audience
writer: Brian K. Vaughn
artist: Nico Henriken
Writer: phonograph
Publisher: exploding giraffe
About two years ago, the writer Brian K. Vaughn and artist Nico Henriken Launched the Exploding Giraffe newsletter via Substack, named after a famous scene from the pair’s previous critically acclaimed collaboration, The pride of Baghdad. They join a sizable number of comics creators who have been attracted to the platform, presumably with significant funding, and they have made good use of the newsletter network, releasing a steady stream of updates on Mondays to create a beneficial community. What’s more (for the purposes of this post), they’re also releasing new pages of a full-length graphic novel every week called audience.
I think it’s important to note how the book was first published because I feel it had a significant impact on the story. For the background, audience It is a very NSFW comic (there are so many group sex scenes in this book that I lost count of how many group sex scenes there are in this book), and the story takes place at the intersection of sex and death. At its most basic, the plot is that our protagonist is a woman killed in a mass shooting, whose ghost haunts and observes humans for decades, eventually finding her affable spirit in the ghost of a cowboy. Together they set off in search of a passionate threesome, racing against time as the end of the world appears to be approaching.
I think the publishing method influenced the book in several ways. First, I think distributing a few pages per week really shows audience’s Pacing. I follow the book’s release weekly, but for the purposes of this article, I also read the book in two installments. I found it as a whole very readable. Basically every few pages there’s a page-turning burst of suspense, revelation, or intrigue. I tell stories so fast that I have trouble finding a good stopping point halfway through, and I mean that as a compliment.
Second, Henrichon is really capable of taking on an epic two-page spread. audienceto the extent that he might not be able to do that in a 22-page journal publication format. I didn’t count, but there are quite a few (very good) two-page spreads in this story. So much so that I think if this story were told in a single issue, it might feel a bit distracting, but read as a whole, these spreads are truly breathtaking. They also help enhance important moments in the story, whether it’s a huge reveal, an epic sci-fi scene, or a piece of dialogue set against a particularly interesting backdrop.
Henrichon also shines here with some great sci-fi design work. audience is a near-future science fiction comic where the cityscapes, costumes, and new technologies are fantastical yet still legible. The concept of ghosts watching over humans throughout history also lends itself to some interesting juxtapositions, such as a shoeshine boy floating through an epic space battle. Color is used well to represent the line between the ghost world and the real world.
I also really enjoyed Vaughn’s script. Perhaps the strongest element of the script here is the micro-story that flows seamlessly through audience. Throughout this 300-page book, our heroes appear and disappear as they observe the living. We see parts of the date, a little sex here, more sex there, each reacting to the end of humanity in their own (often sexual) way. In this way, this is a quick read but rich in ideas.
The entire book is centered around the creepy and dark plot of the #leaderboard game, which gives this book more weight and edge than a book purely about ghost-watching sex. In this world, a cult of mass murderers is rising to see who can kill the most people. They have no ideology other than wanting to see how many people they can kill. It’s a violent corollary to the callousness and profoundly uninteresting nature of real-world meme culture.
If I have to say anything, it’s that I found the cowboy character to be a little blander than the protagonist. As one would expect, the main character gets most of the emotion in this movie. One of my favorite scenes in the entire book is the flashback of her watching Terminator With her dad when she was little. At one point, he covered her eyes during a sex scene… before making her watch the extreme violence that followed. It’s a relatable scene (I distinctly remember my parents making my brother and I leave the room to watch the sex scene) true liesand then let’s get back to similar violence), which also speaks to the thinking at the heart of the book, which is thinking around the intersections of sex, death, and pornography. I think it’s well done.
However, the cowboy character is not explored in depth enough. It’s not a major issue, but his backstory definitely suffers a bit compared to how relatable the other protagonists are. I guess it’s inevitable because she’s from our time and he’s a historical figure.
Overall, I absolutely love it audience. I was initially skeptical about newsletters as a viable format for comics, and given the rate at which creators left the platform after the first year of Substack-funded deals, that skepticism seemed justified. but audience is a notable exception. and audienceVaughn and Henriken thought carefully about what kind of story would work best in this format and delivered a memorable story as well as a rewarding reading experience.
If you missed the e-newsletter reading experience here, Vaughn noted in his previous article that the book will also be released physically in the second half of 2025.
View the ended Exploding Giraffe Newsletter
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