“Is IDW’s Black Crown imprint publishing a new comics series by Joe Hill and Martin Simmonds?”: A Paige Potter Comic Book Mystery
Editor’s Note: The following is a work of fiction (except for the factual parts).
A pin held writer Joe Hill’s picture in place as lines of red string bled out from it across the tack board to connect with pinned images of comics editor Shelly Bond and artist Martin Simmonds and the printouts of various online articles. Private detective (and comics enthusiast) Paige Potter stepped back from the board to drink her late-morning glass of whiskey and ponder the clues.
On December 18, 2018, the comics blog MEANWHILE reported that Hill had revealed he was writing a new comic book series; Hill had indicated that Simmonds was the artist. As she sipped her whiskey, Potter wondered why other comics news sites or The New York Times hadn’t also picked up the story.
Below Potter’s broken second-floor office window, cats were fighting over the treasures left in the dumpster.
Potter found it interesting that Bond — the editor of comics publisher IDW’s Black Crown imprint, which features distinctive creator-owned titles like Kid Lobotomy, House Amok, and Assassinistas — had retweeted MEANWHILE’s article. Simmonds was the artist on the Black Crown comic Punks Not Dead, so the retweet could have been just a show of support for the upcoming comic and its creative team. Or perhaps Bond also had a professional interest?
A cat’s screeching interrupted Potter’s musings. Potter yelled out the window at the dumpster cats and got back to work after they had scattered.
The third clue was a May 21, 2019 post from comics news site Bleeding Cool. In its coverage of comics distributor Diamond’s Retailer Summit, the site noted that IDW had revealed that a “huge” creator-owned title announcement would be made at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Hill was acclaimed for his prose and comics work. Could the Hill and Simmonds comic be the creator-owned title that IDW was teasing?
Potter put the whiskey glass down on her food-stained desk and approached the board. Unconsciously, she massaged the scar on her left arm, an unwanted souvenir from her well-publicized confrontation last year with the city’s comics-obsessed “Letter Hack” serial killer.
Potter knew that Hill had originally envisioned his upcoming comic book series as a four-panel comic strip for his newsletter, Escape Hatch. Hill’s hints to his newsletter readers that he was working on a comic strip had even inspired one excited fan to create a humorous comic strip about Hill making a comic strip; despite its amateurish qualities, Joe Hill Makes a Comic Strip was one of Potter’s favorite online strips.
But on May 28, 2019, via Escape Hatch, Hill had shared that although he initially planned the comic to be a four-panel strip for the newsletter, the comic had expanded to an initial six-issue comic book run, and that readers would be “hearing more about it soon”:
“Funny story about this. I started writing a four panel strip for Escape Hatch about nine months ago. Only it all got away from me, and in fits and starts has become a new comic book. I’ve got about three and a half scripts now on a six issue initial run. I thiiiiiink it might be good? You’ll be hearing more about it soon.”
There wasn’t that much time between Hill’s May 28th newsletter and the upcoming July 18th San Diego Comic-Con. Soon, indeed, thought Potter.
Like Simmonds, Hill also had connections with IDW. Hill’s celebrated Locke & Key series (with artist Gabriel Rodriguez), for which Hill had won an Eisner Award for Best Writer in 2011, was published by IDW. As were other Hill comics, including Wraith, a mini-series by Hill and artist Charles Paul Wilson III that expands upon Hill’s prose novel NOS4A2.
With Hill’s past award-winning comics work, along with the adaptation of NOS4A2 into a television series currently running on the AMC network, the possibility that a new creator-owned comic from Hill would be considered a “huge” announcement by IDW was inarguable.
Potter was confident she was on the right track, but there was no smoking gun. She couldn’t ask Hill, Simmonds, Bond, or IDW to confirm her hunch; Potter knew how big this news could be, and if she was correct, she respected the effort to keep things under wraps. Besides, they probably wouldn’t return her phone calls.
And maybe it was all in her head, and she was seeing connections that weren’t there.
Still, Potter was a detective. She opened the desk drawer to retrieve her flask and counterfeit San Diego Comic-Con convention badge (how else could you get access to Comic-Con these days?); she was headed to San Diego to find the truth.
THE END(?)
Interested Hill fans and comics aficionados can sign up for the Escape Hatch newsletter here: www.joehillfiction.com
You can find out more about IDW’s Black Crown imprint here.
The images and text above are the property of their respective owner(s), and are used here for not-for-profit, educational purposes only under the fair use doctrine of the copyright laws of the United States of America.
Although the above story references actual comics creators, newsletters, online articles, comic strips, and tweets, the character of Paige Potter and the incidents depicted in the above story are fictional. Any character resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is coincidental. The comics creators referenced in the above story were not involved in the story’s creation, and any opinions expressed in the story are the opinions of the author.
