Yearly 2026 is now available for preorder – both a physical and a digital version. I know, the year has barely started! But I want to publicly commit to a strange and slightly ambitious plan for this issue.
I’ll quote from the description at the preorder link and then say a bit more:
For years now, I’ve been working on these books:
- And One Night More – color, approx. 168 pgs, the story of the story of the Thousand and One Nights.
- A Catalogue of Reasons – b&w, approx. 186 pgs, possibly unrelated stories about Pablo Picasso and his friends. Briefly serialized online, then abandoned and reworked.
- Bloom – b&w, approx. 104 pgs, autofiction about always reading and sometimes loving comics.
- Only Once – color, approx. 170 pgs, two brothers love fiercely. Reworks and completes the story that began in M and N.
These are drafts, but they’re polished drafts. I’d like to read them in print. Maybe you would too. So Yearly 2026 consists of these four books, plus a process zine that tries to say something interesting about chipping away at these projects over the years.
This is a small print run, it will be available in extremely limited quantities and possibly not at all after the preorder period.
“Regular readers” probably know I’ve been editing and reworking in-progress comics, even revising previously published comics, more and more over the years. For these four books in particular, I found myself getting closer to what I wanted with each revision but also unable to reach a stopping point. I wasn’t fiddling, I was finding and attempting to fix real shortcomings that I’d missed on the last read. It’s probably not a coincidence that looping, repetition, and infinite recursion is a theme in several of these comics.
I’ve often wondered what it would take to see my draft work from a new perspective, the way I can see it months or years after it’s been printed and no longer sits inside me. So I considered printing the books for myself, and very quickly that became the idea I’m describing to you now. This is what I’m working on, so it’s what Yearly will be about. It’s working already, in the sense that imagining the work will finally be seen has led me to a few insights, a couple redrawn panels, that I don’t think I would have come to otherwise.
Of course, I hope these works will see print more broadly and in their complete form at some point. No plans at the moment, but that’s always the hope. So maybe you’d prefer to wait and see the finished books in a few years! Conversely it could be that I print the work now and suddenly realize it’s finished already. I’m not sure.
So: four books, accompanied by some ramblings on the process of making those four books. I have a lot of work left to do before the end of the year. Your preorders would be a welcome motivation but either way I best get on with it.