I’m overdue for a cool, official announcement: I’m now collaborating with cartoonist Dustin Mollick on an ongoing, online comic strip entitled BAND! On top of his ever-growing cartooning chops, Dustin is a world-class saxophonist with the Jazz Ambassadors, and the perfect partner for a project like this.

I met Dustin briefly when he came to the band a couple years ago, but didn’t really get to know him until last year, when I was subbing with his band. Before one of these shows, I was writing on my computer backstage when he noticed my wallpaper: a Frank Miller depiction of Batman. He asked me about it, and we started talking about comics.

Knowing Frank Miller’s name these days doesn’t necessarily make you a comics devotee, but recognizing his work at a glance kinda does. Ten minutes later, Dustin and I had established each others’ credentials as legitimate comics guys, a connection not unlike finding someone with the same rare disease as you, or meeting another English-speaker in North Korea. The fact that we’re also professional musicians, that work together, made it that much cooler. Not only do we read and appreciate comics, we’ve both been making our own for a while, in different ways.

As a kid and through early high school, I wanted to be a comic artist. When I decided to pursue music as a career, I stopped drawing. When my brother Bill started taking comic art seriously, I wrote some scripts for him to illustrate, and had such a great time with it that I’ve since written hundreds of scripts. I’m currently writing several projects with different professional artists, at least two of which will be released this year.

Dustin was the co-creator of a community-driven webcomic that ran for a few months called A Zombie Story, and is the founder of musicomic.com, an increasingly popular webcomic written for musicians. The first musicomic ran less than a year ago, and seeing how much Dustin has grown as a cartoonist since then is pretty inspiring.

The first Spoilertoon: a 3-panel summary of Pacific Rim.

Almost since we started talking, Dustin and I have discussed doing a comic together. We played around with an idea of mine entitled Spoilertoons, a comic strip that would boil a movie or show down to 3 panels. It was a cool idea, and really fun to collaborate on, but around that time musicomic.com started taking off, and Dustin wanted to focus on that. For now at least, Spoilertoons will have to wait.

So, from now on, Dustin and I will be working together on musicomic.com, where BAND! will be published every Friday. Readers will follow a class of kids from their first day trying out instruments through their careers in public school band. Much like Spoilertoons did, BAND! offers some fun and interesting challenges I don’t usually deal with in 22-page comics: telling a story in only 3-6 panels; creating one ongoing arc out of a thousand tiny pieces, each with its own message and conclusion; and above all: comedy. I’ve always found comedy to be one of the trickier devices to pull off in writing. But Dustin and I already have a ton of scripts written, and a class of beginning band students is pretty much the ideal scenario for finding funny stories.

Look for BAND! on Fridays, and check out Dustin’s other strips on Mondays and Wednesdays. Dustin seems excited, and I know I am. Weaving music into a visual and (usually) silent art form is something I’ve always been interested in. I try to include an original song in every comic script I write, and seeing how different artists interpret music has been fascinating. But Dustin’s taken a different approach with his work, and being a part of it is going to be a lot of fun. Thanks for reading!