Autumn Is Coming

For some time now, comic book creator Matthew Dow Smith has been teasing something he’s referred to as Project Park Bench. For even longer, I’ve been wondering whatever happened to his The October Girl, which began in 2012 as a series from Monkeybrain Comics for comiXology, then was announced as a three-volume graphic novel series in 2023 from Insight Comics, then just… disappeared.

As announced on Bluesky yesterday, it turns out that The October Girl and Project Park Bench are one and the same—although apparently this already was known to his Patreon supporters since maybe last year. My own Patreon subscriptions come and go with my budget, so I didn’t know this before yesterday.

Further: at long last, thirteen years after the original and incomplete series, the first of three volumes is coming from Mad Cave/Maverick, suitably enough, this October.

Four days, in fact, before my birthday.

“The October Girl is a very special project for me. It’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for more than 30 years, and now, thanks to Mad Cave/Maverick, I finally can,” Smith said. “I’ve spent the last 30 years drawing people in tights fighting each other, and as much fun as that can be, my head was full of people in long coats and skeleton trees and strange little creatures. There just wasn’t a place for the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. But now, with a growing audience for comics outside of tights and capes, I could finally let all these things out of my head.”

(I’ve basically been out of reading comics for years now, in part for attention reasons and in part because I’d never found a comics-tracking app I liked, and since I’d started doing most of my reading via Hoopla Digital, which doesn’t track what you’ve already read, I was losing my place in everything. At any rate, the point of this digression is that being out of reading comics for years now will not prevent from being all the way in on reading this comic.)

The original version of The October Girl ran between 2012 and 2015, and was my favorite thing in the early Monkeybrain stable, but it only lasted four issues before dropping into limbo. To say that my anticipation here is high would be an understatement of a degree that cannot be overstated.

Shortly after the original second issue came out, I referred to it on Twitter as having “a bit of a quieter (e.g. no subway fight) early Mage vibe”. This quietness, perhaps, was a result of the story being told very much from within the first-person narration of its protagonist, Autumn Ackerman, and so very much intimately concerned with a young woman trying to figure out her life.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t note, if I’m even remembering this correctly, that the mention in the original fourth issue to “raising your own goats” was something of nod at the nonprofit, urban herd I’d been project managing at the time.)

That essential premise clearly remains (even if it’s unclear if the story continues to be from Autumn’s point of view), although even for those without Patreon access it’s been known for awhile that the graphic novel version wasn’t simply picking up with where the single issues left off, instead being something of a reimagining and reworking of that idea. Smith talked a bit about this back in 2023 when it was still slated at Insight Comics.

There have been four chapters that came out digitally from Monkeybrain. The first book is 140-150 pages and it’s just scratching the surface. For very hardcore fans – all five of them – there are other things that I’ve done, short comics in Negative Burn and short prose stories that are connected. It’s a much larger narrative and finally getting to do the graphic novel series from Insight is letting me tell it properly. We have agreed to at least several books, and if they do well, several more books. The plan was always to do a fairly long run, six or seven books. Which is all planned out. I just sent Insight a huge document the other day about the whole shape of the story. It’s a weird thing to talk about because so little of it is out yet, but hopefully it’s the start of something large.

If you compare some Monkeybrain pages to what’s on his Patreon (even in blurred form) you get a tiny sense of how Smith’s storytelling approach might have evolved in the intervening decade, but I’m more than a little bit undecided as to whether or not I even want to get the full look at what glimpses Smith has provided there.

I’ve been waiting a very long time for Autumn Ackerman—the presumptive, titular October girl—to find her way back into the world. Maybe it’s better to wait just six more months.