ON FIRST PUBLISHED WORKS

Ryan and Donny take a stroll down memory lane.

It takes time, patience, and LOTS of hard work before you find yourself at the throne of the comic book industry. That remains true even for a couple of titans named Ryan Stegman and Donny Cates.

In this mini installment of Ryan and Donny’s Half-Assed Substack Podcast, the boys take a moment to reflect on their very first published works in the industry and what they’ve learned since. Check it out!

---

Ryan Stegman: My first published comic work was a book called Midnight Kiss for Markosia Comics. You can still get it, I believe. It's a British publisher. I wasn't very good. But you can see the seeds of what I became, which is the greatest comic book artist of all time. We did an episode of Steg-Man and His Amazing Friends, our podcast on Apple Podcasts, with Chip Zdarsky, where he was gonna come on, and make fun of me. He was gonna review that book to my face. And he pretty much was just like, "this is actually really good" for somebody that was, at the time, 23 or 22. And, in retrospect, I'm now far enough away from it, where I'm like, "I'm so proud of that little kid for trying so hard." Now I'm 40 and I know he worked his butt off on that, good job. But I mean, there's some rough spots, but there's some good stuff.

Donny Cates: My first credited work was actually as an artist for Marvel. There's a book called Ant-Man and The Wasp written and drawn by Tim Seeley, who's been a great friend to me for probably over a decade now. He is just a sweetheart of a dude. I was an intern at this time, it was like 2010, 2011. Part of my job as an intern was to write the recaps for the front of every issue. And the gag for this issue was that Eric O'Grady, the Irredeemable Ant-Man, was doodling in Hank Pym's notebook. His little stick figure drawings would tell the story of the last issue, right? And Jordan White who's now the editor of the X-Men line- I was his intern- he asked me if I would draw the stick figures and do all that. And I was like, "yeah, sure, I'll try." And so I did it. And I did my goddamndest. He really liked them, so he published them. I think there's four issues of them. I think that's true, maybe three. In the trade actually, which trades never include recaps ever, but there's a chapter break where they took like one drawing of mine and made it the chapter break. So if you buy the trade for it, it's also in there. That was my first credit at Marvel. It took me six years to get back to Marvel after that, to get a credit again. After that, I had two short stories published in Dark Horse Presents. I wrote this character named Hunter Quaid. Then, Buzzkill was my first solo writing gig. Well, I wasn't solo, that was a 'story by.' I am not proud of the Hunter Quaid stories at all. Me and my co-writer on it were trying way too hard, because we were both super psyched out and really scared. We didn't know how to do an eight page short story. It's so much harder than it sounds to tell a full story in eight pages and- ugh- we just had no idea what we were doing. But Buzzkill, I actually am very proud of that book. I think back to that book and I'm like, "that was better than it had any right to ever be." So I'm proud of that one. There's actually a previous credit before the Marvel one, but you'll have to search high and low for that one because, I'm not going to tell you...

---

Kids Love Chains. And we love you.