Tales is a comic magazine, featuring both chapters from ongoing series as well as one-shots by creators from all over the world. It’s centered around stories in the Fantasy/S-F genres and is suitable for readers 10 years and up.

The first issue was released in September 2026 and contains 6 comics by 5 creators. All in all about 90 pages of black and white comics.

• The first chapters of my comic Lora
• Void by Azlan A Mckechnie,
• Set Forth Distant Suns by Tobias Nordin
• Jackdaw by Naka,
• The feeling of Sunlight, the kiss of moonlight by Liam Naughton,
• Lost & Found, another Wasteland Anecdote by me.

Tales aim for the feeling and excitement of a weekly Japanese pulp magazine in the likes of SHONEN JUMP. It functions partly as a way to publish long-form comics one chapter at a time, but also to showcase short stories that have only previously been published on the web, because the internet is filled with amazing comics! Be it epic, long-form, webcomics that have updated weekly for years, or amazing one-shots that are made from a sudden burst of inspiration. Comics that scream to be transformed from pixels on a screen into ink on a page. Each magazine should be filled with stories that are uplifting and exciting, that is TALES! 

Since only one has been released I can’t say how often I’ll be able to put them together. But the plan is to continue publish Lora in Tales so the plan is to make more issues. So if you are a comic creator who want to be featured in an upcoming issue, or if you know a webcomic that you would love to read in physical form? Let me know by filling in this submission form. The comic should be between 4-50(ish) pages, and while I’m mostly looking for one-shots I’m potentially open for more long-form comics as well. So reach out if you have a story in your drawer that fits the bill or are working on something new and cool!

Background

I started it as a way to publish my own comic and Azlan and Tobias. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robinkarlsson/tales/description

I had previously made two anthologies back in 2018 and 2019 with my classmates while going to a comic and writing course. They were called Tales from the Drawer and Terrible Tales. So in a way Tales #1 is actually the third in the Tales series. While it wasn’t my intention to continue using the name Tales for this new magazine, it just sort of happened.

Now, let me tell you about a short history of events leading up to the making of an Adventure Comics Magazine!

This project has been a long time coming. I first started making anthologies together with my classmates at a Comics program back in 2019-2020. The first one was called “Tales from the drawer” and the second one was “Terrible Tales“. 

Ever since, I’ve loved anthologies and try to join every such project that I find. It’s a great excuse for making one-shots (short stories that are one-and-done). Making short stories is fun, but I’ve also always yearned to tell longer adventures that span multiple chapters. And if I wanted to do the comics that I had in mind, there wasn’t really any anthologies or magazines that fit the bill, and I knew I had to make it myself one day.

But I wasn’t alone in wanting to make such a magazine. Tobias and I have been friends and worked on projects together since the first anthology back in 2019. Over the years, we have talked about publishing our comics in the same magazine one day. Either just by ourselves or together with more artists. Growing up with Shonen Jump, I believed that a good magazine would need at least three series. Apart from the anthologies we made in school I had never done such a project, but I knew it would be a big commitment and didn’t yet feel ready for a project of that scale. 

So while I really wanted to take the plunge, instead I made some collections of my own comics, the first one being “Wasteland Anecdotes“. This way I could also try out crowdfunding on a smaller scale and gain experience in the publishing trade. I also decided to collect some of my other short stories in another book called “En ruta i taget“, mostly because I wanted something more to sell at conventions, but this gave me even more of that juicy experience. 

After these two books, I felt I was ready to start on a longer series, thus “Lora, the troll’s daughter” was born. I still had the idea of making a magazine with Tobias at the back of my head, but I also knew that it would be a lot of management and didn’t know if I would have the time to be both editor, publisher and comic creator. So I decided to just start on Lora as a comic book by itself. Thus I went ahead and published the first issue of Lora and was committed to telling the full story this way. But making a long story is not easy, especially when you don’t have someone to hold yourself accountable to, except for yourself. So while things were moving forward it was going pretty slow. 

Then one day, Azlan started posting his comic, “Void”, on instagram, which would start a chain reaction of events. 

Though we’ve never met in real life, I’ve known Azlan since 2022 when he posted in a forum looking for feedback on a sketch draft of the first chapter of his comic. I really liked the story and continued to give feedback on all 14 chapters as he completed them. I am still impressed by the fact that he made a sketch version of the complete 400+ pages! I think this comic is great, even in it’s rough form, and I have always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to help publish it one day, maybe as a part of a comic magazine?

So now, when Azlan started posting pages of the final version, at the same time that I was chugging along with Lora, the spark that was needed lit the flame. I asked him if he would be interested of being a part of a magazine, and checked with Tobias if he still wanted to join. And when they both said yes, I knew we had the three comics needed to finally start the journey of making the comic magazine of my dreams.

With me, Tobias and Azlan on board, the only thing missing was some short stories. The reason I want to include one’shots is to give the reader at least some sense of fulfillment after reading. It also provides an opportunity for other comic artists to get their work printed and I like the idea of the magazine being a great place to show off your work and also to give the reader new artists to follow.

The first short story we added was “Jackdaw” by Naka. A hungarian artist that Tobias had been in contact with during the insane summer art event that is Chroma Corps (which he ended up winning). While Naka doesn’t generally make comics, his ability to portray ideas visually and learn new skills makes that fact invisible, and the result is a really well crafted short horror story. Tobias asked if we could publish Jackdaw in our magazine and Naka was on board! Easy peasy!

It was great to already have such a high caliber of a short story to start with, surely there would be no problem finding more (I thought naively). So that begs the question, where would the other stories come from?

One method is to have an open call for creators to submit their comics if they want to join. But since being a new name, it’s not easy to get many submissions this way. I am super grateful for the people who have decided to submit their comics so far, but for one reason or another these don’t fit perfectly with the style of the magazine that I was aiming for.

If we can’t rely on getting comics sent our way, we just have to find them ourselves! 

While there are tons of great short stories on the web, that people have made just for the fun of it. It can still be difficult to find ones that would be a good fit for this particular magazine.  And what criteria is needed is not super established yet, but I know in my gut if something would work or not. So I started by going through the top submissions for short story contests, such as the “Global Comics Award” which Naka had participated in, as well as “Silent Manga Audition“. I recommend checking them out, there are some real gems in there! But finding a great short story is only half the problem, you then have to find a way to contact the creator (which isn’t always easy) and hope that they are interested in being a part of a magazine without much monetary gain. While most of the profit is shared between all contributors, it is all dependent on how well the campaign goes.

Apart from looking through submissions to comic contests, another way is just to simply start reading random comics that looks interesting. Some big sites for finding new comics are globalcomix, mangadraft  and tapas where many thousands of people have shared their works. But there are also smaller websites. One such website was set up during corona as a place for irish comic artists to showcase their comics online, called www.irishcomics.ie. And that’s where I found “The feeling of sunlight, the kiss of moonlight” by Liam Naughton. This comic looks like it is straight from a vintage Shonen Jump issue and I hoped against hope that he would like to contribute with it. I was not the first to discover Liam’s work though, as he had made, apart from his personal work, two short stories directly for the giant publisher Viz’s. They are called The Stranger and Caged Tiger and if you are in USA I think they are free to read online. So when Liam actually replied to my message and wanted to join, I was super excited to say the least.

Now we had two short-stories to go along our featured series, and while my initial idea was to have a 50/50 split, this felt like it was actually a good ratio of guests. I decided to add a short-story of my own to finish things off, and that was it.

So there you have it, that’s how it all came together for the first issue of Tales.