SAN HANNIBAL goes semi-live on JD’s new site. Bookmark it, leave a message, print out the pages at home and fold them into little origami rabbits and leave them on local DJs’ turntables. Schedules and swag-related information to follow.

SAN HANNIBAL, for the uninitiated, is a pop pulp mystery comic co-written by both myself and JD Smith, who also provides the art, lettering, distribution, and de facto final cut. I’ve see the whole of the first finished chapter, and believe me, it’s more than worth keeping tabs on. 

I’d also like to point out that at one point, back when it was still called AVERY, the project was all kinds of DOA. This was about a year after JD asked me to write something for him, a year spent brainstorming on the book’s distinctive look and refining its influences. Supposedly. (You can read about that here, if you can stomach a slightly younger Dan’s staggering hubris.) I’d written through issue three and JD had drawn all of issue one, but the lines we thought we’d had on publication had all gone dead. We opted to pursue a different project, which would also eventually come to naught and Avery was left for the crows. I moved on — to revisit it was to remember a lot of rejection and time wasted, like old emails from someone who used to not hate you. JD didn’t. He saw what I used to see in the book, and he saw all the fat it’d picked up along the way. He threw his badge at the chief and went rogue, heavily editing the existing script and straight-up writing the final two issues himself. He redrew the entire first issue. He figured shit out, is what I’m saying. He made it seaworthy for the first time. I weighed in on the revised script, and my influence is far from insignificant, but make no mistake…

You know, I used to joke, in private, “the book couldn’t have happened without either of us, but it couldn’t have happened without me more.” Ha ha henh. But if that were ever true, it sure as shit ain’t anymore. JD raised this thing. I’ll share in any success it has — sort of like how the crows share the elk after the bobcats are done.

(Why am I thinking about crows? Maybe because I’m getting used to the taste.)

I’m proud as hell of this thing. You’ll see why. Stay tuned.