what a month! thank you for reading and supporting "a ghost story" for another month. i hope you continue to enjoy reading my comic for many more months, and years, to come! as a reminder: patreon is going to completely fuck up my income in november for spurious and annoying reasons. you can help by pledging at least $1 a month for early updates and hopefully more goodies as my health continues to improve (as it has been, its just taken years instead of like, months). i'm hoping for many small pledges including the graciously generous ones being provided by current patreon donors in order to offset the inevitable fucking when i am forced to switch over to a less beneficial means of charging people (getting paid "per month" instead of for every comic page i deliver). if patreon isn't for you, you can donate monthly or with one time payments through kofi. please and thank you for considering any amount to help keep "a ghost story" up and running.

oh and before we start: it's free comic book day! don't forget that you can download the re-draw of the first chapter of this webcomic, "in the black", for free...or name your own price lol. but put in 0.00 if you want. i just want people to read it.

my recommendations are pretty sparse this week since i've been spending most of my time reading books and manga and going through the backlog of frankie's shelf while im working.

• i read a few of dennis cooper's books last week as they're each around 200 pages long. i read "the sluts" (liked it more and more as i marinate on it), "frisk" (which i liked considerably less than "the sluts"), and am in the middle of reading "closer" (which i'm enjoying). these books are not for the faint of heart lol. they are sexually violent, disturbing (even by my jaded standards), explicit, and filled to the brim with unpleasantness. but to me it is a deeply refreshing turn away from the hyper-marketable and saccharine take on gay relationships that has become the bog standard in what feels like basically all forms of media. it is a uniquely unflinching ugliness that's welling up from somewhere very dark that many people would seek to see eliminated rather than explored. i would not recommend these but i am getting something out of reading them.
• for manga, i'm still chewing through "dorohedoro" which has become incredibly confusing and weird 70 chapters in. im not even halfway through and kind of shocked at what's gone down. really interested to see where this could possibly be going. "the lies of the sheriff evans" also has like 5 chapters left before its done. i am never not shocked that the one joke the comic has managed to be stretched out over 240-ish chapters. really fun and breezy read despite the length.

here are some bonus comics this week. :) i was worried i wouldn't have any! more of this strange ship:

the other one is actually pretty long so i think i'll save it for next week. thanks for reading!