Issue 3 of Meth: The Immortal has been kicking my butt, but...

... the tables have just turned.

​WAY back in December 2018, I had planned to finish the script for Meth: The Immortal issue 3, and then have it out by the end of February. Here we are in early May, and I finally handed in my final script pages yesterday. What happened? It's a bit of a story in itself.

At the end of issue 2, Methuselah and his buddies set sail from Kuwait to North America, but soon into issue 3, something goes wrong with their plans. I won't say what, but when that happened, it threw my brain for a loop, as if Meth had a completely different agenda, and he was being coy about revealing it to me. 

The key to unlocking the mystery also turned out to be the cause of so many of my problems. It comes in the form of a child-sized coffin, which shows up on the back of a bike in issue 3. This was inspired by my own experience while in Kenya, seeing a man cycle past with a yellow child-sized coffin on the back of his bike. The more I thought about the comic-book-version of that coffin--which was originally included merely as background color--the more curious I became about knowing what was inside. The problem is, it took me nearly three months to answer that question, and then two more months to figure out how that would affect my fictional world.

The upshot is, all that time spent ruminating on this problem unlocked an entirely new dimension to this series that I hadn't anticipated. I'm talking about the mythology that underlies it all and the cosmic struggle in which Meth is about to engage. It's pretty exciting, and you'll get a hint of it at the end of issue 3, but it will really come into the fore in issue 4, which I'm anticipating will be a lot quicker and easier to write--if Meth doesn't kick my butt again!

In other news, once issue 3 is done (a huge chunk of the artwork is already complete), I'm planning to re-release issues 1-3 plus bonus materials in a single volume. That's originally how I planned to release Meth: The Immortal anyway, as a series of graphic novels. Kierston (my artist) already has created the cover for that. And we have a fun cover coming to you for issue 3. In the meantime, here's a thumbnail page from issue 3.