I'm gonna need your help.

It's go-time to make some comics of my own!

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 my self 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.

Since then I’ve been incredibly lucky to have worked on the books I’ve worked on, checking off all the bucket-list characters I ever dreamed of; Spider-man, Batman, Daredevil, Wonder Woman, you name it.

I’m fully aware how rare it is to get to draw this guy’s comic!

But the book that I always longed for was Hysteria. 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.

The promo poster for the original 2005 One Man Gang series.

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.

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!

The cover for this new OMG comic!

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.

See this link?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mikehawthorne/hysteria-one-man-gang-ashcan-comic

That’s my hopes and dreams right there.

You can sign up to be notified of the campaign’s launch, but I’d also appreciate it if you helped spread the word. This is just me making this, so I’ll need all of you to help push this out to into the world.

In the immortal words of Deadpool, who I also got to draw…

Thank you!

Mike

PS - On a side note, I came across this…

Pretty cool :-)