The Hell Blog

Podcasts, For Your Ears

I’ve been involved in several podcasts over the summer, and had a blast each time! If you want to hear my meat-voice discuss nerd shit, you can!

Podside Picnic episode 230 – BOLTGUN

I join Karlo and Kurt in the grim darkness of the far future to talk about the 2023 Warhammer 40,000 spin on classic DOOM gameplay, Boltgun! Hear me do an impromptu space marine impression, drop nuggets of buck wild 40k lore, and talk about the true star of the game, Sassy Nurgling. It is your duty to listen to this podcast, and only in death does duty end.

Syndicated with Lesley & Ben S3 E6 – Better Call Saul

I return to reclaim my title of “most guest appearances on Syndicated” and also gush about how good at making TV the folks behind Better Call Saul are. We talk the brilliant use of visual metaphor, fantastic characters, and if BCS is the Only Good Prequel.
Wandering Monster Plays BURGERPunk!

I’m not actually on this one, but the Wandering Monster podcast played BURGERPunk, and you can listen to the absolute chaos that followed (or watch it on their YouTube channel).

Come see me at Calgary Expo, April 27-30!

That’s right, I will be emerging from my comics lair to engage with the public once again. And for the first time in four years, I’ll be in Calgary at the annual Calgary Comics & Entertainment Expo! You should come see me, and also buy some books so I don’t have to drag them back home afterward!

Hockeypocalypse: Slashers will be making its debut, in beautiful hardcover form. I’ll also be in the RPG business for the first time at a con, with Hell, Inc. The RPG being part of my wares for the first time. There will be a combo available with the RPG and Hell, Inc. comics, as well.

So head over to the Big 4 building, and use this convenient map to find me on the comic guest wall!

Spread the Word! Hell, Inc. and Upcoming Appearances

April will see the end of my art hibernation. I must return to the necessary business of “going places” and “interacting with the public in person,” and shall begin that with another return – to Calgary! Specifically, the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, April 27-30. I haven’t been there since 2019, so it’ll be nice to see a lot of folks that I’ve been apart from for a long time. I think about that a lot, because otherwise I will probably have a panic attack about dealing with travel and a four day convention in my current “the pandemic made me forget all of my social skills” state. I’ll be getting an extra, less stressful encore with Free Comic Book Day at Rolling Tales in Edmonton, on Saturday, May 6th.

In addition to spreading the word about my emergence into the wilds, I also encourage you, the reader, to spread the word about Hell, Inc.! It’s very good, and I think more people should be reading it. So tell your friends, co-workers (especially if they read it at work instead of working), or tell strangers by voting for it on Top Webcomics.

BURGERPunk: 72 Hours Left!

The Kickstarter campaign for BURGERPunk The RPG is wrapping up its shift, and ends Thursday, March 16th at 9 AM MT. There’s only one stretch goal left to unlock, and the campaign is less than ten backers from breaking our record! Go! Embrace the Living Meat(TM)! Become BURGERPunk!

Look at this glorious map of New McDonaldland, and let your imagination run wild with meaty thoughts of high-fructose adventure!

Serving Up BURGERPunk Fiction!

BURGERPunk is two weeks in, and we’ve got a bunch of new stuff to share – new stretch goals, new author announcements, and the first piece of BURGERPunk prose fiction! Do you want to understand what adventures lie within New McDonaldland!

And introducing the writer of our first piece of bite-sized fiction…

Patrick A. O’Driscoll is a triple-decker freak-burger with extra sauce now available in participating locations in Missouri, USA. When not writing about meaty horrors or clown funerals, Patrick is an SFF writer and freelance game journalist with dreams of writing for video games. His work has been featured in Den of Geek. His latest story, A Mother’s Love is a horror fairy-tale about alienation and insect biology will be featured in an upcoming issue of Elritch Tales Magazine.  He has also written quests for the indie MMORPG Genfanad and comic books for Necronauts Toys.

We had asked Patrick to come up with a quick bite of flash fiction to give you all a taste of what’s to come, and we were really happy with how it turned out!

CLICK THRU TO READ THE FULL STORY!

***

He stumbled into town one day, smeared with blood and greasepaint. Mothers clutched their children and made the sign of The King as he passed, but I’d never been one for superstition. I welcomed him, as I do all my patrons, with a soft bench, a drink, and a burger.

“Honkabout,” he called it. A tradition among the Children of Ronald. A punishment. A pilgrimage.

“Your journey can wait.” I told him. “Winter nears its end, and with spring comes The Thawing. Every Living Meat from here to the Burger Kingdom will be about. One step beyond the shockwall, and you’ll be ‘twixt two buns and praying ‘no pickles.’”

The clown looked to me from beneath his rainbow wig with eyes I saw each day, staring back in the mirror. The eyes of a man who had laid out the table for his own last meal.

He spoke, at last. “I took joy from the world. Never shall I see the bigtop, nor smell the popcorn of my home-tent until I bring mirth to a thousand souls or die in the attempt.”

Continue reading on the Kickstarter update!

BURGERPunk: The RPG is now LIVE ON KICKSTARTER!

In the dark future/past of 1997 America has been destroyed, a victim of its own hubris, unchecked consumerism and the Living Meat™. Amid the ashes of the Cola Wars, shell-shocked survivors struggle to piece society back together while fighting for survival against burger-clown cultists, meaty monstrosities, mutated maize and cola-addicted blood thieves. It’s not the apocalypse anyone was expecting, but it’s the one that happened — welcome to the world of BURGERPunk: The RPG

FINALLY after months of preparation, the BURGERPunk TTRPG campaign is live on Kickstarter. I’m sure my regular readers have seen me mention it already, but for anyone new (or who just reads the comics and ignores these posts), BURGERPunk is a 2D6-based tabletop role-playing game and setting written/created by my partner, Cait, and illustrated/designed by yours truly (with rad cover art by Łukasz Kowalczuk). Inspired by dystopian sci-fi, 80s action films and vaguely-remembered fast-food advertising from our childhoods, BURGERPunk is set in an alternate timeline where the Cola Wars were a very literal conflict that have brought about the end of the American Way of Life as we know it.

We’ll have more to say about it in the next few days, but for now I recommend heading over to the Kickstarter page to read more. And if you want to hear us talking more about BURGERPunk with our flesh-mouths, you can listen to Cait and I chatting about BURGERPunk and a goofy 80s post-apocalypse film starring pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper on this episode of Podside Picnic (which was very fun to record).

It’s only on Kickstarter for a limited time, so go check it out now!

Rent-A-Thug – La Cosa Glasnostra is being published on Patreon

Yes, you read that right, my glorious but doomed return to Rent-A-Thug is now being published on Patreon after ignominious and wholly predictable defeat in the Webtoon Call to Action contest. The platform that prioritizes manga art styles, shonen action, and romances isn’t going to get my weird, ultraviolent, Eastern Bloc crime comedy with characters who look like angry potatoes? Weird. Who would have thought.

Anyway, it’s being reformatted for potential print release, and I’m posting those pages on Patreon. The first five are available for free, and $5/month and up patrons will be able to read them as I go! The current plan is for these to lead up to serializing the Rent-A-Thug graphic novel like I did Hockeypocalypse: Slashers.

Click the image to check it out!

Hell, Inc. is now also available on GlobalComix!

In my endless quest to make Hell, Inc. inescapable and replace Dilbert as the ubiquitous office comic, I go to where the eyeballs are. Then I try to get those eyeballs to come here, because I’m in charge here.

That said, if you prefer to read your comics on GlobalComix, you can now do that with Hell, Inc.! The first two books are currently available (strips 1-84), with the rest being added a book at a time until caught up. PDF copies of the books will also be available there in the near future.

LAST DAY for Hell, Inc. The RPG on Kickstarter!

That’s right, this campaign is almost over! This isn’t an update so much as a last call-to-action for folks following the project who haven’t gotten around to pledging, as well as for everyone to continue sharing the campaign link on social media and with friends you think would be interested. The last stretch goal is very close, and more backers = more stuff for everyone, so it’s a real win/win/win situation to help boost the campaign.
Once again, here’s a handy short-link that you can copy and paste to send folks – http://kck.st/3KgUKnf
But you know what? Let’s make this an ACTUAL update, and reveal one of the finished pages from the rules section!

A page with RULES on it!? GASP!

A page with RULES on it!? GASP!
The initial design process for the book leaned toward corporate sterility, but that started to feel bland instead of thematic. During discussions about the graphic design, the idea came up of treating the book like an actual employee handbook that someone had been drawing in instead of paying attention at orientation. That IMMEDIATELY grabbed my interest, and I started making notes about where I could fit doodles, and what those should be. They’re all red, because that is the only colour of pen available in Hell.
– Jeff & Cait