Hello, Moon Gazers!
In September 2019, while recovering from surgery to remove a malignant tumor from my kidney, I started this newsletter as a way to share my poetry.
During the pandemic, I began experimenting with using collage art to illustrate my poems, which turned into a new phase of life where I became a poet-cartoonist making poetry comics for fun and very little profit 🤣.
On October 14, 2024, I published my first full-length poetry-comics collection, Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy.
It’s a collection of three science-fiction prose poems set in the near future. You can also think of them as short stories about loneliness.
Today, I’m sharing one of the prose poetry comics from that collection, Moon Miner. The whole comic is only available to paid subscribers, but the first few pages are free for everyone.
If you would like to support my comic-making journey, you can become a paid subscriber to this newsletter, buy a digital or physical version of one of my books, or share this newsletter with the people in your life who might enjoy such things.
Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy is available as a PDF in my online store for just $4.75.
It’s also available in paperback or deluxe hardcover here.
I know ads and invitations to buy can be annoying; however, it’s only through these occasional invitations that I’m able to raise enough funds to continue doing this thing that you (and I) love. Otherwise, I would need a second job as a barista or something else I’m utterly unqualified for and incompetent at.
About the Making of Moon Miner
For Moon Miner, I collaged a combination of public-domain NASA images from the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s with my own collage illustrations.
After reading about some billionaire’s plan to open a lunar mining operation, I wrote this poem. I asked myself what a company town would look like on the moon? I imagined an entire world, but it centered on the heartache of one miner in particular. Maybe someday I will return to that world, but for now, Moon Miner is the closest you can get to that dystopian place.
At the time, I was also captivated by the moody beauty of Tom Gauld’s graphic novel Mooncop. This story is a kind of homage to that book, the Apollo program, and the Depression-era book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by photographer Walter Evans and writer James Agee.
Remember to be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
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