Upsetting Magazine #77 is available free! Download the complete PDF here!

I’ve recently fallen in love with old school, magazine-sized, anthology comics. Savage Sword of Conan was my first brush and first love with this format, but since then I’ve discovered a whole world of comics magazines. Perhaps basic, but I’m especially fond of the Warren magazines, Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. Honestly, it’s a bit of a shame that these magazines don’t have a larger mainstream following. Some of the best artists doing their best works can be found in this format, and that continues to be true today with magazines like Shudder and Vampiress Carmilla.

Anyway, suffice it to say, these magazines have broadened my understanding of the medium, and have driven my tastes in the last few years. So, naturally, when it came time to making a comic of my own, I thought it would be fun to not just make the comic itself, but also to wrap it, along with some prior work, into a magazine format that spoofs and honors the Warren greats.

Upsetting Magazine #77 is the result. It combines my old Inktober story from 2020 with my newly created 89 page sci-fi epic and my 24-hour Comic Book Day project, into a single issue. Additionally it has all the accoutrements of the form, including a letters page, editorial column, subscription forms, and advertisements real and fake. As a complete package it’s pretty neat!

The best part is, in a few days I should receive physical proof copies from the printers. That’s right! The ultimate form of this comic will be an actual print magazine. I’ll update this post with pictures once I have them (and if they are good!). If the proofs are good, I plan to print a limited run and send copies to family and friends. If it’s the future, and you didn’t get one, email me!

Anyways - more to come! Stay tuned.

Update Nov 14, 2023

A few weeks ago I received proof copies of the magazine. Since this was my first ever self published thing, and because there are about a thousand ways to mess it up, I was a bit nervous to see these. Surprisingly, there were no major errors. Really, my biggest complaint was just that the paper quality was too good, not quite fitting the low-quality stock of the Creepy and Eerie magazines I was trying to emulate. But other than that, I think they turned out great.

Soon after I got the proofs, I sent one of them to a comic book YouTuber I follow, Robert Norton, who offered to show off the book in his Indie Spotlight series. Well, he loved the book, and dedicated a whole 1-hour long video to it! And the video was quite an ego boost too. The things he loved about it were all the things I was hoping to have done well. To see him call out the work that I’d so specifically focused on was super validating, and generally made me feel better about the whole thing.

Robert has a ton of nice things to say throughout the whole video! If I ever try to make a kickstarter for this book, I’m putting these on the campaign page:

• “it makes me want to draw”
• “when I got this book I was playing video games…I started flipping through this book, and I got engrossed. I shut my game off and I kicked back on the couch and I just read the whole thing”
• “the story telling is almost perfect”
• “it’s disgusting, and it’s perfect, and I love it”