Making comics, for us, has always been a journey rather than a destination. One story springboards into another one, characters evolve and grow in ways we never intended, or at least never considered. It’s organic, and it’s quite honestly a deeper form of therapy than any of us managed to get outside the confines of our group.

So what’s the “way”? It’s a simple concept. We set out years ago to make the sorts of comics we wanted to read. We cut our teeth on the comics of the 70s and 80s, and then started taking deep dives into the comics of the 50s and 60s looking for the amazing things that had come before us. The comics we grew up reading were smart, both in story and composition. They had to be, to even come into existence, in those days. In our era teams stayed on a book for extended runs, crafted epic tales, became part of the iconic fabric of those characters. That was the beginning.

Bring it forward to Y2K. Times have obviously changed, and not always for the better. The paper is shiny now, the colors numbering in the millions, and comics are made largely on computers with all the tools that implies. The emphasis has become the flash, the in your face, the moment. Comics are pretty, but we’ve lost a lot of the heart, and quality honestly, that made comics our chosen form of entertainment as kids. Something was missing.

But the question was, how do we change that? The first step was identifying what we still loved about comics, and what we wanted to do differently. We wanted something outside of the corporate machine where characters never really die and stay dead, and their origins are constantly changing to suit a bean counter perception of what the fan base might well be, in this moment. Comics were great when they just told stories in sequential form. Those comics didn’t apologize for having parts of the story you hadn’t read, it was on the reader to dig in and find those older issues, to catch up and stick with it. Those comics didn’t dumb things down for people who weren’t ready for that level of reading, they encouraged you to pull out a dictionary and look a word up if you didn’t know what it meant. Those comics simply were. They stood on their own merits, gave no quarter, and the fan base took them as they came.

Those are the comics we want to make. That’s the Way of the Red Hand. It’s certainly not the only way, but it’s ours. We hope you dig what we’re doing.