Poison Pen Letter - 009 (Patreon)

Parting the mists of time, we find ourselves in the distant past--2010.

My good friend Erin and I are about to embark on long, strange comics journeys with new webcomics. Neither of us is terribly confident, but we decide that the only way to start making progress is to, you know, start making progress. Drawing pages. But actually starting is difficult. We've got our drafts and our outlines and some thumbs and lots of beautiful character art (you know that stage!), but the pages themselves are difficult, because once you're drawn a page, it's THE PAGE. It's as good as you make it. Or to us, as bad as you make it.

So I propose a game to her to kind of get us over ourselves. I'll draw a page of anything, and then hand it to her to draw page two. Much like the Surrealists' exquisite corpse parlor game, wherein you draw one portion of page, then fold it over for your partner to draw the other half, we'd create a story based on what the one person hands the other.

So I drew a knight, and a silhouette, tossed together some hammy fantasy dialogue and slapped Poison Pen Letter onto it as a title. We bat it back and forth a couple times, our webcomics debut, life happens (Erin has a child, I move continents five times). It seems to stall at page 007 (gotta love that hopeful three digit numbering system. Good on Jon, 2010).

But then in February 2017, five years after 007, Poison Pen Letter 008 lands in my inbox. I want to see what happens next, myself, so here's 009. Erin's turn!

You can read everything we have so far at PoisonPenLetter.com! Somehow that domain was free so I bought it last week. My pages are the odds, and Erin's are the evens. We tried to match each other's work a bit so it's a little more seamless, but our approaches are different enough that it should be clear whose page is whose.

Our agreement has always been "do the page whenever you feel comfortable, it's not anything to get stressed out about", so I can't tell you when the next one will materialize (in the past it has been anywhere from three weeks to five years), but when it does, I'll share it with you guys first, and then with the general public later.