I’ll be reading Hottest Chick in the Game, me and Andrew White’s comic about Drake and friends, at the HiFi Bar in NYC at 8pm tonight as part of Zachary Lipez & Michael Tedder’s Words and Guitars reading series. A whole bunch of other luminaries will be reading too, so heed the words of the man himself and come thru!

The HiFi Bar is located at 169 Avenue A between East 10th & 11th in Manhattan. I hope to see you there!

Andrew White and I made another comic about Drake. It’s called “Murder She Wrote,” it co-stars Amanda Bynes, and it’s based on a true story. We hope you like it.

I’m very, very happy that two comics I did in 2012, “Hottest Chick in the Game” with Andrew White and Thickness #3 featuring “The Cockroach” by me and William Cardini, made it into the Truth Zone gang’s Best of 2012 list (via Simon Hanselmann). If you’re guessing that I frantically scanned this thing to see if I made the cut, you are a good guesser.

Hottest Chick in the Game, the comic about Drake that I made with Andrew White, made BuzzFeed Music’s list of 44 Wonderful Things About Music in 2012. We beat Animal Collective. Thank you to everyone for reading it.

Writing for NBC News’ The Grio, Kyle Harvey takes maybe the most in-depth approach to me and Andrew White’s Drake comic “Hottest Chick in the Game” to date. Check it out.

The Huffington Post’s Priscilla Frank interviewed me and Andrew White about our Drake comic, “Hottest Chick in the Game.” Well, how about that!

Lahav Harkov at the Jerusalem Post and codacarolla at Metafilter enjoyed “Hottest Chick in the Game” and thought their readers might too. I hope they were right!

Art Levy at Prefix and Margaret Eby at the Forward enjoyed Hottest Chick in the Game and said so publicly, for which I am grateful.

Also, Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing linked to my interview with Uno Moralez at The Comics Journal. The more people who see Moralez’s work, the better.

Jenny Nelson at the A.V. Club, Matthew Perpetua at Buzzfeed, Chris Coplan at Consequence of Sound, B. Michael Payne, Maré Odomo, a solid 30, 35% of the people on this Kanye West message board thread, and, uh, IlluminatiWatcher are saying nice things about “Hottest Chick in the Game”.

And it looks like I somehow missed linking to the kind words that Joe “Jog” McCulloch had for “The Cockroach,” me and William Cardini’s contribution to Thickness #3, in his Comic Books Are Burning in Hell podcast with Tucker Stone, Matt Seneca, and Chris Mautner.

Andrew White and I made a comic about Drake called “Hottest Chick in the Game.” We hope you enjoy it.

Sexbuzz
Andrew White, writer/artist
Self-published online, 2010-
Currently ongoing
Read it here

Holy shit. Who is this guy?

Though I first encountered Andrew White’s work through a collaboration with the writer Brian John Mitchell on one of Mitchell’s very tiny minicomics, I didn’t really become aware of White as a creator until a few weeks ago, when (I believe via twitter) I followed a link to his homepage and read this science-fiction sex/spy/slice-of-life webcomic. To say I was impressed would be an absurd understatement. Let me put it this way: I emailed my friends freaking out about him, but refused to tell him his name, because I didn’t want the word going out. A quick google search, in fact, had revealed essentially zero hits. The only person talking about Andrew White was Andrew White, and barely at that. That is nuts.

In Sexbuzz, you’ll see a lot of what you like in the comics of Dash Shaw in the way White fuses science-fictional ideas with formal play rather than with set dressing, which in turn gives him the freedom to pursue human-interest storylines without getting tripped up by excessive visual worldbuilding. You’ll see some Ryan Cecil Smith in how he uses loose, almost ramshackle character designs and a fine sense of movement and momentum in his action sequences to make his world feel loose, large, and full of possibility. You’ll see Paul Pope in his big thick ink squiggles, and a fixation on the role of physical objects as a loci of near-future science fiction rather than a more ethereal digital conception of the genre. You’ll even see some Gilbert Hernandez in the way he occasionally pulls back for isolated, abstracted images of the world around us that suffuses it with a weird melancholy magic.

But beyond all the trainspotting, White’s just very good at making the most of the tools at his disposal. The comic’s long vertical scroll gives you the sense of a long story, a story to get lost in, unfurling before your eyes. His graytones are beautifully applied for shading and contour, but also enhance the impression that this is a dingy, rain-soaked city of the night. He’ll slow time down to a crawl with spread-apart panels that evoke McCloud’s infinite canvas without using it outright, then leap forward in time at a chapter break. And he’s constructed the story itself — about underemployed twentysomethings who steal the works for their dangerous technological sex drug Sexbuzz from a sinister corporation — with ample room to play in any number of genres: sci-fi spy thriller, a satire of the corporate/security state, alt/lit young-person relationship drama, action, romance, even erotica. (The nakedly transactional exhibitionism of that opening chapter is hot stuff.) Like Jesse Moynihan’s Forming before it, it’s the kind of webcomic you dream of stumbling across. Long may it run.

(Here are a few pages.)