you get on their good side.
Inspired by the work of Katharine Briggs, Andrew Lang, Brian Froud, and Alan Lee.
Available on itch.io, and well-worth your time! Undines of glass! Full of cool ideas!
Inā 1606 a devastating pestilence swept through London; the dying were boarded up in their homes with their families, and a decree went out that the theatres, the bear-baiting yards and the brothels be closed. It was then that Shakespeare wrote one of his very few references to the plague, catching at our precarity: āThe dead manās knell/Is there scarce asked for who, and good menās lives/Expire before the flowers in their caps/Dying or ere they sicken.ā As he wrote, a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern seas. Its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Dante; its great-great-grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above them the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.
It's from a great little essay about Greenland Sharks by Katherine Rundell (2020). The audio version (included with the article) is excellent, too.
...No, not regular space pirates. I mean pirate radio stations, in space!
...Oh, that doesn't sound very interesting to you? Then take a look at these:
Those are two types of Maunsell Forts, defensive sea towers built during World War II by the UK. These forts had great names, like Fort Roughs, Shivering Sands, and Sunk Head! They were decommissioned and abandoned in the late 1950s... only for several to be taken over by pirate radio broadcasters in the '60s! And the story of pirate radio in the UK in the '60s and '70s is bananas. Some broadcasters on the forts fought actual battles with each other to control them.
O'Rahilly attempted to storm the fort in 1967, but Bates defended the fort with guns and petrol bombs and continued to occupy it.
He got off scot free, because this happened in international waters. Another guy got killed in a fight over pirate radio ā though his death was ruled self-defense by the court.
So imagine this all in space!
After the Dominion War (Shadow War/Galactic Civil War), you have little Deep Space Nines/Babylon 5s/Imperial battle stations that are abandoned and get taken over by fucking SPACE DJ PIRATES. Who wage their own little wars against each other, while dropping sick playlists, as the authorities throw up their hands.
I think it'd be cool. It doesn't feel like a "me" idea though, so I probably won't write it myself. š¤·š»āāļø If you do anything with it, please tag me?
(Radio Free Death Star!)
EDIT: I figured out a couple potential ways to do a short or flash fiction story on this subject last night... but the "space pirate radio DJs" concept is still sitting right there for anyone to use! š
"Cool and Sexy Asian Girl and the Tourist are alone except for all the people in the room with them."
"Termination Stories For The Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist" by Isabel J. Kim is an excellent short (5,960 words) story that Clarkesworld magazine published in 2022. The audio version (attached) is also excellent.
It's cyberpunk... or it's a meta narrative about self-aware characters navigating their way through a cyberpunk city and a cyberpunk story, playing the parts they have to to keep the story on the rails, and to stay in the roles and the tropes they've come to enjoy.
Like old Gibson by way of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
(Or something.)
Itās a tautology. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl has to do the things she needs to do to keep being Cool and Sexy Asian Girl, or else she stops being Cool and Sexy Asian Girl. She stops knowing about nightclubs only identifiable by a red lantern. She stops being able to saunter in heels. Itās like how the city stops being the city and becomes a different city if the flickering flames of the neon billboards all go out.
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