REEL POLITIK came about partly because of a conversation I had with film programmer and publisher Jake Perlin. We’d been talking about doing a book together for his imprint, Film Desk, and he suggested I try doing a daily comic that would be posted online, then collected in a small book. About 60 strips total.

I love the little paperbacks that Film Desk puts out, and the idea of having one of these books have my name on the cover was very appealing.

But doing a daily comic felt totally impossible to me. I’d published one graphic novel, made non-fiction comics that occasionally got published, but never really written short comic strips. I couldn’t imagine finding the time to do one every day, and felt like I didn’t know how to write jokes.

But something about the idea stuck. While Instagram is (obviously) a loathsome platform that makes the world worse, I do like the way it provides the ability to post single panels and have a reader swipe through. A comic strip is something that benefits from attention to each panel individually, rather than the carefully designed page or spread that you might find in a graphic novel. And I liked the possibility of gaining some kind of modest readership by posting a comic every day.

Before long, I was writing down ideas and punchlines and figuring out how tell a story via a daily comic strip. As a sort of test, I posted this comic before attempting to do them regularly:

People liked it.

The original plan was to see if I could do one every day for a month.1 I wound up doing one every day for a year. It turned out not to be a good fit for Jake and Film Desk, but I was enjoying the act of doing a daily comic that that hiccup didn’t really bother me. (Jake and I will do a book together at some point, we’re still friends, and I love Film Desk.) I slowly gained a small readership. What I thought was going to be a sixty-page story told in comic strip form was turning into a place I could go every day to work out an idea. It started to feel limitless.

I had one rule: each strip should have a punchline. If it wasn’t funny, I wanted you to at least see how it was supposed to be funny. This one rule made the strip doable. Instead of staring down a blank page every day, I just had to perform a sort of trick. I needed to take whatever idea I had about movies, politics, or the characters and try to format it for a six-panel strip with a punchline. Once I was able to turn that key, I could do the strip.

Rules are freeing in that way. There was no preciousness whatsoever. I drew the strip differently from the way I drew other comics. It’s loose and immediate, prioritizing speed. I didn’t really care how good the drawings were, as long as they clearly communicated the idea and the punchline, so I didn’t get hung up on how the comic looked, only how it worked. And doing it every day had its own kind of value, so even when the idea wasn’t great or the punchline felt flat, I knew that my little readership would probably forgive it because there’d be another one the next day.

And sometimes the ones that I thought stunk, ones that I almost didn’t post because I thought “I’d rather break my daily streak than let people read this dumb comic,” were pretty popular. Not that more likes than expected on Instagram means they were good comics—popularity and quality have no sensical relationship—but one of my goals was to reach people, and I was doing it.

Peggy Burns at Drawn & Quarterly—genuinely my favorite publisher—got in touch after a few months of the daily strip and asked if I’d considered making them a book. Well, of course! Less than a year after Peggy and I first corresponded, Reel Politik the book was in stores.

I stopped doing Reel Politik every single day after a year because as the one-year mark approached, it seemed like a reasonable milestone, and I knew if I went past it, I’d shoot for two years, but that didn’t feel sustainable.

Another collection, No Concessions!, is coming out this October.

Okay, I’m going to stop this story and now and say that if you’ve read this far, you care about my comics. And so I’m going to ask you to start supporting them by paying to subscribe on Substack or Patreon. I don’t want to put the strips behind a paywall. It just seems antithetical to what Reel Politik is, and I don’t know if it would really make people all of a sudden start paying.

Drawn & Quarterly is an amazing publisher. They publish my favorite comics, they push my work, I can’t believe I get to work with them. But I’ve been to their offices and there are not piles of cash lying around. No Concessions! is coming out less than a year from the first RP collection, which was my request, because I like putting them out quickly. But it means there’s no budget for me to travel to promote it. Still, I’m going to go to Austin, Chicago, and New York in November to show movies and sign books on my own dime.

More paying subscribers on Substack and Patreon would mean that Reel Politik is funding itself. With enough support, it would mean that I can do the trip in November without putting it on a credit card.

You’re still reading this? I’ve been talking about how my comic doesn’t make me enough money, which is a ridiculous thing to complain about. Of course my comic doesn’t make any money! Cartoonists don’t make money off their comics! But if you’re still reading this, COME ON! Help out Bertie and start paying $5 a month. Who knows, maybe I’ll start doing it every day again.

I’m also on a panel with Julia Wertz, Mimi Pond, Peter Bagge, and Marc Torices. It’s about being funny, and it’s moderated by Tom Devlin, who publishes my books!

Get in touch, say hi, get the book, talk about movies.