When I started Yearly in 2018 I wrote a few paragraphs about the project and its goals. Those goals have not changed but they’ve shifted and developed slightly. That seems worth capturing in writing. It’s been on my mind.
So: Yearly is a “one-person anthology” that I publish every year and that I plan to publish for as long as I can. Until I die? I think that even if I ended the series after ten or twenty years, the shape of it is affected by me saying, to myself and to you, that as I write this I have no intention of stopping. It’s funny, as I reread that 2018 description I notice I don’t mention the idea of the one-person anthology. I’m pretty sure I had this in mind at the time? But now I’m wondering what an issue of Yearly would look like, would feel like, if it only contained one story…
For the first few years Yearly contained every comic I made that year, but as I started to develop a sense (which I don’t think I can really articulate) of what comics were “right” for Yearly and also as I began to feel that many longform comics required much more than a year to be publishable, it began to contain a selection of my work. Still the majority of it. A representative selection, maybe.
I try to make every issue cohesive in and of itself, as well as a coherent articulation of what the past year meant to me. It’s also begun to feel like part of the point that sometimes I can look back and feel I was able to do this (2020, 2022) and other times the issue feels more haphazard (2021, 2023). I work hard on the ephemera.
This is also a long-winded way of saying that Yearly 2024 is available for preorder. I’m still working on it, but for whatever reason the shape of it came together early this year. So I know the stories it will contain even if I haven’t finished those stories yet. I’m pretty sure this will be the cover.
