Welcome, Lover 

This issue contains three addendums and a Black Cat Mini-Issue. Apart from the typefaces and random pages in the back, everything here has been published before.

The addendums ranged from 16-to-24 pages, black and white only, lacking a normal front and back cover. The first was created for Death, Phones & Scissors in 2012, then Church & State in 2017, followed in 2018 by Clowns, Devils & Bait.

The problem of how to handle new material found in the years after an issue is printed has had three solutions. The first was redesigning an issue’s existing pages, merging new material into existing layouts to build denser pages. This worked very well at first, but once an existing issue’s wasted space had been utilized, there’s nowhere for later images to go. Thus the second strategy was born: building entirely new pages from the additional material and creating separately stapled addendums that were inserted into the center of the main issues at the bindery. Again, this worked fine at first, but there’s a 36-page size limit, and it didn’t help that once in a while a store-owner would be alarmed by a slab of pages “falling out” of the main issue. So in 2020 I tried the third method of accommodating new imagery: I’d wait until I had enough for a couple dozen pages from each of several past topics and then bundling them into full-length, dedicated “Additions” issues, each with the publication year on the cover. This method is working very well so far.

Unfortunately, as I was recently planning reprints for four issues, the addendums strategy returned to haunt me. I faced this question: Do these three isolated groups of extra pages have to persist as satellites, always printed and tagging along with the main issues, even as all other imagery gathered afterwards gets published in a different format?

I’ve decided no. I’m cutting this shit off, creating a future where I’m no longer repeatedly dealing with bullshit extras and inserts. This issue acts as a final closure on the era of supplements and addendums. That batch of extra material existed in one form for a while, now it resides in another.

Then the second question: Should anything accompany the three addendums? Together, they amounted to 68 pages. That’s a respectable count, but well below that of a typical issue. At one point I seriously considered adding 36 pages of all-new imagery for the three topics in question. I decided against it because I wanted those who already owned the published material to be able to skip this issue. Offering material already available in other forms is one thing, but offering something that’s three parts old imagery and one part new imagery smells like a “repurchase the songs you already own” record label scam.

The answer was the inclusion of the Black Cats Mini-Issue, a 32-page stand-alone offered in a 2020 fundraiser to anyone buying the first Additions issue. Like the addendums, the Black Cats have a new home in this issue. There might be further mini-issues ahead, but as with Black Cats, I expect they will also eventually be collected into a larger issue.