Hey folks!

Last week I dealt with both a mild yoinking of the back and a two-day stomach situation (was I sick, or was there something wrong with the blueberries? the world may never know). I spent the weekend mostly recuperating and am feeling great now. I wasn’t able to finish my next page yet, but I did finish the cover to my next book!

Tina and Ellie Take the Case will be the third collection of Meeting Comics by Andrew Neal. I actually started this cover in 2024(!) and finally figured out how I wanted to finish it this weekend.

The book will collect eight issues of Meeting Comics, from #13 through #20. The previous volumes collected six issues each, so this one's going to be bigger!

Tina and Ellie Take the Case will finish out the gag comic era of Meeting Comics. Through issue #20, every page was a single panel joke comic with a punchline. Starting with issue #21, I started writing longer stories.

I am very proud of my first two books, Meeting Comics, which was published by Adhouse Books, and Clocking In and Selling Out, which I published as Added Value Books, but I really got invested in my own comics over the course of these eight issues. I think this stuff is where Meeting Comics really became Meeting Comics.

When I was working on #12, the last issue collected in Clocking In and Selling Out, my plan was to draw six more issues and wrap things up with #18. I even knew how I was goign to end the series (though I didn't know exactly how I was going to get there)!

That all changed as I worked on issue #13. There were three things that happened in #13 that changed the course of Meeting Comics:

First, I introduced Tori, Val's oldest friend and one of her exes. I didn't know when I introduced Tori that she would be a major character in the series. You'll see Tori on and off through Tina and Ellie Take the Case, as I start to figure out who she is...

...and as Val starts to figure out that maybe there's still a spark there.

Second, Tina and Ellie moved from "supporting cast" roles to main characters of the series. They became apprentice detectives, working under the tutelage of Mitch Cranberry. 

Tina and Ellie aren't the only ones with major storylines in Tina and Ellie Take the Case, but there are two complete mysteries intertwined with the other storylines in the book: 

The Case of the IP Freeloaders: Tina and Ellie investigate the mystery of who had been producing bootleg masks and shirts of Tina's husband Thomas's super-hero identity, The Ribbon Cutter. 

The Case of the Executive Exorcism: Gil, the idiot son-in-law of an evil CEO, has been possessed by a demon, and Tina and Ellie try to figure out what can be done about it!

Lots of stuff happens with these two in this book. In addition to enjoying detective work, Tina and Ellie find out that they enjoy each other's company, a lot, and they get to work possibly screwing up their marriages pretty quickly. 

Third, COVID hit the real world, and it hit the world of Meeting Comics too. When I decided my comic characters were going to have to deal with COVID, that meant throwing out pretty much every plan I had for where things were going to go and reacting more to the real world. This lead to a lot of shakeups in Meeting Comics, as characters lost their jobs, moved in with each other, and one of them even starts an adult entertainment company!

I will be running a kickstarter for this book later in the year. There’s not much work to do on the book itself, but it’ll still probably take me a few months to get it launched. We’ll see!

OK, take care!