Heaven

the story of my new graphic novel

I was a few hours into my quarantine ritual: I had walked the 2 miles to the post office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, waited in line, and deposited my outgoing packages. Now, I was headed to my favorite bench, located in the courtyard of an unused co-working building. It was February 2021, freezing, but routine was what I had. I sat down with my coffee and lavender vape*, took off my mask, and planned to enjoy my next scheduled 30 minutes until I had to clock in.

By this point, the post-project gloom of finishing Maids was past. Now, I was shifting into the next phase: the no-project gnaw. A purgatory of ideas, all failing to launch me into my next comic. Nothing felt right.

Sometimes a comic will just fall out of me. Maids was like that. Nurse Nurse was like that. My Pretty Vampire. With those, it felt like my forehead was a projector plugged into the wall. I was just beaming image and word to page. But then I have the in-between times. I struggled publishing the strips that became The Agency; the anxiety of publishing online really got to me. Operation Margarine was an attempt to both agitate and suture my own wounds. Difficult.

I like to take on other people’s projects during this phase to try to mitigate the gnaw, but it always returns and the only way out is through. It seems to be a necessary stage in my development, and no material distraction can ever take me away from it permanently.

***

the notion

I am a fan of The Weeknd.

He has a beautiful range. I enjoy when he dresses like a Lupin III henchman. I like that he occasionally sings with his hand in his pocket. I think he’s the only one who sounds good alongside Ariana Grande’s whistle register. I used to bike over the Williamsburg Bridge and fly on the downhill to Starboy. But I digress.

Quarantine had given me plenty of time to look at Twitter (pre-X) and apropos of some news item, I kept seeing a resounding sentiment about his music: it was for haunted strip clubs.

I was puffing on my lavender vape.* A haunted strip club? It had all the hallmarks of somewhere I wanted to be in my creative hours: a Russ Meyer premise, an unlimited world. A haunted strip club. A complete sentence. I texted friends. I have figured it out.

Two months later, in April 2021 and after 13 years in New York, I uprooted my life for Los Angeles. Any reliable routine, even it ever being freezing cold again, was over. I welcomed the changes. My heart was overhauling itself, and I’m very, very glad for that still.

And yet I just wasn’t working on a comic. Without accounting for any of the major life events going on around me, I was determined to just tell the story already. Do what I knew how to do. I got started in the kitchen of our East Hollywood rental, drawing on the table. The story that was emerging for Heaven was coming out so hard-boiled. This will be my Sin City!

But then, this girl showed up.

hello, dolly

This character, Dolly, kept demanding to make herself known. But she was so young. This setting was too off-putting for a younger person to operate in. This wasn’t the way things usually went for me when I was writing. Why couldn’t I get rid of this kid?!

It went on this way for, I admit, years. I completed Heaven in July of 2025. That’s a long time to work on a comic, yes. But it was pushing and pulling me hard. I could only work on it in spurts. Dolly was guiding me to remember and translate from some murky past. It hurt!

But I was back.

***

watch me watch me paradoxical aesthetic on you yeah

All that is past, now. And it’s been packaged by the very capable hands of Fantagraphics, and good fortune brought Kayla E. back to handle the design. (Kayla also did The Agency hardcover design.)

This is a weird one. I like weird ones. And right on schedule, my next comic script just fell out of me. Is there a better way to do this? Does it matter?

I will never stop.

You can pre-order Heaven from Fantagraphics now. It releases on 7/7. I hope you’ll read it and I hope you’ll love it.

*Ridiculous.