Since last summer, I've been secretly working on a new comic with Marcos Martin, for his Panel Syndicate digital platform and it's out today. Right now. Close readers will have noticed me mentioning a secret project with one of my favorite artists here and there, and this is it. Marcos has been agonizing over every detail of this book, and doing what I think is the best work of his career, and it's totally unlike anything he or I have done before... so I'm really pleased we're finally getting it out there.

Of course we didn't know we'd be releasing it during a global pandemic, but honestly every new movie or show that's getting released right now feels like a gift to me, since we're trapped at home (I even watched the new episode of Tiger King that's just interviews about how famous they all are now) so I hope our comic can give you some escape for a little while... Which is always my hope with a new comic, but you know, especially now.

The plan is to release the chapters digitally as we finish them, and then put out the whole graphic novel from IMAGE in a beautiful hardback edition (with lots of extras) for comic shops and bookstores.

I describe FRIDAY as Post-YA, which is a genre that doesn't really exist. But it's about an 18 year old girl who grew up as a teen detective, fighting crime and exploring occult mysteries, the sort of Watson to her best friend's Holmes. It's an idea I've wanted to explore for a long time, to take that concept of the teen detective, but then let them grow up and have all same problems we all do, and encounter a much more dangerous world. So, kind of a horror story. I think one of the first things I said to Marcos was this book should feel like Lovecraft's New England is colliding with Edward Gorey's.

As you can see, Marcos and Muntsa have been doing an incredible job on the art, and here is Marcos talking about his process:

I had been wanting to experiment a bit with my drawing style and get away from my comfort zone for a while now, contemplating the possibility of cross-hatching, a technique I’ve never really looked into. So when Ed pitched me the idea for FRIDAY with its mixture of Edward Gorey and Lovecraft set in a New England-ish town in the late 60s/early 70s, I was surprised to find how perfect it was for what I was hoping to develop. It drove me to look into comic book artists and book illustrators I had always liked but never had found a way to incorporate. Artists like the aforementioned Gorey, who is probably not only the strongest influence in the character designs but also conceptually, in the overall visual mood and atmosphere of the book. And also Tove Jansson, Crepax, Matsumoto or Harry Clarke among others have been a constant reference in my struggle to find the right balance between the strong and simple black and white areas and the more intricate linework.