Just Mad Books

When I was approached by It’s Alive! to publish color versions of Breathers back in 2019, I thought, “Why not?” I’d had my self-published collection out since 2011, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to get a wider distribution. Everything was going fine in the beginning. The first crowd-funding was a great success and orders from comic shops were decent (greatly thanks to that sweet variant cover Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt were kind enough to do). The crowd-funding efforts continued for each subsequent issue. Complaints of unfulfilled orders began to surface. I grew more and more frustrated with It’s Alive! (to the point where I had threatened to terminate our “contract”).  The fact that I saw no sales numbers and received no payment at all left me feeling more and more concerned about the future of Breathers. There were new promises made and a deal with Dark Horse was dangled in front of me. I doubted any of it would actually come to light, but I (reluctantly) agreed to keep on going. After issue 7 came out, the man at the helm of It’s Alive! died, leaving the future of Breathers up in the air. I was surprised when I had heard issue 8 had come out. We had one more issue to go. I had already submitted it to be published, but it would never be released.

Eventually, I reached out to Dark Horse and we were able to work out a deal to get the Breathers Collection out into the world. It was a rocky, frustrating road to get to this point, but I couldn’t be happier to have the Dark Horse logo on my book!

If you had been reading the It’s Alive! comics, I appreciate you picking up the series and apologize for not being able to get that last issue out. If you want to read it, here is a link to the pdf:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B2kVkXQX7ehjLKlC3GAskwIcFTWi3hr5/view?usp=drive_link