We just partnered with a 30-year comics veteran.
Hello and welcome to the Macroverse Dispatch Episode 7!
We've spent the last few weeks talking about comics history; the people who built this industry, often for not much money and even less credit. Today we want to talk about someone who's been at it for thirty years and is still going, and about what we're actually building here at Macroverse.
This is the issue where we stop being a newsletter that talks about comics and start being a platform that lets you read them.
Who Is Jimmy Palmiotti?
If you've read a Marvel or DC comic in the last three decades, there's a reasonable chance Jimmy Palmiotti's name is somewhere in the credits. He started at Marvel in 1991 as an inker - one of those essential, unglamorous roles that shapes how a comic actually looks on the page - working on Ghost Rider, Punisher, and the Nam. He was good at it. He was particularly good at making his frequent collaborator Joe Quesada look even better than he already did, which is saying something.
By 1994, Palmiotti and Quesada had decided they'd rather make their own comics than ink other people's. They founded Event Comics, a small creator-owned publisher that introduced two characters who've stuck around: Ash (a firefighter with superpowers, which sounds simple but is genuinely great) and Painkiller Jane, a street-level cop with a healing factor and a very low tolerance for corruption. Painkiller Jane eventually got a TV movie and a 22-episode Sci-Fi Channel series. She's still Palmiotti's favourite character he's ever created.
Just a small resume…
Event Comics got them noticed. A Marvel in financial difficulty came to Palmiotti and Quesada with an offer: come in and fix our street-level characters. The result was Marvel Knights - a line that gave creators genuine autonomy and produced some of the definitive comics of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada on Daredevil. Christopher Priest on Black Panther - a run that introduced the Dora Milaje, the all-female royal guard who you know from the films. Marvel Knights didn't just produce good comics. It helped save a company that was headed toward irrelevance, and set the creative template that the MCU has been running on ever since.
At DC, Palmiotti spent years writing Jonah Hex - a deeply weird, consistently great Western with a scarred bounty hunter as its lead - and then hit a different gear entirely when he and his wife Amanda Conner took over Harley Quinn. They wrote over 100 issues together. During their run, Harley Quinn went from a popular supporting character to arguably DC's fourth pillar after Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Their version of the character - anarchic, funny, oddly warm-hearted - shaped the merchandise, the animated series, the films. If you have a mental image of what Harley Quinn is, it's probably the one Palmiotti and Conner built.
He's also been one of the comics industry's most consistent advocates for creator-owned work and independent publishing, running Kickstarters for original projects, writing for smaller publishers, and building a body of work that exists entirely outside the major publishers' IP machine.
Thirty years in. Still going. Still creator-owned where it counts.
Why We Started With Jimmy
When we began building Macroverse, we wanted to work with people who understood what we were trying to do: create a home for comics that respects both the creators and the readers, where the work gets the presentation it deserves and the people who made it actually benefit from its success.
Jimmy got it immediately. He's been in this industry long enough to remember every bad deal, every publisher that folded owing creators money, every time the work mattered more to the company than the person who made it. He also cares - genuinely, demonstrably - about readers finding comics that are worth their time.
So when we approached him about bringing his library to Macroverse, the conversation was short and the answer was yes.
Starting this week, Jimmy Palmiotti's work is live on the platform. And we're kicking it off with two free titles - two comics he made with Garth Ennis, who you might know as the creator of The Boys.
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What You Can Read Right Now
First cover of The Pro
The Pro is one of the most gleefully offensive comics ever published, and also one of the funniest. Written by Garth Ennis, drawn by Amanda Conner, inked by Jimmy Palmiotti, it was published by Image Comics in 2002 and has been causing arguments ever since.
The premise: an alien voyeur (a parody of Marvel's Watcher) gives superpowers to a down-on-her-luck prostitute, just to see what happens. She reluctantly joins the League of Honor — a thinly disguised Justice League parody featuring the Saint (Superman), the Knight and Squire (Batman and Robin), the Lady (Wonder Woman), and their various extremely silly villains. She is immediately the most capable person in the room. She is also the most profane, the most honest, and the only one with a kid to get home to.
The Pro is technically a superhero parody but it's really about the gap between what heroes are supposed to be and what they'd actually be like if they existed, filtered through Ennis's particular brand of anarchic humour and Conner's deceptively expressive art. It is also, in its last few pages, unexpectedly moving. It ranked #4 on one publication's list of the best graphic novels of the 2000s. Jim Steranko famously hated it and called it "psychotic, nihilistic garbage." Ennis and the team included a sarcastic dedication to him in the next printing. We think that tells you most of what you need to know.
Paramount Pictures picked up the film rights in 2017. We're still waiting. In the meantime, you can read the comic for free, right now.
Back to Brooklyn 3
Where The Pro is chaos and comedy, Back to Brooklyn is Palmiotti and Ennis doing something different — a lean, violent, New York crime story about a mob enforcer who goes to war with his own family to protect his wife and son.
Back to Brooklyn follows Bob Saetta, who has spent his career doing terrible things on behalf of terrible people. When the people he's been doing them for turn on his family, he comes home to Brooklyn to settle it. Back to Brooklyn is a six-issue series published by Image Comics — tightly plotted, beautifully paced, and genuinely brutal in the way that crime comics are allowed to be when nobody's watering it down for a mainstream audience.
It's the kind of comic that demonstrates why Palmiotti's creator-owned work often hits harder than his superhero books: no editorial mandates, no character licences to protect, just a story told exactly as it was meant to be told.
What's Coming
This is the beginning, not the announcement of something finished.
Over the coming weeks and months, we'll be adding more of Jimmy's library to the platform — including exclusive variant covers and never-before-seen material that isn't available anywhere else. We'll also be working with Jimmy directly on content for the Dispatch: his perspective on the industry, on the characters he's built, on what thirty years of making comics actually teaches you.
The platform itself — the Macroverse reader, the embeddable comics experience, the infrastructure we've been quietly building — is designed for exactly this kind of partnership. Creator-owned work, available on subscription, with the creator properly involved and properly compensated. We couldn't be more excited about what Jimmy is kicking off, and we genuinely can't tell you everything that's coming because it would make this email very long and we have a word count to respect.
What we can say: this is the tip of the iceberg. Jimmy is the first. He will not be the last.
Until next week
KBO
Adam
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