Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Image, Oni Press | Tagged: kickstarter, mike hawthorne

Mike Hawthorne To Finish Hysteria: One Man Gang After Twenty Years

Mike Hawthorne tajkes to Kickstarter to finish Hysteria: One Man Gang after the first two issues were published twenty years ago.

Published Mon, 09 Sep 2024 08:00:20 -0500

by Rich Johnston

Comments

Mike Hawthorne has risen to new prominence recently, drawing DC Comics' ongoing Batman series alongside Jorge Jimenez and written by Chip Zdarsky. Also known for Deadpool, Superior Spider-Men, The Un-Men, Queen & Country, Ruule, Conan, and Three Days In Europe, now he is jumping off and going back to something he left off quite some time ago. In a new Substack post, he tells us;

"I've decided to follow up my run on Batman with something new, but also from the past. I'm returning to my indie roots with a creator owned book, Hysteria: One Man Gang. I started a run at a comics career with my series Hysteria, I did so with an "ashcan" mini-comic. It was more proof of concept than anything to answer, "Could I actually make a comic, from soup to nuts? I wrote, drew, lettered, copied and stapled this little bit of love myself and dropped those comics off at any comic shop in Philly & York PA that would let me. Every comic I've done grew out of that first comic."

Hysteria was also published in 2004 from Oni Press as a graphic anthology, a selection of short stories, and then for Free Comic Book Day as a flipbook, Hysteria: An Uzi On The Island by Mike Hawthorne on one side and Sharknife by Corey Sutherland Lewis. Image Comics then published Hysteria: One Man Gang #1 and #2 in 2006, but never the concluding #3 and #4.

"The last book in that series I tried to make was One Man Gang, a story about the gang war that breaks out on this little fictional Caribbean island. The plan was to make a 100 page fight comic, featuring Bruce Lopez the One Man Gang accidentally starting a gang war that spans the length of the entire city it takes place in. I started strong, making it to issue two, before life kicked the seat out from under me. Indie comics are hard to sustain, and I had to cut the book short. So Hysteria: One Man Gang went unfinished… That was almost twenty years ago. I need to finish it."

But it won't be coming from DC, Oni or Image Comics…

"I also need to finish it the way I began, independently. I'm not doing this with a publisher just yet because I want it to start the way I started this book way back when; small and personal. I want it to be an "ashcan" so it feels like the beginning of this crazy run at comics again. Doing it independently allows me to personalize each comic in a way that I can only do by making and distributing it myself. The idea is to remake that original comic from scratch, with all new art and tweaks to the original story. I'm going to bring all the comic-making know-how I've learned over the years to bear on this! I'll be using Kickstarter to get it going, launching a new campaign early this week. As of the time of this writing I've drawn the 12 page comic I'm planning on releasing, but we have plans to expand the page count using stretch-goals."