’22’s been a HELL of a year, gang. I know I say that just about every time I do one of these end-of-year retrospective posts, but when I look back on all the shit we do here in Strangeville on an annual basis, I’m always amazed at JUST how much shit we manage to cram into 12 calendar months!
I told you at the end of ’21, easily Strangeville’s wildest year to date, that the biggest news of my career hadn’t even dropped yet! As ’21 became ’22 I started work on my most ambitious project yet. A 164 page graphic novel with brand new characters set in the Strangeville universe called SPACE WORMS and, gang, let me tell ya, this beast took me ALL FUCKING YEAR to write, lay out, pencil, ink, letter and color. I’m still not finished! I am in the final process and banging out finished pages, but it’s still going to be first/second quarter ’23 before this filthy tome sees publication. I will share a relatively SFW page here for you guys to see how nuts the artwork and story is on this one.
This thing is gonna be nuts. I am SO proud of it and SO ready to try out Kickstarter next year to crowdfund it. We’ve had great luck working with IndieGoGo but it seems like the comic book reach there is limited. We’re going to roll the dice and see if we can brainwash some more helpless citizens into the cult of Strange over on the Kickstarter side. Look for that, as I said, quarter one or two of ’23.
Between pencil pages on SPACE WORMS I even found time to finalize and release the color versions of the Strangeville Comics one shots NEON GUTS and ROCCO AND SASPARILLA’S SICKMASTIME STORY.
While I was in the middle of that madness, I decided to take on an even crazier project as if I didn’t have enough going on with the biggest graphic novel of my career. I’d already signed that TromaNow streaming contract I’d been hinting about so I knew I needed to come up with something BIG to promote the flicks once they dropped on Troma’s streaming platform. The announcement was still months away, so why not DRAW A WHOLE ASS TROMA COMIC. So that’s what I did. I drew a 20+ page TromaNow promotional comic called TROMA COMES TO STRANGEVILLE, printed a fuckload of black and white giveaway copies and hit the road for the ’22 con season with reams of the suckers to give out, and hopefully sign up some new fans to TromaNow. Here’s a look at that book:
It was tough putting SPACE WORMS down for a few months, but a closed mouth don’t get fed and the TromaNow drop was around the corner so we hit the road hard as fuck and preached the gospel of Strange all around the country LIKE WE DO and boy did we bring the heat this time. We launched a brand new line of Strangeville Stonerverse merch and blew wigs clear into the 420 dimension. Peep a few of these fresh designs:
As fall approached we got the call and it was on! Troma dropped COCKHAMMER, NIXON AND HOGAN MEET SATAN and NIXON AND HOGAN SMOKE CHRISTMAS all in one fell swoop with DREAM REAPER and STIFF JOBS to soon follow and the rest of the catalog set to drop in the new year.
After 20 fucking years my lifelong artistic dream had been fulfilled. I was a true blue TROMA TEAM member with my ENTIRE film catalog picked up for distribution by the longest running independent film company in America! What a trip!
With that giant news public, we swept through the remainder of the year dropping Troma promo comics all over the country, screening the flicks at a grip of indie film festivals and generally cavorting around being the weirdo gypsy art lunatics we are.
As fall gave way to winter and the Troma drops continued, I settled back in to my secret hovel in the woods of Strangeville and beat the shit out of the remainder of the SPACE WORMS PAGES which catches us up to where we sit here on December 31st ’22. Another epic year in Strange behind us. With a whole new set of adventures to greet us in the new year. What do we have planned? Stay tuned and find out!
-Kevin Strange 11:09am 12/31/22