Tag: Comtec

Sons of Comtec is LIVE

On August 6, 2025

It’s me and Ben’s new comic, available as a paperback book, or simply a PDF ebook if that’s all you need or can afford right now. How I envy your excitement as you RUSH to Kickstarter to order your copy NOW, RIGHT NOW!

NOW, I said!

Sons of Comtec is a graphic novel about the unsung heroes of the modern world: businessmen. (Yes, female businessmen too.) In this golden era of prosperity, unmarred by war, repression, or poverty, isn’t it time we mere artists paid tribute to the selfless corporate executives whose Big Ideas made it all possible?

Michael Kupperman, Eisner Award winner and creator of Tales Designed to Thrizzle and Snake ’n’ Bacon, says…

Patrick and Ben rip the lid off of the corporate world in this startling exposé that’s also the funniest and most surreal comic I’ve read in a long time.

And Ryan Estrada, co-author of Occulted, Student Ambassador, and the Freeman Award-winning Banned Book Club, says…

Patrick and Ben are two of the world’s most beloved and influential goddamn weirdos, and Sons of Comtec is just the kind of masterwork that all aspiring goddamn weirdos dream of becoming goddamn weird enough to create.

These two have either perfectly parodied the current power structure of the world we all live in, or they need both an intervention and a prison sentence, in either order. I am not sure which, but I thoroughly enjoyed this weird-ass comic.

Mlervin makes Reynaldo privy to some big future plans.

Too farcical to be satire, but too surreal to be farce, Sons of Comtec is an arrangement of vignettes from the multi-storey dream factory that is Comtec: a towering mega-corporation that does… something. Elevators? Conference rooms? Comtec — always a step ahead of the competition — truly has it all. And what it doesn’t have, it will make.

Meet Mlervin von Camelanche, the visionary executive who owns a small Buddha statue, and Reynaldo, his solid but reluctant number two. Meet Winter Stylez, a Woman in Business™ shattering the glass rungs of the corporate ladder. Meet two leprechauns — I just realised this book has two separate leprechauns in it.

"Great Barry's ghost!" cries Winter Stylez. She has witnessed something perhaps best unwitnessed.

Other things Sons of Comtec has in it:

Climate-conscious new product concepts
Neckties of importance
An inspiring TED Talk
Poetry
Sexual tension (not the good kind)
A special appearance by… well… we won’t spoil it, but a certain someone you might know from a little book called… the Bible
The most sincere apology in the history of business
A single flower
And… you?

Yes, you can put your very own self in Sons of Comtec, immortal and forever respected — just like a successful company! But not if you wait too long to back the project, and certainly not if you miss the crowdfunding period altogether! A bright future without regret awaits you beneath this link.

Or this one

mutter mutter mumble Genuine Rolex mutter mutter gnashing of teeth

If you use LinkedIn and hate every moment of it, Sons of Comtec is the book for you. Order copies for yourself, your suit-wearing colleagues, and your boss, who will enjoy it because he thinks it’s making fun of all those other bosses.

Over a decade in the making, Sons of Comtec is a slim but dense serving of unadulterated comedy, timely yet meaningless. You should back this book because it will make you laugh a lot, which you need and deserve.

70-80 pages (including front and back matter); 182 × 257 mm (7.2 × 10.1 inches); black and white; paperback. Printed in and shipped from Japan!

Don’t wait

If you think you’ll want a copy of Sons of Comtec at some point, please do order it now, through the Kickstarter crowdfund. You will be helping both us (the author-publishers) and yourself. This is indie publishing; you can’t idly visit Amazon dot com months from now when it crosses your mind again and expect to find Sons of Comtec waiting conveniently for you there. I mean, maybe…? Look, you’ll be able to get it if you really want it, but the best and easiest time is definitely, definitely right now.

Think of how Sons of Comtec will look on your office shelf, next to your pristine copy of The Art of War and fully solved Rubik’s Cube, marking you as a trend-aware business leader of taste and sense. You might, from time to time, thumb through its handsome leaves, appreciating the texture of its papery wisdom. Someday, when your busy schedule allows, you might even read it. “Perhaps when you retire,” offers the admiring journalist, with a sympathetic smile. You give a wry chuckle. “If I retire.”

The future is yours for the taking. Summon a copy of Sons of Comtec into your business-savvy hands RIGHT NOW.

Sons of Comtec is nigh

By Patrick Alexander

On August 1, 2025

In Uncategorised

Hello everyone. I know, you want more comics from me. Well then. It is time for Sons of Comtec.

Sons of Comtec: A very serious work of sequential graphic narrative, about the most important people in the world.

Sons of Comtec is an extremely silly graphic novel¹ about businessmen — even some female businessmen, for you ladies with modern ideas. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, you’ll have already learned about it from the video below, which features voice-acted excerpts, an introduction to the main characters, and the front cover illustration being painted from start to finish!

My co-author and fellow genius, Ben Hutchings, is a legend of Australian comics, whom you might know from… well, anything from his long-running comedy zine You Stink and I Don’t, to his celebrated children’s comic Mini Mel and Timid Tom, to his award-winning educational works like The Invisible War and Follow Your Gut.

He and I have been collaborating on the slab of comedy nonsense called Sons of Comtec for over ten years, and at last it is time to trap its soul in book form and sell it to YOU.

…And that’s where you come in.

An excerpt from Sons of Comtec. Reynaldo is not yet ready to embrace Mlervin's outside-the-box vision concepts.

Ya see, to make this book happen, we’re crowdfunding it! On Kickstarter! This will begin in mere days, and what you can do right now is check out the pre-launch page and click the big button that says, “Notify me on launch”. That way, on launch, you’ll be notified!

Be ye notified

And should you desire to be actually in the book — you, yourself, immortalised in its very pages — such opportunities will be available but limited, as soon as the crowdfund kicks off. Hence, the handy notification.

The staff of Comtec. Shall you be among them?

I’ll be real with you though, because I hate FOMO marketing: you probably won’t miss out. You are part of a dedicated but small audience. But, you never know, right? Maybe Sons of Comtec will be favoured by the algorithm and attract thousands of cashed-up new fans three minutes after it launches. It can happen.

Actually, that’s the other reason you might like to click that “Notify me on launch” button: it makes us look popular and helps the project to succeed. So if you do that, thank you!

An excerpt from Sons of Comtec. He wan', it would seem, baneenee.

Apparently mid-week is the best time to launch a crowdfunding campaign, so expect something to happen around Tuesday, August 5th, depending on your time zone, how tired I am after work that day, and so on.

The campaign will run for 30 days and 30 nights, which as you may recall is how long it took Almighty God to pout mightily and destroy the Earth by flood. In my mercy, I intend to merely ‘flood’ your RSS feed with non-stop reminders to back the campaign! Ho ho!

Indeed, now that Sons of Comtec is your new favourite book, you probably want to learn more about it. Well, there’ll be more to come in that regard, to keep us all ‘big energy’ and slavering during the crowdfund! Say it with me: I am FOCUSED, I am LOCKED IN, I am a WINNER with HOT WINNER STINK. Now say it to your wife! Now say it to your young children! Say it to them daily! Schedule a time and stick to it!

Congratulations, you are now on the road to business success! A road that leads where? That’s right: to Comtec.

A graphic novel is a comic that you have to take seriously if you want to be taken seriously. ↩︎

Oh and hey I’m on Mastodon and Bluesky these days, if that interests you. I’m not using them a lot, but it’s another way to stay up-to-date and/or get in touch. And my email newsletter is still a thing — sign up on this website’s Contact page!