Why subscribe to Buzzer Beater?

The short version? This newsletter is the way I deliver both comics and book updates to anyone who wants to follow along. Sweet! Expect more in-depth content than what you’d find on Instagram, all delivered to your inbox alongside your electronic bank statements and forwards from grandma.

The longer version? Well, read on…

When I was a kid, the highlight of my week was the Sunday Funnies. My dad would pull into the gas station after church let out and pick up a copy of the Green Bay Press Gazette. We’d get home and spread the newspaper out on the table along with our Hansen’s Dairy and Deli sub sandwiches, and I’d tear as quickly as I could to the full color pages tucked somewhere in the middle: the comics. Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, the Far Side, Overboard, Ernie, Fox Trot–all favorites, and every week they greeted me. From this vantage point in my life and career, I can name this as a Formative Event. Reading the comics inspired me to make comics, obviously!

But even if my life hadn’t gone that route, I would still name this weekly ritual as one of the most meaningful parts of my life. There’s something incredibly comforting about an ongoing story, the assurance that the characters you’ve come to know and love will be there for you every week. The jokes were secondary, the artwork too. It was the stories that really got me. The characters.

I’m so lucky that I get to make graphic novels for a living, and of course I want to use this newsletter to keep you informed of any interesting updates on that front, and I will! But books take a long time to make, and there are often years between each is published. My next book (Bookworms, Little Brown Ink) isn’t scheduled for publication until 2026. What do I do with my newsletter in the meantime? 

I started publishing a side-story this past fall called Claudia Claws. It’s cute and it’s weird and it’s so fun to draw, and I’ve been sharing that comic here in installments. I don’t know what kind of emails you get on a regular basis, but my hope is that when an email comes from this account there might be a tiny flash of excitement, like I used to get when the Sunday paper dropped onto the table. “What are my characters up to this week?” Or at least it’s not another airline ad, right?

So, why am I changing the name of the email to Buzzer Beater? Well, long time readers know I never loved “Breena Bard Comic News” as a title. A lot of the newsletters I subscribe to have more clever titles, and I wanted one too! I’ve been privately using Buzzer Beater as a username on some of my accounts because I liked the BB alliteration which lined up with my initials. I like the energy behind it–the race to score points as the last second ticks off the clock (I do live and die by my deadlines). I like that it calls back to the sporty days of my youth. And of course, Claudia Claws is a basketball story, so there’s that.

I dunno, I’ll probably change it again, but for now we’re rolling with it. So, here’s to the new year and a new face for this newsletter… I look forward to sharing lots of comics with you this year, and hope you follow along!

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To find out more about Breena Bard, you can visit her online home at breenabard.com