Storycomic Weekly Newsletter: August 15th
ALWAYS POSTED A WEEK EARLIER ON PATREON
🚨 Storycomic Patreon Update for Creators 🚨
If you're an author, indie comic creator, game designer, or storyteller looking for more visibility, the Storycomic Patreon is one of the easiest ways to get your work in front of a growing audience.
For just $5 a month (about the price of a cup of coffee), you get some real promotional benefits:
🎙 Front-of-the-Line Recording Access
I’m often booking podcast interviews three months in advance, but Patreon members jump to the front of the line. This is especially helpful if you have a time-sensitive launch, Kickstarter, or new release coming up.
🔗 Permanent Show Notes Promotion
Your website or project link will be included in the show notes of all interviews as long as you’re a member.
📣 Social Media Promotion
We’ll regularly help promote your projects across Storycomic’s social media channels.
And remember, the Storycomic podcast has over 30,000 downloads, so it’s a great way to get your work discovered by readers and fellow creators.
For the cost of a coffee each month, you get promotion, visibility, and priority booking.
If you’re a creative looking to grow your audience, it’s a pretty great deal.
👉 Join us on Patreon and let’s share your story with the world.
Jim Arnosky on nature, drawing, and helping children notice the world
In my newest interview, I’m honored to speak with Jim Arnosky, a Vermont author, illustrator, artist, and naturalist whose books have helped generations of young readers connect with the natural world.
Jim has written and illustrated more than 100 books for children, many of them centered on wildlife, observation, seasons, tracks, birds, bears, reptiles, fish, forests, ponds, and the quiet wonder of looking closely. His work reminds us that nature writing for children does not need to be loud or complicated. Sometimes the most powerful thing a book can do is invite a child to pause, look, and ask, “What am I seeing?”
This conversation is a gentle, reflective one. We talk about creativity, drawing, Vermont, animals, children’s curiosity, and what a lifetime of paying attention can teach us.
Jim’s books have been used in homes, libraries, and classrooms by adults who want children to feel more connected to the world outside. For anyone who loves children’s literature, nature, art, or Vermont creators, this episode is a special chance to spend time with someone whose work has left a lasting mark.
Isaiah Ratliff joins Storycomic to talk The Waterbat, comics, and creative curiosity
In my newest interview, I’m joined by Isaiah Ratliff, the creator behind The Waterbat, a home for comics, writing, blog essays, and what the site calls “stories and other little things.”
The Waterbat has a wonderfully thoughtful creative identity. In the blog post “What is Waterbat?” Isaiah writes about etymology, overthinking, loneliness, connection, art, and the search for good conversation. He describes Waterbat as “a bundle of absurdity, overthinking, good conversation, loneliness, connection and understandings all sculpted into words and pictures.”
That spirit shows up in the comics listed on the site. Murky Waters, the latest story, follows “a raccoon with lofty ambitions” testing an idea with help from a goose. Other listed comics include Plain Unknown, SKP, and The Dowser, with stories ranging from robots and apprentices to friends out past bedtime.
In our conversation, we talk about short comics, creative process, storytelling structure, why absurd ideas can carry emotional weight, and how art can become a way of asking bigger questions without pretending to have all the answers.
For fans of indie comics and reflective creators, this is a conversation worth checking out.
Bill Lutz returns to talk comics, sci-fi, sketchbooks, and creative persistence
Bill Lutz is back on the show, and this is a great time to catch up with him.
Bill is a Vermont-based illustrator, cartoonist, graphic designer, video editor, IT technician, and multimedia instructor whose creative life stretches across comics, design, technology, and science fiction. His website describes more than 30 years of work in illustration, cartooning, graphic design, and video editing, along with a lifelong love of comics and genre storytelling.
His current personal project is Pathways: Before the Return, a giant graphic novel that is part of a larger saga called The Frontiersmen. Bill describes it as a story involving superheroes, romance, politics, intergalactic empires, oppressive religions, and family — exactly the kind of big, layered sci-fi comics project that rewards years of worldbuilding.
Bill also recently received local attention from Seven Days, which profiled him as a South Burlington Staples employee and illustrator who keeps his sketchbook nearby.
In our conversation, we talk about drawing, persistence, comics influences, sci-fi imagination, balancing work with creativity, and why artists keep making things even when the path is long.
Ian Lemke returns to talk Nevermore and American Gothic horror
In my newest interview, I’m joined again by Ian Lemke of Nepenthe Games to talk about Nevermore: A Roleplaying Game of American Gothic Horror.
Nevermore is a tabletop roleplaying game that digs into the shadowy tradition of American Gothic fiction. It draws inspiration from writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, and others — the kind of authors who understood that horror is often rooted in guilt, isolation, obsession, memory, and the things people refuse to say out loud.
The game uses an original card-based system with standard playing cards, setting it apart from more traditional dice-driven RPGs. The core rulebook is listed as an approximately 280-page hardback, with PDF access included for core rulebook buyers.
In our conversation, Ian talks about designing horror that is more than a monster encounter. As he has said, even when there is “just a monster,” the story is often about why that monster exists.
For fans of tabletop RPGs, gothic literature, and atmospheric horror, this is a conversation worth hearing.
Project Update: Revisiting Stag Gem
This week, I’ve been spending some time rereading my old book, Stag Gem. Since I wrote it many years ago, it has been interesting to go back through it with fresh eyes and see what still works and what I might want to change.
For now, I’m simply enjoying the process of getting reacquainted with the story and seeing where revisiting it might lead.
Graphic Novel Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day
One of the pleasures of hosting my podcast is getting to speak with creators about the care and imagination behind their work. Alan Barillaro recently joined me to promote the second Bunns Rabbit book, and he was kind enough to send me a copy of the first. After reading it, I can see why this beautifully illustrated story has found such an enthusiastic audience.
Bunns is born with unusually short—but perfectly functional—ears. The superstitious rabbits in her warren believe her appearance is a bad omen that could bring misfortune to their community. Although Bunns is surrounded by the love of her family, fear and prejudice threaten their home and place within the warren.
Hoping to protect those she loves, Bunns ventures beyond the safety of her burrow. Her journey carries her into the wider world, where the mysterious Spirit Fox and a trail of Monarch butterflies lead her through a series of challenges. At the heart of it all is the idea of a “heartsong”—an inner truth that, unlike spoken words or thumping feet, cannot lie.
That idea gives the story much of its emotional power. Bunns may be small and treated as an outsider, but her courage grows from compassion rather than a desire to prove everyone wrong. Her quest is not simply about finding acceptance; it is about learning to trust herself and recognizing that being different does not make her dangerous or less worthy.
Barillaro’s warm illustrations and graphic-novel-style passages make the world feel expansive and alive. Some pages invite you to pause and absorb the artwork, while the more dramatic sequences give the adventure a cinematic quality.
Bunns Rabbit is imaginative, tender, and genuinely moving. Younger readers will find magic, danger, and adventure, while adults will appreciate its reflections on prejudice, belonging, sacrifice, and family. Having spoken with Alan about his work made reading it especially meaningful, and I’m excited to see where Bunns’s heartsong leads her next.
Personal Update: A Very Productive Week
This was a very productive week, and it feels like a lot of things are finally moving in the right direction.
One of the biggest developments is that we are expanding the newspaper into Danville. That will add roughly another thousand homes to our circulation and bring our readership to more than 12,000 homes. It is exciting to see the paper continue to grow and reach more people, especially after all the planning and work that goes into expanding into a new area.
We also made very good headway on the transfer to our new broadcasting system. Next week, we plan to stress test it by running the APEX system overnight for an entire week to see how everything performs. It is one of those behind-the-scenes projects that takes a lot of time and attention, but we are getting closer to having it fully in place.
eBay, on the other hand, has been basically dead for the past week or so. Not every part of life can be productive at the same time, I suppose. I am hoping things will start to pick up again as we get closer to the end of summer.
At home, I am still working on cleaning out the garage and getting things organized for another yard sale in the next few weeks. It is a slow process, but little by little I am getting through it.
I also had a chance to take Jordan and Elizabeth to see the new Spider-Man movie. After all the comic book “homework” Jordan and I had been doing beforehand, it was nice to finally get to the fun part and see the movie together.
Overall, it was a week with a lot of forward momentum. Between expanding the paper, making progress at the radio station, spending time with the kids, and continuing to chip away at things around the house, I feel pretty good about where things are heading.
This doesn’t mean much to the normal person, but this is the error log. See! Only 1 thing listed! It used to be full! Our new broadcast software
Walking back from watching Spider-man