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At long last Verse: Book 3 is finally out.

You can buy it wherever books are sold and you can catch up on books 1 and 2 as a webcomic at www.versecomic.com

I always told myself I wanted to do a little write-up once it was done and I guess I will now:

Verse started off as a way to escape the tedium of my office job. A month before I had enough and quit I spent company time pulling up my draft to write during work. Once I left my job I decided I'd use Verse as a way to work on the craft of comics, it'd be a free webcomic that I'd update as best as I could. I'd spent my entire teen life reading webcomics so it seemed right.

A lot happened in between that's mostly just annoying publishing drama. Book 1 was a kickstarter, then it was picked up by a publisher, stuff happened, it returned as a webcomic and after really fighting for it, all three books eventually got printed. Book 3 had been ready to go since spring 2023 and was then delayed many, many times over. That's publishing I suppose.

I think I'm sane enough to realize that Verse was never going to be the next big thing, it was my first real comic and I'm fucking LUCKY it got printed. It's done a solid "OK" and that's good enough. I wish for a lot of things that would have kept readers and fans around but I'm really grateful that there's a handful of people that stuck through till the end.

As for Verse itself, the characters will always be special to me. That was the whole point of writing this big fantasy story. To get to play with my little dolls and make them go on adventures and have their big feelings. I feel distant enough from the project to see it for all it's flaws but still be really proud that I drew and wrote over 600 pages. This series has fundamentally changed me as a writer and artist.

I'm really grateful to it, well to me, for making it in the first place.

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Yeah, Sophie Thatcher would've made a great Emmy Crawford.

Sophie Thatcher characters + hiding behind a tree because she's being hunted in the woods

YELLOWJACKETS (2021—) COMPANION (2025)

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Drew a Robin Hood poster!

Some details:

I've been trying to get back in the groove of doing my inks traditionally instead of digitally:

I did the roughs for this one (pen, black marker, and watercolor) in a sketchbook quite a while back; finals ended up looking pretty much the same:

(if you want this one on your wall, I'm printing some on heavy natural-stock 11x17)

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At long last Verse: Book 3 is finally out.

You can buy it wherever books are sold and you can catch up on books 1 and 2 as a webcomic at www.versecomic.com

I always told myself I wanted to do a little write-up once it was done and I guess I will now:

Verse started off as a way to escape the tedium of my office job. A month before I had enough and quit I spent company time pulling up my draft to write during work. Once I left my job I decided I'd use Verse as a way to work on the craft of comics, it'd be a free webcomic that I'd update as best as I could. I'd spent my entire teen life reading webcomics so it seemed right.

A lot happened in between that's mostly just annoying publishing drama. Book 1 was a kickstarter, then it was picked up by a publisher, stuff happened, it returned as a webcomic and after really fighting for it, all three books eventually got printed. Book 3 had been ready to go since spring 2023 and was then delayed many, many times over. That's publishing I suppose.

I think I'm sane enough to realize that Verse was never going to be the next big thing, it was my first real comic and I'm fucking LUCKY it got printed. It's done a solid "OK" and that's good enough. I wish for a lot of things that would have kept readers and fans around but I'm really grateful that there's a handful of people that stuck through till the end.

As for Verse itself, the characters will always be special to me. That was the whole point of writing this big fantasy story. To get to play with my little dolls and make them go on adventures and have their big feelings. I feel distant enough from the project to see it for all it's flaws but still be really proud that I drew and wrote over 600 pages. This series has fundamentally changed me as a writer and artist.

I'm really grateful to it, well to me, for making it in the first place.

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Happy tenth anniversary, Harrow County

"...to the sweetest girl I know."

(From Harrow County #32. Written by Cullen Bunn and art by Tyler Crook.)

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Good day Mr Flanagan. please what does "the rest is confetti" mean to you and in the context it was used in hill house??

Okay, here we go. Buckle up for a long read.

To answer this, I've got to explain a little bit about what was happening and where I was when I sat down to write episode 10 of The Haunting of Hill House.

Hill House was not a fun shoot. The picture above is from very early in production, when I was still chubby and happy.

It was my first foray into television. I was absolutely terrified that I'd mess it up. So I'd opted to direct all of the episodes myself, figuring that - if nothing else - I'd have no one else to blame if it went south.

It was the most grueling professional experience of my career. The shoot was by no means a smooth one, every day was an uphill battle from a budgetary perspective, and between the three giant production entities involved with the production, I spent a lot of time fighting over the creative and logistical elements of the series.

I began losing weight. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

By the end of the shoot, I had dropped almost 40 lbs.

I was very depressed. Every day was a battle, and for the first time in my career, I wasn't excited to go to work in the morning. We were fighting for basic resources, fighting for the show we wanted, and even fighting amongst ourselves by the end. It was grueling.

We hadn't written all of the scripts when we started production. I believe we had finished through episode 7, but the rest of the scripts had to be finished while we were already shooting.

We'd mapped everything out in the writers room, and I had great support on the other episodes, but I was writing the finale solo. I'd thought I'd be able to juggle it with everything else. I quickly fell behind.

I finally got to the script about halfway through production. I'd work on it between takes at the monitor, and then get home to our tiny rental house in Atlanta, where Kate was waiting with our baby son. (One of the rare bright spots of this shoot came when Kate found out she was pregnant about halfway through production. We even named our daughter Theodora, in honor of her origins.)

I'd typically fall down from exhaustion when I got home, but I had to push through it and work on the script. My weekends were spent shotlisting and prepping for upcoming episodes. We didn't have enough time to stay ahead of prep, so every available day was used for that... I went three months without a single day off at one point.

I'd sit up late staring at the script. I was in a dark, dark place. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and feeling like I lived in an eternal present. Each day bled into the next and it didn't feel like there was an end in sight. That feeling of unreality was heightened because we kept returning to the same sets, same locations, and even the same scenes throughout the 100 shooting-day production. Stepping back into the exact room we had shot in days or weeks or even months ago made the whole thing feel absolutely surreal. Making movies is always an non-linear experience, but this one felt particularly so... it was like the days of our lives were happening to us all out of order.

I remember feeling something like despair creeping into my daily experience on the show. And I remember dwelling on that when I got into the scene work of episode 10.

As I worked through the draft, I recall that despair coloring a lot of what was on the page. My filter was breaking down. There's a monologue at the beginning of the episode where Steven's wife Leigh (played by my dear friend Samantha Sloyan) spews out a torrent of eviscerating insults about Steve's value as a writer. That is just me vomiting onto myself. She was voicing all of my deepest insecurities about myself at the time, and of what I was doing with this series.

She says "Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about, they're real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real - but not to you, is it. Not until you chew it up, digest it, and shit it out onto a piece of paper and even then, it's a pale imitation at best."

This was the mindset I was in for a lot of the shoot. The writing became a reflection of a lot of that turmoil, and I knew who I was referring to in that monologue - I was talking about my family. I was talking about how much of their lives I'd used as building material for this show. I was talking about the fact that I'd lost two loved ones to suicide, and seen what it had done to my mother in particular. And I knew I was using - possibly even exploiting - those people for this series.

There's a lot of despair in this episode. The Red Room, as we conceived it, was a place that would feed upon those emotions. Grief, sadness, loss... those were the real ghosts of our series, and where our characters find themselves at the start of the finale. They're being slowly digested - eaten alive - by those feelings.

So finally, it came time to write Nell's final scene with her siblings. I knew from the outline we'd constructed in the writers room what this was supposed to accomplish - she was supposed to be their salvation. She was supposed to take all of these feelings that we'd been wrestling with and finally provide catharsis... finally say something that would free everyone.

I remember sitting with a blinking cursor for a long time. The Crain siblings had just turned and seen Nellie standing by the door, and suddenly were able to hear her speak. But what should she say? What would I say? What would I want someone to say to me?

What she ultimately says lays bare a lot of what I was thinking about when it comes to grief. It exists outside of linear time, much as I felt I existed at the time. That sense of eternal present, that sense of a nonlinear eternity of moments and memories - it all came out in her speech to her brothers and sisters.

I remember feeling, looking at my insane present and looking back at my past, how strangely overwhelmed I was by memories. That I wasn't experiencing time in a straight line, and hadn't been for a while - for the better part of a year, I'd felt more like I was standing in a whirlwind of moments. "Our moments fall around us like..." Nell said, and I recall sitting back and trying to find the words.

"Rain," for certain, but there was something too uniform about that. The moments of life as I experienced them weren't that orderly, they weren't that small. They didn't fall the same way. Some sailed by, fast and unremarkable, while others lingered in front of me, twisting and stretching. So it was a good word, but not the right word. I left it on the page though.

"Snow" was my next attempt. Better, in that I imagined the snow blowing in the wind, swirling and dancing and feeling more organic. More chaotic. More like life. But for some reason, the word that stuck with me, the word I felt Nell Crain would connect with was...

"Confetti."

And that was because I was thinking not of Victoria Pedretti at this point, but of Violet McGraw.

Violet played Young Nell, and I wondered what she might have said if she experienced time this way. As an adult, Nell was despairing. Nell was overwhelmed. But as a child... there was an innocence to the word. There was a joy to the word.

I imagined moments falling around her, this little girl with the big smile and the wide eyes. Her moments would be colorful. They would be of different shapes and sizes, some falling fast and some falling slow, flipping and turning and dancing in the air, independent of the others. Sparkling, whirling, doing lazy summersaults as they sauntered down to Earth.

I thought of myself, and of the members of my family. I thought of those we'd lost. I realized what I hoped for them, and for us all, in the end... was to look upon that mosaic of experience, that avalanche of days and minutes and moments... and to smile with some of the joy we had as children.

And this, I thought, was something that gave me hope. This gave me a glimpse of some kind of salvation for them. This was also how I hoped my life might seem if I was a ghost - a cascade of color and light and shape and movement, something I could dance in.

So Nell smiled and said... "or confetti."

It stuck with me. The rest of her monologue gets heavy again, and gets to the real point of the show - the point of the whole series, if I'm honest - and that's forgiveness.

I figured the only thing that would let the Crain children out of the Red Room was to be forgiven. I thought of the losses in my own family, and I thought of what I wished for my mother and for my aunts and uncles and cousins and I tried to pour that into her final words.

"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she said, "that's all." And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn't matter. The rest is that rainstorm, or that blizzard, that fell around this one central truth, and maybe built itself in piles around it, to the point we lost sight of it along the way.

And I thought again of that little girl, and almost as an afterthought, wrote "The rest is confetti."

I liked the way it sounded, but I was insecure about the line. I almost took it out, in fact. I remember asking Kate to read the scene and talking about that last line with her. "Is it too cute?" I wondered. She was on the fence. "Depends on how it's acted," she said, and I figured she was right. We could always take it out if it didn't work. The scene could end with "I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all."

Why not shoot it and see what happened.

I turned in the script, we published it quickly so that we could start breaking it down and prepping it. And the next morning I was back on set. I'd deal with episode 10 when it came down the pipe again, sometime in the coming months. We had a lot of shooting to get through before I had to worry about it.

I recall Netflix asking me to cut a lot of that monologue, and I remember them also having questions about the "confetti" line. I pointed out that it didn't cost us any extra to shoot it all, it was only words, and fought to keep the script intact.

Ultimately, they insisted I make a series of cuts on the page. I begrudgingly agreed, but left Nell's speech alone. I made superficial cuts around it, throughout the draft, and even considered changing the font size to fool them into thinking it had gotten shorter (I ultimately was told I wouldn't fool anyone and not to risk starting a war). But Nellie's final goodbye stayed intact.

It must be said - Victoria Pedretti SLAUGHTERED this scene.

By the time we got around to filming it, things had never been worse for the production. There was almost nothing left for a lot of us. Tensions were sky-high, resources had been exhausted completely, and we were all ready to give up.

Filming in the mold-ridden Red Room was depressing, morose, and led to a lot of arguments and unpleasantness. The room itself just felt gross, always, and we were in there for days at a time. The last thing we had to shoot in there was Nellie's goodbye.

Victoria came to set having to push through pages of monologue, and she did so with captivating bravado. I recall being teary-eyed at the monitor watching her work. And when we finally made it to the last line, I watched her deliver it with... a smile. A sincere, innocent, longing, joyful smile. A smile informed by the sadness, grief, and loss of her own situation, of her own life... but a smile that finds forgiveness and grace after all. Pedretti knew how to say the line, and how that word would work.

And as she said it, I knew it would stay in the show.

Over the years, that sentence has become something of a tagline for The Haunting of Hill House. I'm always a bit mystified and touched when I see people approach me with the line on T-shirts, or even tattooed on their bodies.

I started signing it with autographs back in 2020 after enough fans asked me to. Now it's my go-to when I sign anything related to Hill House.

The line, for me, represents a lot of things.

It's about the insane, chaotic, non-linear experience of making that show. It's about trying to find and hold onto joy, even in the grips of despair.

It's about the way the moments of our lives aren't linear, not really, and how we may be unable to understand them as we exist in their flurry. It's about finding hope, innocence and forgiveness in the final reckoning.

And it's about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just... well, it's fleeting. It's colorful. It's overwhelming. It's blinding. It's dancing. And, if we look at it right, it's beautiful. But it's also light. It's tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it's as light as air.

The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

It's the love that stays.

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Arcana Royale #1

My latest comic is finally out today, and I'm so proud!

"Hudson Tremaine is a high-stakes gambler who has won big in her career, but made a lot of enemies along the way. When she gets embroiled in a new, and mysterious tournament named the Arcanos Mysterinos, however, she realizes that she may have bitten off far more than she can chew: her rival players are demons and demigods – and she's playing to save the world!"

I'll share some more art in the coming days~

Written by @cullenbunn Colored by Bill Crabtree From Dark Horse Comics Find it at your local comic shop, or you can order it here:

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Character art of Hudson from Arcana Royale. #1 is in stores now~ Or you can order it here: https://www.previewsworld.com/Catalog/JAN251163

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I’ve just finished this Hellboy commission based on “The Bones of Giants” novel.

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Could you maybe reblog this post if you think respecting trans peoples' names and identities is a basic right and not a political opinion?

No pressure. Just seeking some validation of my sentiment. Due to some. people

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Out of Alcatraz out March 19th!

"The time and place are exquisitely captured by Crook, a versatile artist who is equally adept at thrilling action and more subtle character interactions, and he tracks the fraught emotional journey of these characters with crystal-clear specificity." - AV Club

Out of Alcatraz in stores March 19!

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(an ask from my retrsopring)

Apologies in advance, this is going to sound harsh.

'What is different then?' It's not complicated. A computer is not a human. A computer can't think. A computer can't feel. A computer can't experience. A computer can't learn. To equate a computer's ability to copy and regurgitate data to a human's ability to communicate through art is so existentially offensive as a premise that it's inherently bad faith, even if you yourself aren't asking it in bad faith. You may as well be asking me what's the difference between a plagiarist and a writer, because if that difference between those two things is even entertained as a debate, then either you're being made an idiot or you are indulging idiots. At worst, both.

No one seems to debate this when it comes to the idea of, say, athletes. A machine can ostensibly produce the same results as a basketball player, throw a ball in the hoop and score points against other machines. But that's patently ridiculous, isn't it? People don't watch sports for the concept of throwing balls in hoops, people watch sports for human spectacle and physical ability.

It's a mistake to think art is only about the results, that's capitalist thinking in that only the end conclusion of the process has any value (fiscally or otherwise). Propaganda made by mediocre people who think being an 'idea guy' is the only important part of any project. Art is about ability, it's about expression, it's about making history. It's about human labor and craftsmanship. It's about being alive.

That a creator who is too lazy to respect their own art doesn't have the imagination to be good at it, and also they hate the planet and want humanity to die, ostensibly.

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It is now officially Out of Alcatraz month! Out of Alcatraz is your classic meditation on what it means to be free but overflowing with good old-fashioned American violence. Make sure your local comic book retailer knows that you'd like a copy! In stores March 19th from Oni Press.

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The BEASTS OF BURDEN OMNIBUS is now available at all booksellers, and preorders are going out. The Omnibus will be available at comic shops tomorrow. Published by @darkhorsecomics.

Thanks to everyone who supported the book by preordering through their comic shop or bookshop, thanks to everyone planning to pick the book up. And thanks to those out there trying the series for the first time.

The BEASTS OF BURDEN OMNIBUS collects all the material done in the series so far, almost 600 pages of stories and backmatter material (artist's layouts, covers, variant covers and other neat stuff). Includes the Eisner Award-winning stories, "The Unfamiliar", "Hunters and Gatherers" and "What The Cat Dragged In", as well as the one-shot Hellboy crossover (!).

Beasts of Burden has won eight Eisner Awards and a Harvey Award, and has been nominated for several other national/international comics accolades. For only $30 US you can get everything we've done so far in a big brick of a trade paperback.

Responsible parties are:

Jill Thompson (cocreator/illustrator), Benjamin Dewey (illustrator). Sarah Dyer (co-writer), Mike Mignola (Hellboy creator, aider and abettor), Nate Piekos (letterer), Jason Arthur (letterer) and Evan Dorkin (co-creator, writer, me).

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Another study session is up on my Patreon for Sketchbook Flippin' and Studio Access members! A collection of portrait studies and notes as I continue to do my homework and exercise my drawing muscles.

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FML #1 (Dark Horse Comics, November 2024) variant cover by Alvaro Martinez Bueno