• Love as a Foreign Language news!

• TCAF 2026 and some picks for you to find

• Kane Parsons and Refusing AI

• Films I’ve Been Watching

Love as a Foreign Language, out July 7th, 2026

Love as a Foreign Language is coming out next month! (By the way, you can still preorder it here, available in both hardcover and as a fixed layout ebook!) This new edition collects all 6 volumes of the very first story J. Torres and I ever worked on. It's got a lot of wonderful changes: hardcover, larger than all the other editions, and with new colors courtesy of my longtime collaborator Wai Khan and lettering by Crank!

It still recounts the Joel’s story, an overseas teacher caught between wanting to go home and wanting to stay to try and be with the love of his life, Hana Song! Love as a Foreign Language also features Korean dialogue, something I still consider a real feat.

To promote the book, the two of us are getting the ole road maps out and getting ready to hit the road! We'll be posting more about our participating retailers, and if you want us to come to your town, have your local comic shop reach out to us!

TCAF 2026 picks

Ringo Award-nominated Fell Hound (fellhoundart.carrd.co) will be at Table 161 B on the 3rd floor selling copies of Funeral Home, Commander Rao, And We Love You, and S.I.R.! (S.I.R. is out through BOOM!Box. 12+, 144 pp, full color)

Francis Lee (leetropolis.com) will be at Table 21 on the 2nd floor with copies of Ami Moon: Galactic Peacekeepers! (8-12, 216 pp, full color)

Matt Daley (@shinypliers) will be at table 13B on the 2nd floor and will have copies of Soft Serve & Nosferatu, which is up for the Pigskin Peters award for this year Doug Wright Awards! (12+ 28pp, full color)

Steve Manale (@dontletsart) will be attending, doing low-cost, low-quality caricatures for attendees! And if you’re looking for something a bit more upscale, Brian McLachlan (brianmcl.com) will be with Steve, bringing mid-cost, mid-quality caricatures!

Looking for more fantastic artists? Check out the floor map!

Kane Parsons and Refusing AI

Parsons (Backrooms) says what we're all thinking, which is that there is no thought in what AI makes, and the images that it generates reveals it's thoughtlessness. And it's not just him: Ronny Chieng, in his address to Harvard's graduating 2026 class, had this to say:

"Look, a lot of other respected graduation speakers in colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master A-I for the future, okay? I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy A-I. Kill it. ... And I know, I know there’s someone sitting out here right now who’s just like, “Well, you know, what about the use of A-I to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?” Well, first of all, shut up, nerd. I’m not talking about that. ... I’m talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models according to a study by MIT published in 2025 in Archives."

Chieng was the only graduation speech to not come under fire. Marisa Kabas noted this in her article when discussing Eric Schmidt of Google and Scott Borchetta (Big Machine Label Group): "The soundtrack of the past week or so has been the boos of graduating college students as out-of-touch adults try to tell them that they need to embrace AI or else." 404 Media even has a compilation of these speeches, which is really fun to watch.

What artists grasp is what Kabas gets to when she talks about Steven Rosenbaum, a media executive that used AI to hallucinate his book, "The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality," into being: "Ronsebaum’s big whoopsie is certainly a warning, but not in the way he thinks. He himself is the warning; a cautionary tale about relying so heavily on a flawed technology that it completely undermines your legitimacy."

Legitimacy is the key word in this sentence for me, and it's one that artists innately understand. Saying something with your whole chest, being all about it, being real, being legit...all of these say the same thing, which is that artists commit to their words. AI has become a way to duck responsibility at an executive level, and people are sick of this kind of cowardrice. They don’t want to see it in their leaders, and they certainly don’t want to see it in their artists.

What Chieng gets at and what artists already knows is this: "The creating is the fun part." It's fun to speak your mind and it's fun to make the work, to discover truths about yourself as you create. This is what Parsons knows, what Kabas knows, what Chieng knows, and what I suspect that you, reader, also know. The fun is in creation and speaking your mind. To paraphrase my friend Jim Zubkavich, people aren't coming out to conventions to shake hands with a computer.

Eight Films I’ve Watched

Other News

You may have noticed the new look and format! We’re trying out some new things to add a touch of fun to our otherwise really dull look. Let us know what you think! With that, we’ll see you in thirty!

- eric