Southpaw-Comics 2019: A Decade in Review...
Wow, the year is already about to come to a close, and we're about to enter a new decade! Needless to say, the past 2 years were huge for Southpaw-Comics, but this year was surely the biggest of all so far! 2019 only had ups, from watching Gary Shipman Live-stream the making of the “SDU: Fray” cover, to publishing another big SDU adventure, and to completing and being able to show off Jay's "Tiger-Man: Ascension" cover on top of that! That's two books completed in one year, 492 pages in total, and that's no small accomplishment.
This wouldn't have been possible without a lot of people having my back since I stopped dreaming about the Special Defense Unit, and started writing SDU stories back in 2015. Back in high school (2009-2013) and in college (2014-2015), all I did was dream about these characters and write some miscellaneous stories in my free-writing notebook during my free hour, and when I got home, Jared and I would talk about these adventures among ourselves. But when I left college in 2015, I knew that these characters and adventures couldn't stay between us, and as someone who grew to have the ethic of, 'if you have a story to tell, you should tell it', it became a severe travesty to me to keep Special Defense Unit to ourselves. So, when I came home one day, I told Jared that we're coming up with the final versions of these characters because I'm finally going to write them.
From 2015-2017 I wrote 70 short stories, 61 of which were Special Defense Unit related. It was early-2017 when I decided we needed to step up and start to blaze our own trail under something more professional looking than the garbage logo I created in MS Publisher, I went to a great friend of mine, Jakeel Johnson, who is the one responsible for our great Southpaw-Comics logo. Then, in late-2017, I decided that it was finally time to write and publish a book. I remember going to a comics group I'm in and just asking openly, "I need a cover for a novel I'm writing, any takers?" and Pd. Lopez stepped up first. I checked out his art, I liked it, and we began brainstorming. During that, Jared was finding me artists for promotional pieces and we found three, Thomas Blake, Jay Hernandez, and Bojan Aleksic. Thomas's piece, "Cross-Wind and Seisma" was the first piece of art to be completed and it was emailed to me when Jared and I were working on ‘Unite!’ at his place. Now, I obviously can’t speak for Jared, but for me the feeling in my chest that I felt when I saw that...it suddenly all became real for me. This was really happening, and that was only heightened when the other pieces followed to be capped off with Pd.’s cover.
I thought that the surreal feeling was going to wear off, but it didn’t. Especially when Gary Shipman live-streamed the making of the cover on his channel, now we’ve got a well-known pro working on our cover, and putting it on Youtube…man, 2019 was absolutely crazy. I met him, along with Pablo Romero, and Image Incorporated, during the production of ‘Fray’ and I got to go back to the people I worked with on ‘Unite!’ and I got to see how they improved over the year and it was a wonderful feeling, absolutely amazing. If you’re reading this, any of you guys…thank you a billion times over. It’s the only way I can thank you any more than I have, besides commissioning you more…which I will, of course! Haha!
These last few years surely didn’t go the way I imagined them to go…it was way better. Far more than I could’ve possibly imagined back in 2015. Now, on the cusp of a new era, we've got two novels out now and a novella to be released in a little over a month. It's been a very eventful few years...here's to the next 10! Thank you to everyone who believed we could do this and still believes in us, I promise you that the fun ain’t even close to over…I’d even say that the real fun still has yet to begin! Have a Happy New Year, and Stay Tuned for more Special Defense Unit in 2020! –Josh Malecki
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