David Harper’s SKTCHD Book Shows Off The Best Of Comic Book Journalism

Proving that comic book journalism may not be dead, but reading comprehension definitely is, yesterday The Beat posted a story featuring some news about comic book news. Included in that article was the actual sad news that Newsarama* is functionally dead. However, since it was paired with the news that SKTCHD’s David Harper is taking a two-week break, readers assumed the beloved long-form/podcast site was dead, as well. Hey! Not only is SKTCHD not dead, it’s got a great book of writing you can buy until April 30 titled SKTCHD Book 2025.

The magazine-sized book features 152 pages of writing from Harper, as well as a foreword by Kieron Gillen, a conversation with Grant Morrison, and more. In total, the book costs $25 (plus probably prohibitive shipping, thanks, Obama), but also features plenty of (as usual) great comic book deep dives from Harper.

Those include, via an email sent to Comic Book Club by Harper:

• A foreword by writer Kieron Gillen (The Power Fantasy, Die: Loaded)
• The Story of Bone’s Time in Disney Adventures, From the People Who Made It Happen: This is a retrospective on a big moment for an all-time comic book classic and for 1990s comics kids, starring arguably the four key players behind it.
• The Comic Character Name Matrix: A far too serious exploration of which names are the right ones to use for a wide variety of characters.
• A Conversation with Grant Morrison: The legendary writer’s first appearance on Off Panel is transcribed here for the first (and only) time.
• Comic Strips Are So Back: It was a big year for comic strips, and I talked to notable cartoonists about the realities of the work and why they’re seeing a resurgence.
• The Entire History of Me: For SKTCHD and Off Panel’s 10th anniversary, I picked the most personally consequential comic from every year of my life and wrote about each of them.
• Ten Reasons I Love What I Do at SKTCHD and Off Panel: It’s my Friday column Comics Disassembled, but all love, and all about what I do.

The book is printed to order with only one print run, so you need to snag it by April 30 the latest. And to loop back to the scan-and-pan people did of The Beat’s skeet instead of reading the article itself, lots of folks say they want better comic book journalism, but don’t actually read the articles or support the sites doing the work. Harper is doing the work, and if you want to keep SKTCHD going, purchasing a copy of SKTCHD Book 2025 is a great way of doing that.

So get to it! Go buy SKTCHD Book 2025 now, so we can get a 2026 edition, too.

*Full disclosure: Comic Book Club did a ton of work for Newsarama back in the day, hosting multiple live streams at cons including New York Comic Con, C2E2, and San Diego Comic-Con, so RIP. I certainly have a lot of thoughts about what this means and the journey of Newsarama, as well as the history of comic book journalism online as a whole. But I also (second disclosure) occasionally still do work for Newsarama’s parent company, so will save those for another time.

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