Think 2026 might be the first year in a minute I don’t do a single comic convention. It was always trending that way and honestly pretty comfortable with it.

Been drawing scenes, posters, and behind the scenes photos for a fictional film series as well as a related fictional director and it’s way past the point of being a productive enterprise. But it’s mega relaxing.

Every rewatch I'm more and more certain Bernard Hill was the best casting choice in the whole of Lord of the Rings.

The Gowrow emerges from its cave.

You start to get the theater kids a bit more going on stage.

I see it’s another weird kinda day if you only see the news for the first time at midnight.

Sitting in a theater for rehearsal in a corner reviewing my lines for a performance. Telling this to myself approximately one year ago and seeing what my face does.

There’s a lot of things I’ve lost any patience for in maintaining polite conversation, but it appears people telling me all the scary things that happen cities is the fastest route to making me go feral.

Conducting lightning bugs.

Action Man Mulder episodes are hardly my favorite but they do offer us a lot of Krycek abuse and that’s not nothing.

Conducting lightning bugs.

Still got one thing releasing soon that I don’t quite believe fell on my lap. “This feels insulting to the guy” writing my name next to his kinda stuff.

I'll also being at the Local Author Open House at the Fayetteville Public Library on December 6! Event courtesy of the fine folks @pearlsbooks.bsky.social of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Hey Springfield friends! Week from today I'll be reading an original story with some visuals as a brief act for the Ozark Jubilee Live Tribute Show at the Historic Fox Theatre! Gunna be a packed night with a lot of cool music and acts! www.etix.com/ticket/p/629...

One of the 2026 goals is a new edition of Eve of the Ozarks. Re-edited and with added material to make a full graphic novel out of it.

I get so grumbly how often the interesting things to talk about in regards to Alan Moore often get buried under “he hates everything” or “he’s a kooky wizard!”

Had a distance learning AP lit class in high school where we got to pick our own books from a list, and my back to back choice of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 did a huge number on my worldview.

“How would he know, Gus doesn’t go online” is not something I ever thought I would hear someone say about me. Guess putting in the hours to undo this curse has been working.

Wrote a little thing about my history with a regional con I frequented before its new ownership. Also Twin Peaks. www.backwoodfolk.com/2025/11/07/r...

That I’ll leave this year with two different variety shows on my resume is definitely one of those things I didn’t plan.

Oh word, you are saying we can run candidates people like and want? Can we do more of that?

Bertrum Strom pictured with artistic interpretation of his sighting of the Pink Eye of Po'Dunk from 2011.

You see the comings and goings of creative trend ultimatums. “Ugh flashbacks are hack tools for dummies” or whatever. But I think every one of those ultimatums is going for the flavor of the week annoyance versus the central problem that any tool’s a hack tool if you are deploying it unconsciously.

I don’t really complain about the indecipherable posts on wrestling nights or whatever video game festival has a bunch of new ads, so I say bring on the baseball posts.

Toby Still Had Honey to Spare. A free Backwood Folk Halloween special. Read the full comic at Backwoodfolk.com/honey

One of those stray thoughts you present like a thesis you've had for years. Today's? Blind boxing or bagging getting more popular as a response to choice paralysis inherent in the age of the streaming/internet infinite library.

I know a lot of comic artists who look at like film composition and cinematography to see what it can bring to their own medium. Absolutely worth looking at the acting in that same degree. Maybe more vitally actually.

“Just like Braum’s” I say watching Motel Hell as Farmer Vincent explains that he only distributes within 100 miles to guarantee the freshest ingredients.

Toby Still Had Honey to Spare. A free Backwood Folk Halloween special. Read the full comic at Backwoodfolk.com/honey

TOBY STILL HAD HONEY TO SPARE. A free Halloween comic special from Backwood Folk www.backwoodfolk.com/honey/

TOBY STILL HAD HONEY TO SPARE. A free Halloween comic special from Backwood Folk www.backwoodfolk.com/honey/

My mom would sometimes just find me in zombie makeup or some costume or another failing to menace goats. Wasn’t even Halloween usually.

I don’t bemoan the loss of features on any social media too often, but some nights are a real “I’d kill for circles” Sometimes you wanna be messy in front of like twenty chill friends and absolutely no one else.

At some point soon spending too much time with my grandparents listening to cassettes of depression era radio is gunna work out for me. This probably isn’t a great sign, but we work with what we get.

They put it in the papers that I love Lost. (And a really lovely write up on Backwood Folk #2) www.nwaonline.com/news/2025/oc...

Finishing out our podcast miniseries on a story of Fayetteville Real Estate, Internet forum beef, and Bigfoot. This one has it all, including a parade of some of the most prominent cryptozoologists and Bigfooters dunking on Fayetteville.

Are they bad at spelling or -like many of us- have they given up fighting an increasingly insane and opinionated autocorrect?

Finding a nice balance of planning my A plots from the get go and just winging the B and C plots to different degrees. Keeps a direction while still allowing me something that can shift and move while I make the book.

Read the first volume of Hobtown Mystery Stories and that comic scratched an itch. Hot dang. Good stuff. Real sense of place in its setting. We love that.

Sometimes I find myself idly thinking about what things would like if Comixology and Comixology Submit didn’t go the direction they did. Sometimes specifically for myself and sometimes for the entire medium.

The Mayor of Po'Dunk.

Coincidentally reading a lot of Charles Portis lately. And that three hour runtime on Blank Check’s True Grit episode isn’t getting any shorter if I keep pausing every time they compliment his writing to go back to reading Dog of the South.

The Mayor of Po'Dunk.

Hello friends! The digital edition of Backwood Folk #1 is now available at an introductory price of $2! That's a 48 page drm-free comic full of ghost town gossip, lights in the sky, and strange shapes behind the trees. Should be great for some seasonal reading! Available at giftshop.backwoodfolk.com

Everyone in my immediate life who had gotten really sick of my bigfoot research phase is gunna absolutely love that I've moved on to digging into ventriloquism history.

I think my storytelling has greatly improved once I got a little out of webcomic model, but I won’t lie, miss the little regular posting thrill of dropping a page every week.

The Cigarette Smoking Man being a failed pulp novelist is such a great character detail that you almost forget that episode's other funny character detail, Mulder's first words being "JFK"

On part three of our miniseries we travel to one of the most popular destinations on the Buffalo River to find Bigfoot, but find some fines instead. Sasquatch and event permits contend this week in Episode 3: BIGFOOT CREEK, the Expedition of Steel Creek. Available where the podcasts grow!

My comic series, Backwood Folk, follows the lives and afterlives of a rural hamlet in the Arkansas Ozarks. Each issue is 48 pages of small town gossip, ghosts, and strange creatures. The first two issues are available in big handsome print editions or digital downloads at giftshop.backwoodfolk.com

I’m not as much angry at older established artists playing with generative AI as I am worried about whatever empty key jingling tech fools me when I’m that age.