Say hello to House of Twelve Monthly #2

Yes indeedy, after much gnashing of teeth and tearing out of hair, the second installment of House of Twelve Monthly for Comixology's i-device app "Comics" has finally dropped, and it's a doozy. Within its pages, Kate Lacour pontificates upon the mythopoeia and evolutionary taxonomics of fast food chain mascots; Fred Noland brings us the first installment of an ecologically-themed science fiction tale; David Paleo reveals the difficulties and joys associated with uncooperative body parts; Cheese Hasselberger debuts his serial concerning a mildly psychotic gentleman's interactions with the inhabitants of the Hollow Earth; and yours truly begins his serial featuring the misadventures of some thoroughly detestable paranormal investigators. Details and samples can be viewed at the House of Twelve's very own blog, so git goin'!

I think it's a knockout. Kate's story is worth the price of the issue by itself, and everybody is shooting for the moon with a generous helping of long-form serialized narratives. It's actually sort of surprising to me how many Ho12 contributors are using this format for that purpose, so I can't wait to see how everything unspools in future installments.

I do have a minor issue with how my story is presented, in that it seems to have been re-authored by the publisher ("authoring" being the process by which the frame-to-frame transitions are established), so some of the subtler storytelling effects I had built are no longer present. No big deal, it still reads coherently and you can always adjust your settings to view the full pages. Still, we were explicitly encouraged to be creative with the authoring process, and I worked hard to take full advantage of it, so hopefully that won't happen in the future. I should be clear that I'm not ragging on Comixology by any means; with their "Comics" app, they have developed the ideal solution to the tough problem of presenting comics on mobile devices, executed it brilliantly, and are literally giving it away for free. This issue was beset with difficulties all across the board, so I guess we're still sort of on the learning curve here.

My only other quibble lies with the style of my art: not quite lurid and ghastly enough. Expect more aggressively psychotronic graphics in the next installment of "Creeple", in the works at this very moment.