§ Nice Art: Jeff Lemire shares a Firestorm cover that he inked over Denys Cowan in his newsletter! Did not ever expect that team-up. B&W above and color by Francesco Segala below. Lemire also revealed that The Fury of Firestorm #1 has SOLD OUT and has gone back for a second printing and will expand from 6 issues to 9.
If you’re into Black Hammer, in another newsletter Lemire teased the return of that series.
I can’t say too much yet, but, in addition to the Crowbound Ashcan, there will also be a huge announcement about the next phase of Black Hammer comics this July at San Diego Comicon.
2026 marks the 10th anniversary of Black Hammer and we’ll be celebrating in style with a major new BH series written by me and drawn by an artist who I have admired for a long time.
§ The Beat has been so swamped! So many things happening, so many projects to help with. Sometimes things fall between the cracks so consider this a catch-up edition of Kibbles ‘n’ Bits:
§ Dren Productions is teaming up with transmedia pioneers Starlight Runner for Deep Down, a graphic novel set in the bowels of NYC. It’s by legendary writer Fabian Nicieza writer and transmedia producer Steele Filipek, artist Felix Ruiz, and art director and colorist Chrysoula Artemis. The series was created by Jeff Gomez, Kay Rothman, Dana Kuznetzkoff, and Mark Pensavalle, and launches as a three- issue mini series. IT also marks the debut of DREN Prestige—a new literary imprint overseen by Michael Dolce and James Mascia.
As for the story, if you’ve ever wondered what is going on down in the tunnels, this is for you:
When a young autistic girl disappears into the tunnels during a violent crime spree, the possible kidnapping becomes a political flashpoint passed down to the motley crew of the little known and marginalized NYC Transit Special Ops. But as they descend deeper into the labyrinth beneath the city, TSO Agents Verge Guerrero, Joe Weber, and their team uncover a far more expansive and unsettling reality lurking in the shadows of the sprawling subterranean grid.
Blending procedural drama with social commentary, at times scathing and poetic, Deep Down explores themes of inequality and the unseen communities that exist beneath the surface of modern urban life. The story also highlights how neurodivergent perspectives can reveal truths that others fail to see.
“Deep Down represents exactly the kind of ambitious storytelling we want to champion with DREN Prestige, our new imprint,” said Michael Dolce, founder of Dren Productions. “The creative pedigree behind this project is extraordinary, and the world they’ve built is both thrilling and genuinely relevant.”
§ Another team up: Publishing consultant Borderless Ink and M&A advisor Ku Worldwide are pacting to provide services that help artists, authors, companies, and publishers grow their businesses. Borderless Ink was founded by former Webtoon rights exec Lara Lee Allen and the company specializes in working with companies – including comic and manhwa studios and creators – to expand their licensing reach. Ku Worldwide is run by longtime publishing exec Kuo-Yu Liang, who works behind the scenes on things like brokering the sale of Seven Seas Entertainment to Media Do International, and other M&As.
The two companies will kick off their collab with a line of BTS books developed by the Korean company CAKE slated for publication in September 2026 from Running Press. CAKE is a global edutech company and language-learning platform known for its deep integration of Korean pop culture. And you can’t get more Korean than BTS.
§ I honestly barely know what to make of this. Just an email from The Thrilling Adventure Hour announcing a May 16th event: a live TV pilot called Spectacular which is about the making of the Spider-Man musical. Starring Ben Feldman, Randall Park (as STAN LEE), Melissa Benoist, Gabriel Luna (AS BONO!), Iman Vellani and many other faces you will recognize.
Stan Lee AND Bono. And it includes puppets.
The Spider-Man musical was the topic of intensive coverage during the early years of The Beat because it is indeed, one of the greatest disasters in Broadway history. Directed by genius Julie Taymor with songs by U2, and starring beloved hero Spider-Man, ON PAPER it sounded like something that couldn’t miss, right? But it did, reader, it did. The show was torn apart in previews, cast members kept getting injured, Spider-Man had problems swinging, costs swung into the stratosphere, and the story somehow ended up being about a creative woman’s mid-life crisis and not Peter Parker.
And I saw it. Live in person. I can never forget it.
Anyway, now there is another stage show about this stage show! If I lived in LA I would be there so fast. I don’t but you can Get Tickets Here.
The complete text:
Spectacular
a staged reading about the disastrous Spider-man musical
Saturday, May 16 7pm PT
attend live or stream on demand
at the Dynasty Typewriter Theater (LA)
Written and produced by The Thrilling Adventure Hour creators
Ben Acker & Ben Blacker
& Liz Hara (Sesame Street)
There will be live scoring, puppetry, videos, and more!
Starring:
Ben Feldman (Superstore), Randall Park (WandaVision), Alan Ruck (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Succession), Melissa Benoist (Supergirl), Mireille Enos (For All Mankind), Iman Vellani (Miss Marvel), Gabriel Luna (The Last of Us), Amy Hill (Magnum PI), Demi Adejuyigbe (Dropout), Craig Cackowski (The Pitt), Cyrina Fiallo (High Potential) & Tom Choi (Squid Game; the PS5 Spider-man 2 game)!
For those who cannot attend in person (like me sob sob ) you will be able to watch a livestream in the future. We’ll keep you posted because this sounds…well, spectacular.
§ Print Mag caught up with Michael DeForge as the prolific cartoonist’s latest, All The Cameras in my Room, just came out.
Each story is more surprising than the next. It feels a bit like “Twilight Zone” meets “Black Mirror” meets “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” meets “Severance” meets Kurt Vonnegut. Tell me, do you consider this satire, or some kind of inner purge of demons, or both, or none of the above?
Satire is a big part of my work, and I lean on humor a lot. I certainly bring a lot of my personal life to the comics as well. Even with the wilder or goofier premises, I try to ground everything going on with human emotions and human stakes. Many of my favorite pieces of narrative art are flexible about tone and genre—Gilbert Hernandez’s body of work or a movie like Johnnie To’s Running On Karma are the examples I often use.
§ The Comics Journal has been turning out banger after banger lately:
• This rare interview with Frank Quitely was so interesting and newsworthy that many news sites have turned it into several news stories. One I haven’t seen: Quietly on the disastrous Jupiter’s Legacy Netflix show, based on the book by Mark Millar and Quitely, which is actually about HAPPY, the show based on the Grant Morrison/Darick Robertson comic:
No, no, of course not. They were like, “You go away and write some new stuff. The TV guys know what they’re doing,” and it was just absolutely such a missed opportunity. Grant Morrison had the same experience on Happy. Happy at its heart has an actual storyline that pays off. It works for a reason and Christopher Meloni, he really got the character and he’s really good at ad-libbing which was brilliant and Grant was super happy with him but everybody else, particularly the writers room, they’re like, “Hey, we can just totally wing this. This is how you get the energy into it.”
Grant said, “No, wait a minute. You can do whatever you like on the branches of the tree, but the trunk has to be like this.” They didn’t take his concerns on board. Then the suits from upstairs come down and go, “Wait a minute, where’s this going? Where did this come from? This isn’t what we bought.” I think there’s a thing that happens when people take comics and it seems to be, with my limited knowledge of film and television, that when people start taking comic books to make them into something else, there’s a disconnect between “here’s this floppy source material over here” and “we’re gonna make something big and brilliant out of it.” Actually, look at what makes that work first and then make that big and brilliant rather than be flat drawings on a page.
As I’m a bit obsessed with Quitely’s work, I also loved this passage:
I feel like, certainly when I was younger, I kinda wished that I could be as ostensibly simple and stylized as Mike Mignola or as loose and gutsy as Frank Miller or as controlled in a 3-D direction way as Dave Gibbons or as experimental as Bill Sienkiewicz. I was always looking at other people thinking I wish I could do this, and eventually your style just kinda comes out. Like your handwriting, you can try and copy somebody else’s handwriting and it always reverts back to your own when you start going faster or concentrating on what you’re writing rather than the way the writing looks. But in both writing and art, what comes out, if you’re being honest, is yourself.
• Also at the Journal: a lengthy obituary for underground legend Frank Stack by John Kelly:
Frank Stack, the cartoonist, painter and educator whose 1964 The Adventures of Jesus is considered by some historians to be the very first “underground comic book,” died on April 12 at the University of Missouri’s University Hospital. He was 88. For decades Stack straddled the fences of academia, fine art and comics; he produced countless oil and watercolor paintings, etchings and prints, and taught generations of students at the University of Missouri, where he taught art and printmaking from 1963 until 2001 when he became professor emeritus. During those years, he also contributed many beautiful comic book pages to a number of publications, often going under the pseudonym “Foolbert Sturgeon.”
• Gina Gagliano checks in with cartoonist Iasmin Omar Ata, 10 years after their Mis(h)adra pioneered the graphic medicine category:
What’s changed since then? I brought up the pandemic, and that’s a huge thing: that has changed a lot of things. I would say, in more recent times, it definitely is easier for people to get their stories out there. It’s very easy to just make your thing and pop it online and get a lot more visibility than when I was making Mis(h)adra and posting it online and such. It was pretty difficult to get eyes on work — social media is not the same as it is now. So that’s really cool. I’m always really for people getting their work out there and getting to be seen and share their stories, so that part is very positive. The downside to that is that making comics, particularly online in 2026 — because a lot of it is very online — is that we sort of have entered this algorithmic culture where things sort of have gotten flattened out, where things are made to be picked up by social media algorithms. So people tend to just gravitate towards making what’s going to be seen, and that’s tough.
• And J.D. Harlock sits down with Bryan Talbot:
You’ve been such a driving force behind the development of the British graphic novel for decades now that it’s hard to imagine a future for it without you. Are you considering putting down the pen and brush permanently, or do you imagine carrying on with serialized issues?
I’m never going to retire. I’ll probably die on the job. Having a serialised comic version of the short stories seemed to be a nice idea, but I’ve not even approached any publishers about it. I envisage doing three stories: the two I’ve written and the one I’m currently working on. If and when they are all drawn, I’m hoping they’ll be published together as a graphic novel, so I haven’t abandoned the graphic novel format entirely. If I can, I might even draw the heroic fantasy story that’s been in my head for several years. I do have a basic structure for the book that I did about fifteen years ago, which would come to two-hundred and twenty-three pages as it stands.
§ Speaking of people who will never give up, Dan Vado, an indie comics legend who founded Slave Labor Graphics and the Alternative Press Expo and ran the event space the Boutiki in San Jose for decades, is now doing a podcast, My Five Minutes:
The first episode, “Ya Gotta Believe! The Arrogance of Creativity,” debuts on [May 4th and serves as both an introduction to the podcast and a fitting starting point for SLG’s anniversary year. In the episode, Vado looks at the confidence, delusion, ego, and blind faith required to begin any creative project — including starting a comic book publishing company in 1986 and somehow keeping it alive for 40 years.
The new podcast also builds on Vado’s previous experience with The Unexpected Mentor, a podcast that explored related themes of creativity, experience, risk, and the unlikely ways people learn what they know. That project helped spark Vado’s interest in podcasting not just as a promotional tool, but as an art form of its own; a place where voice, timing, memory, and storytelling can carry ideas in a way that feels immediate and personal.
“Creativity requires a certain amount of arrogance,” said Vado. “You have to believe that the thing in your head is worth bringing into the world, even when there is no evidence that anyone else wants it. Maybe especially then.”
§ What is The Beat’s favorite nerdlebrity, Karl Urban, doing? Recovering from The Boys and moving on to Mortal Combat. Also being praised effusively by Boys showrunner Eric Kripke:
“There’s this expectation that when you’re… The term is ‘number one on the call sheet,’ which means that you’re the lead of the show,” Kripke explains. “And with number one, like I always say, number one isn’t a privilege. It’s a responsibility. You set the tone. The crew follows your lead. The rest of the cast follows your lead. And I can say that Karl is the best number one I’ve ever worked with in that regard. He takes his role as a leader so seriously in that, when the crew is down, it’s Karl who’s clapping his hands and saying, ‘All right, guys, come on, we can do this.'”
§ Funko is not dead! Their Q1 results showed momentum!
The company opened 2026 with improved first-quarter results as sales climbed and losses narrowed year over year. Net sales reached $200.9 million in Q1, up 5.3% from $190.7 million in the prior-year period. Gross profit increased to $88.8 million, while gross margin expanded to 44.2%, compared with 40.3% last year.
International sales were robust and the Core Collectibles business increased 17% year-over-year. According to CEO Josh Simon, “As we focus on bringing the biggest cultural moments to life, we’re excited to continue executing against our strategic plan, moving at the speed of culture, meeting fans wherever they are and giving them new ways to connect with the stories they love.”
One thing that drove profits: Kpop Demon Hunters, which accounted for 7% of their gross sales.
According to the article, toy companies are excited for ‘26 with strong properties such as The Mandalorian and Grogu, Supergirl, Toy Story 5, and Avengers: Doomsday.
§ I could write a whole week of stories that just deal with toxic fandoms, which seems to have hit new heights, as Vanity Fair reports. That crazy thing is that it’s not even about nerd stuff like Star Wars and Call of Duty. It’s mainstream stuff like The Pitt (a medical drama, you guys, a MEDICAL DRAMA!) and, (shudder) Heated Rivalry.
In isolation, a fanbase turning on something they once loved wouldn’t be particularly notable; ultimately, that’s their prerogative. But The Pitt’s woes are part of a larger wave sweeping fandoms across many mediums and genres, in which relationships that used to be pleasantly parasocial have become borderline disturbing. This is a problem that music fans are well acquainted with; there’s a specific term for diehard fans, ”Stans,” that comes from an Eminem hit about a guy whose obsessive love for Slim Shady drives him to a murder-suicide. Certain stans have earned a reputation for cyber aggression—see: the Swifties and the Barbz.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on Threads lately because, well, it’s fun, but I had to mute the words “gala” “hudson” and “connor” after this year’s Met Gala had fans over analyzing and criticizing every little thing, and then criticizing the analyzing over matters like…the color of the food they were eating? It was unbearable. Threads also got into “RPF” or real person fiction, which is fanfic about real people, like folks who ship Jin and Jungkook from BTS. I’ve always felt this was a bit creepy, and guess what…that has been discourse. Like seriously, it is fun to have hobbies and be a fan of things but get off TikTok and Threads and go outside. Also, literary criticism is just fine, and you can have your own analysis of fictional works, but just maybe, the creators of the works have thoughts about their work that are like….valid?
Anyway, the surge in toxic fandom and extreme parasocial obsession is just another by-product of these chaotic and uncertain times, which were summed up with this diagram which I saw on Twitter, of all places:
It’s tough out there, but you’ve got to be kind, babies.
