Highball
with a Covid Cop chaser.
It's alive! The print version of COVID COP is in my hands!
I can't wait for everyone to see and read my new comic book. If you skipped the Kickstarter, details on how to get copies are forthcoming.
To my Backers, please check your email and/or Kickstarter messages for a private link to the digital version (and don’t forget to fill out your surveys). Rewards for the print version and more is being assembled and mailed to you in the next few weeks.
THANK YOU and ENJOY!
To keep the indie-comix love going, y'all should check out my pals, writer Stuart Moore, artist Fred Harper, and colorist Lee Loughridge’s new graphic novel HIGHBALL (published by Ahoy Comics), of which I wrote the introduction for:
ONE MAN'S BOOZE IS ANOTHER MAN'S SPINACH
The late, great singer/actor Frank Sinatra once said, “I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that is the best they are going to feel all day.”
There is a tradition of famous people and fictional antiheroes who drink alcohol to do things sober people can't. Or won't. Sometimes alcohol is used to parlay pitches and broker deals like in AMC's “Mad Men.” Sometimes alcohol is used to manipulate a deep dark secret between lovers like in playwright Edward Albee's “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” British superspy James Bond liked his martini shaken but not stirred before he imbibed his liquid courage. But like how spinach empowered Popeye the sailor man to punch out Bluto and romance Olive Oyl, it's outer space spirits that make Highball, a champion pilot and earth's finest marksman, the envy of all future humans.
When Brooklyn neighbor and comic book writer Stuart Moore gave me the story he concocted with our mutual Brooklyn pal/artist Fred Harper, I was honored to write this introduction. At first I wondered, “Why me?” Was it because I collaborated with writer Jonathan Ames on a graphic novel called “The Alcoholic”? Was it because they knew that, at age 21, I drunkenly fell off a university library roof and broke both my legs, my drawing hand and lower back thanks to a bottle of tequila and bad decisions … and survived? Or was it because HIGHBALL is about a guy whose aim becomes truer the more alcohol he swallows? That's gotta be why, right? Maybe they saw me in him.
Only when I tried to drink myself into someone extraordinary – tried to get drunk enough to activate expertise, to hone hyper focus, to spawn superpowers – it didn't quite work out that way. Most times I get inebriated, I feel like Calvin AND Hobbes in Iron Man armor. Sometimes I'm the funniest guy in the room. Other times it reduces my chronic body pain and grants me the ability to dance like Prince (RIP). But not this time. While reading HIGHBALL, I experienced a super-surreal, psychedelic blackout. You know the kind. Remember Friday nights at college? It felt like a bourbon binge of epic proportions that would make Bacchus blotto. I still don't know how I wound up wearing a muumuu and a pair of mental ward green flip flops during my walk of shame. I was supposed to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Become a hero like Highball where alcohol is more virtue than vice. Alas, I'm not made of the same stardust.
By page five of HIGHBALL, I started to feel a little woozy. By the end of chapter two, I had double vision. And instead of getting a bite to eat or consuming a pint of water, I continued to gulp this sci-fi slapstick cocktail made of an ornery crew, imperial aliens, icky birds, futuristic slang, Sta-Hard Armour, Nega-Bombs, and a crypto conspiracy that veers into interstellar hijinks and a galactic revolution that fans of Star Trek and Star Wars will grok. A story where an ensemble of characters float in and out of gravity-challenged spaceships like they're in a drunken stupor while our protagonist, a daydreamer or just plain hungover, sucks the teat of cosmic moonshine to gain laser-focused purpose.
When I was a kid, I grew up in a building on the Upper West Side of NYC. The janitor stank of cheap gin but always had a smile. When he made brief attempts to get dry, he was shaking and otherwise useless. He needed alcohol in order to do his job. And maybe that's the point of HIGHBALL: a non-judgmental comic book about the things we need to do in order to get things done. Whether you need to mop a floor or detonate a bomb that destroys a star, sometimes it takes five percent alcohol (or more) to make you one hundred percent proof.
So, before you indulge, eat something hearty, drink lots of water between chapters, and secure a recovery sponsor. Just in case.
– Dean Haspiel, creator of Billy Dogma and The Red Hook
January 2023
In case my intro got you a little tipsy, here is the official solicitation copy:
Guardians of the Galaxy meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide for “a world of laughs and no-holds-barred satire” (ScreenRant). Meet Highball, the best shot in the galaxy, with one big problem: he can only hit the target when he’s dead drunk! In his quest to save the galaxy—or maybe just do his job—Highball faces off against a fierce but alluring bird-warrior, a disturbingly racist A.I., a crypto-obsessed fellow pilot, and, of course, his own shameful inadequacies. Collects all 5 issues of the comic book series written by Stuart Moore (The Zodiac Legacy) with art by Fred Harper (Snelson) and colors by Lee Loughridge.
You can learn more about HIGHBALL and order it HERE.
Here are two lovely pages from HIGHBALL...
I will be a guest at the Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase on Saturday, April 22nd from 11am - 7pm, located at St. Mark’s Comics, 51 35th Street in the Industry City Courtyard, BK/NY — with copies of Covid Cop for sale! FREE admission.
Also, this weekend, my gal/painter, Jen Ferguson will be opening her Brooklyn, NY atelier for DUMBO Open Studios! Come see & buy her new amazing art!
Finally, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my Nightwork Studio partner-in-crime, Whitney Matheson! You make the uncertainty of creativity a space worth inhabiting and conquering on a daily basis. Thank you for your encouragement, intelligence and faith.
Love, Dean
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That introduction got me spinning 🤣🤣