Comics by Reinder: The fixer

Wednesday

The 115th Greyfriar’s Isle comic has gone live for paid subscribers of Planet Nude:

In the future

I made a change in my archives on ComicFury (Opens in a new window): Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is now retitled "35 Years of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan - The Extended 35th Anniversary Director's Cut", because the comic will be 35 years old in 2026!

The official birthday is May 23, 1991, which is as close as I can get to an actual date when I first put my pencil down on a page. I was 19 years old.

As you know, the comic is semi-active (latest update a few months ago) and I'm working on extra things for next year. One of them is explained below (under “Earlier”, because it’s work I’m already doing), but I'm also putting out a double call for guest art (or fan art, whatever you want to call it) to post in 2026!

1. If you've sent guest art before, I'd like to hear from you, just to know it's OK to repost it. I may also have lost the guest art in question! There's so much stuff in my archives and not all of it is well-organized, though I've been working on that.

2. If you want to send new guest/fan art for the 35th anniversary, please do! I will promote it and promote anything else you've made in the process. And I’m open to art trades! Your character for mine. You can use the comments for this newsletter, the comments on Comicfury, my Mastodon presence (Opens in a new window), pretty much any place online where you can find me.

Earlier

So far, only paid subscribers on my Patreon have seen this, but I like to keep my readers informed on what I’m doing comics-wise, even when I’m not in a place where I’m doing very much, so here’s one thing that I’ve been spending the odd hour here and there on:

This is not new work; in fact it’s very old, from 1997. I’ve been slowly cleaning it up for publication for the 35th anniversary year, working on the Dutch and English versions at the same time. It’s been difficult, because I’ve been doing it in Art Studio Pro, a program I wanted to like but didn’t, but also because these images need a lot of cleaning up. It’s actually surprising how little improvement the art shows over The Green Knight’s Belt, completed five years earlier. But there’s been a big gap in the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives for two decades now and I’ve decided to finally take some time to fill it. Next year will be the 35th anniversary of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, and adding this story will be part of the celebrations.

Most pages only get the cleanup: erasing dirt, pencil traces, decaying white-out, and some of the biggest mistakes. That helps the art a lot already! But a few will get parts redrawn because the story is where the character Jodoque makes his debut, but in his very early appearances, he looks very different and inconsistent compared to how I drew him later.

Items of Interest

I found out just this week that DigID, the Netherlands’ main identity service provider, is likely to be bought out by an American company (Opens in a new window). Obviously this is bad and should not be allowed to happen, but I didn’t know we were entrusting something so fundamental to a private, commercial party in the first place! We’ve been played for absolute fools.

Every once in a while, you hear about a paper that drops a bomb on something you thought was a long-settled matter. What if I told you that… Stockholm Syndrome isn’t real (Opens in a new window), that we don’t understand the connection between amyloid plaques and Alzheimer’s Disease (Opens in a new window) (and that therefore attempts to base treatments on preventing those plaques are doomed), or…

Here’s a new one: Debunking When Prophecy Fails (Opens in a new window) (Thomas Kelly), via Wiley Online Library:

When Prophecy Fails is one of the most influential case studies in 20th-century social science. It helped launch the theory of cognitive dissonance, shaped popular understandings of how belief survives disconfirmation, and became a touchstone for explaining the origins of religious movements—including Christianity. But the case was misrepresented. The cult did not persist, proselytize, or reinterpret its failure as a spiritual triumph. Its leader recanted, the group disbanded, and belief dissolved. This article shows that the authors of When Prophecy Fails misled their readers—and that scholars in psychology, sociology, and religious studies have been building theories atop a collapsed foundation.

The full article is paywalled, but the abstract is revelatory in its clarity: the authors of When Prophecy Fails simply lied about what happened.

Escalating the Escalation (Opens in a new window), by Greg Grandin at Tomdispatch is a history of the US’s longest war, which is has consistently been on the losing side of, the War on (some people using some kinds of) Drugs:

What follows then is a short history of how we got to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response of all too many reporters, politicians (Rand Paul (Opens in a new window) being an exception), and lawyers was little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, encouragement (Opens in a new window).

Also on Planet Nude: The nudist charm of Jucika (Opens in a new window), Evan Nix, discussing the mid-20th-century Hungarian comic strip from a specific angle. It’s a good lens to view this comic through, but there are others: the mid-century style is super-cool and the visual storytelling in three wordless panels is amazing, a masterclass from a bygone age.

Hey, some tech news I actually like! It used to be that if, like my character Mycelia, you wanted to tap into the music that can be generated by the faint electrical currents going through living organisms like mushrooms, you’d need to add a component to an expensive and time-consuming modular synth setup. But now, you can get a standalone miniature synthesizer that does that all by itself for $150:

(Note: I don’t have $150 to spare, so allow me to plug my Patreon (Opens in a new window) where I post my comics a little early. The current ongoing thing is the 1997 storyline I mentioned earlier. Pages will appear there first long before they arrive on the websites.)

Deep Purple, my favorite band of all time (yes, I have boomery tastes and have long made my peace with that) have announced a European tour for 2026 (Opens in a new window). The last time I saw them, back in 2017, I thought that would be the last time ever, but they’ve made three albums since then, with a fourth on the way, and with Simon McBride on guitar, they’ve had a big kick up the backside as a live act. What with the latest news on Ian Gillan’s health (Opens in a new window), this really is likely to be a last chance to see.

Earlier still

This newsletter’s blast from the past is Jake goes for the jugular; Ragna goes silent (Opens in a new window). I remember having fun redrawing this, but finding the final linework and coloring a little heavy-handed:

And the full page:

Honestly, it’s not so bad!

See you next time!