Greg Hinkle

Ivan Brandon, Jason Latour, Greg Hinkle and Matthew Wilson's Black Cloud is a world where dreams and stories are another plane of existence, and for the right price there's one woman who get you in. While the series itself works in more mature themes of homelessness, loneliness and addiction, Fried Pie Con has a variant cover featuring one of the denizens of these worlds looking extra cute, and ComicsAlliance has the exclusive cover reveal.

Airboy is a four-issue miniseries written by James Robinson and illustrated by Greg Hinkle, and published by Image Comics. Its premise is that Robinson and Hinkle, portrayed as fictionalized versions of themselves, are tapped to revamp an obscure Golden Age character. Robinson suffers writer's block, which hanging out with Hinkle doesn't help; the two of them wind up injecting, inhaling and eating the equivalent of a small pharmacy and go on a bender. When they awaken, they find that the creation they were tasked to revamp, Airboy, has sprung to four-color life, and he sees much wrong with the world – possibly rightly, possibly wrongly. So far, so good. It's metafiction, but speaking as someone whose shelves groan under the weight of Grant Morrison and Terry Pratchett, there's nothing wrong with a good metafiction that blurs the line between creation and creator. But there's a dark side to blurring that line, and that dark side is that it makes it difficult to tell where the fictional character ends and the real person's opinions begin – and that's lent an odious air when the opinions ventured in the narrative are wrongheaded and harmful.

One of the really cool things about Kickstarter and what it's done for comics is that you can have the experience of heading to a con and walking down Artist's Alley to see what's new and interesting without ever leaving your house. It's a cool feeling, especially when you find something that seems immediately thrilling, like I did when I caught a glimpse of Jason McNamara and Greg Hinkle's The Ra