HELLO! If all is going according to plan I have finished a light edit to this post right before it goes live on Thursday. You’ll know I was successful because the opening picture on this post will be of my Emerald City Comic Con Artist Alley set-up at table J21. If that picture is not there, I did not get to set-up my table on Wednesday night and I am setting it up as you read this on Thursday morning.

But let’s cut right to the chase, THIS WEEKEND I am at Emerald City Comic Con in beautiful Seattle, Washington. I will be in Artist Alley from Thursday March 5th-March 8th. If you’re going to show? Please come by with things for me to sign, come ready to get things from my table, or just say hello! As I mentioned previously, I won’t be sharing a table with the awesome Chris Robinson this year, INSTEAD we each have an Artist Alley table and they will be right next to each other. He will be at table J22. Our enterprise as comic creators is growing.

Here’s a map of the show floor with our area circled, for your convenience and so we get some visual content in this week’s post!

And then guess what? I’m moderating a panel. Wild, I know. My first ever. I will be moderating the How To Create A Graphic Novel Proposal That Sells panel on Saturday March 7th from 1:45-2:30 PM in Room 345 featuring guests/creators Sara Phoebe Miller (friend of the Weekly UpDave), Julio Anta, Sam Maggs, and Mary Shyne. I come from the world of monthly, weekly, bi-monthly, bi-weekly, quarterly, comics, so I have a lot of questions about making graphic novels. It will be an awesome panel!

Emerald City Comic Con was very good to me last year and I’m excited to be back there this weekend. Hopefully I meet cool people, talk to folks I have met previously, and convince some people in person to pre-order Showdown!

Speaking of which, it’s time for this week’s SHOWDOWN CORNER!!!

You officially have one month to go to your local comic book stores and ask them to pre-order Showdown #1 for you (and hey, you can have them pre-order all five issues while you are there and make your life easier). The Final Order Cut-Off Date for Showdown #1 is Monday April 6th, 2026. Every order on this counts, I cannot express that enough. Our publisher Ignition Press has taken a chance on the work that Tadd Galusha and I are doing on this book (also our stellar letterer Clayton Cowles and great colorist Triona Farrell), and have been more supportive than I ever could have dreamed. Now it’s our turn to reward that faith by using this month to use every channel at our disposal to promote this book, and convince you to buy it.

In the weeks ahead you will be seeing preview pages, seeing texting interviews with Tadd and I, hearing podcast interviews with us, and hopefully also seeing our contemporaries comment and share their thoughts on the work we have done. We are going to be going all out.

This week I wanted to take a slight behind-the-scenes approach to promoting the book. Above you’ll see the notebook that Showdown originally lived in. The graph paper notebook where I broke down every issue, made a wish list of variant cover artists, drew concepts for variant covers I shared with Tadd, and put all my thoughts on the series in. As I shared before I had a notebook for all my shorter assignments and it was awesome to get to dedicate a full notebook to one project. I’ll share more interior pages from the notebook alongside the finished book in the weeks to come, but at the very least I can share with you the first glimpse at the first issue and it’s title.

What else is happening? Again, taking another week off from Media Diet, not because I have not been taking a good amount of media, but because between the Showdown announcement, Emerald City Comic Con, and my other assignments, I just need all the extra time I can get.

When I come back from Emerald City Comic Con it will be a writing week where I am working on one of the bigger projects I have going on in the background. It’s very exciting. The scripts for this project have been some of the most challenging of my career yet, but I think that’s a good sign. Maybe we will get to talk about that project later this year, we will see how the summer goes.

And then next Saturday I will be doing another signing with a group of writers from DC’s Supergirl Next Door, this time at the awesome Things From Another World comic book story at Universal City here in Los Angeles. That will be going from 4PM-6PM on Saturday March 14th, you should definitely come out if you can, it’s a good crew of creators, an awesome store, and a great book. And we’ll have some other stuff by us too I strongly suspect.

Hopefully I see you this weekend at Emerald City Comic Con or next weekend at Things From Another World.

And if I don’t? I will see you back here next Thursday for another installment of the Weekly Up-Dave.

Until then?

Stay safe!

—Dave Wielgosz