I'm making new comics!

I'm illustrator & cartoonist Ryan Dunlavey and I'm writing, drawing and self-publishing 4 different comic book mini-series, back-to-back (-to-back-to-back) as 20 page single issues. Each mini series is a stand-alone story and each one is in a different genre -crime, horror, sci-fi and romance- but all four stories are tangentially connected and set in the same "Tommy Atomic world".

I'm creating and serializing the series in this order:

BAD GUY - superhero/crime. The Blaster is a super villain who thinks he's actually a hero. 3 issues.

DEAD HIGH - horror/comedy. Two teen misfits try to survive a zombie outbreak at the Friday night high school football game. 3 issues.

MALL PIRATES - action/cyberpunk. The apocalypse is here, and it's called "the suburbs". 5 issues.

TOMMY ATOMIC - superhero/romance. Girl wants to be a super hero but her boyfriend ends up getting the super powers. 5 issues.

Some back story: Bad Guy and Dead High were projects that were set up with a web comics publisher in the late aughts, but that outlet shuttered before either comic made its debut. Mall Pirates is a comic I've been developing for years but just never got around to pitching. Tommy Atomic is a reboot/revival of a comic I created in 1997. I revisited all four projects (and a few others) during a slow work period in summer of 2025 and realized they were all more or less set in the same "world". I also realized that none of them would be an easy sell to the existing comics or publishing world. Pitching books can be a slow, often frustrating process and even if I did manage to get a publisher interested there's very little chance any of them would be offered a good deal. But I also suddenly really, really wanted to make these comics finally happen, so I decided to not even bother pitching these projects to publishers at all and just self-publish them all.

TL;DR: these are all comics I worked really hard on at some point in the past that I still love and want to exist so I decided to just publish all of them myself, all at once.

Bad Guy #1 debuted at the 2025 New York City Comic-Con. All four mini series are already tightly plotted, characters have been designed, all first issues have been scripted and new issues will arrive as soon as I finish drawing them in between all my other comic book and illustration projects (it's my full-time job).

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I'm making new comics! I'm excited!!!

-Ryan Dunlavey, October 2025

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