If you’re at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend in Seattle, come say hello at booth #25000 in the Summit building and check out my single sample copy of the finished, factory-produced Bolted! game:

(I’ll have Wondermark pins, stickers, and books, as well.)

Bolted! games have finished being produced and are currently on a boat heading my way. 

If you haven’t yet secured your copy of the game, a tiny little window of post-Kickstarter “late pledging” is still available. Shipping for all pre-orders should commence before the end of March!

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Dr. Bob Nicholson is a wonderful historian of Victoriana — with a special focus on the printed material of the era. I’ve enjoyed following his work for some time!

In this video for Wired, he does a lovely job answering reader questions about Victorian England.

Continued from Wondermark #024
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[ Comment thread on Discord ]

An old thread is making the rounds again, so here's an updated version. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the most enduring and adapted works of literature in history. But did you know that he wrote 22 sequels? Some are great! Some are trash! Some are bizarrely fascinating.

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— Ryan Estrada (@ryanestrada.com) December 24, 2025 at 6:24 PM

That is all

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I like sharing this kind of stuff, even though it might spotlight some of my more doofus choices and missteps, because I trust that some people will find the process interesting, and take heart at how a polished outcome can be the result of a long, winding, and setback-filled process.

Does that mean that the final result is definitionally awesome? Well, yes, of course.

This is mainly written for an audience new to the game and new to my work generally. I submitted it to BoardGameGeek for their blog of designer diaries (which will reach an audience that mostly has never heard of me).

I don’t actually know if they’ll publish it, but I wanted to make sure it was published SOMEWHERE, so while I wait to hear back from them, here it is!

Bolted! A Game of Creative Necromancy

When you combine different things, sometimes the result is a chemical reaction. Other times, it’s a surprising creative breakthrough.

I’m the author of the comic strip Wondermark, which is created collage-style out of vintage illustrations. So I’ve long been a champion of “creative re-combination.”

Making comics from collage has both freedoms and limitations. I get to hitch a ride on beautiful artwork from ages past, but I’m also constrained in storytelling (to a degree) by the images I can find.

It means the artwork itself is a creative collaborator. The gestures, expressions, and style of the artwork inform the stories that I tell with them…

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This comic was created as part of a “Secret Santa” comics exchange on Reddit. These characters are Tiff and Eve, and this strip was written by Fran Sundblad, the author of the comic Tiff & Eve, and rendered in Wondermark style by me.

• Here’s the original Reddit post
• More Tiff & Eve comics are on Reddit, Bluesky, Instagram, and Patreon
• Check out this post for super secret behind the scenes info