Welcome to my annual report of what I did all year. My 2025 book-writing year ran mid-February ’25 to mid January ’26. Only half of this is specific to my G.I. Joe history book. First up, the non-book things:
HUB COMICS
We said bon voyage to a wonderful employee and welcomed in a new one. That involved some training. The store was open 363 days, and while I was only there three or four days per week, if counting work from home ordering books, organizing events, and creating the weekly store email, I probably worked “at” Hub Comics for 300 of those. We also tabled at three conventions, hosted one party, held Free Comic Book Day, and hosted talks/signings for writer Jonathan Lackman and artist Zachary J. Pinson, writer Stephen Weiner, writer/artist Dan Mazur, writer/artist/publisher Jesse Farrell, and writer/artist Alex Krokus. And we hosted part of the Boston Book Festival’s Lit Crawl Boston, which is two panels with different guests in one evening. And importantly, we also weathered another year of distributor disruptions, with turmoil and bankruptcies and changing publisher accounts altering how we ordered books and how much time it takes to process our deliveries. (We used to place two orders per week and receive 80% of our product in a single shipment on a single day. Now we place between four and 10 orders per week and receive shipments every day. I can’t tell you how much time is spent just dealing with cardboard boxes and packing material, much less looking up book titles/cover images/ISBNs across six-not-one ordering portals.) People continue to say that the store looks nice (Boston, being a college town, always cycles in new residents and visitors), so even if they missed our 2020 renovation, it continues to feel current. Sales were up for both single issues and graphic novels, so if you’re reading someone on the internet signaling the death of comics, they’re incorrect.
This next item didn’t happen at Hub Comics, nor was the memorial service held there (rather, it was at a church a few miles away), but this seems like a good place to note the passing at the too-young age of 52 of a wonderful artist and educator in the Boston comics scene, Dan Moynihan.
Getting back to happier Hub Comics events, we also hosted 12 meetings of the HUB COMICS BOOK CLHUB, one each month. It’s fun to pick a book and then talk about it with interested customers and neighbors who might become customers. As I’ve been out of teaching for three years, this scratches a little of that itch. (I still do a tiny bit of work for the art university, but just a few days per year.)
Also, the City of Somerville dug up the street in front of the shop for two months, parked heavy equipment there for another month, and sometimes just closed the street to traffic. It’s for drainage, so long term that’s great, but short term, no fun.
VIDEO ESSAYS – ATOMIC ABE
In Atomic Abe’s fifth year, writers/producers Nick Nadel and Kevin Maher and our small team of freelance writers, editors, and graphics people continue to research, create, post, and promote our funny video essays on television and film. Our YouTube channel hit a milestone with one video passing the one million view mark. (And as I write this, it’s at 1,149,347.) We added 8,700 subscribers and netted an additional 3.9 million views views. We originated and posted 10 full length videos, mostly in our mainstay series Behind the Backdoor Pilot. Just in time for Dick Van Dyke’s 100th birthday was one on Diagnosis Murder, a show I knew nothing about. We also rolled out a new series called My Favorite Episode (this first episode lovingly poked a little at an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger), and another called The Atomic Interview (featuring, not surprisingly, a long interview — any Clarissa Explains It All fans out there?). The team also does a lot of re-editing of our videos (both used footage and outtakes) into YouTube Shorts, netting us 76 Shorts and a lot of views there. 2025 was also the year a TikTok channel stole a bunch of our work, and it sure isn’t easy to get that material removed. Maybe some good news in next year’s Year-in-Review on that front.
These are just jpegs, not links:
FILM PRODUCTION
This was the year I thought about adding “Film Producer” to my business card and website, as this is the year that a film I haven’t told anyone about really kicked into high gear. In last year’s Year in Review, I called it “Project Z” but we publicly announced it a week ago, so I can finally reveal this.
I am Executive Producer of Animation Mavericks: The Rise and Fall of UPA, an independent, feature-length documentary. There was an animation studio, United Productions of America, that revolutionized the content and stylings of cartoons in the 1940s and ’50s, and its influence continues into today. But because it was short-lived and its output was barely on TV or home video in the decades since, most people haven’t heard of UPA. There is a wonderful book, and we have the author in our doc, but there had never been a feature-length documentary on the studio. Until now!
The short version of my involvement: the studio co-founder’s son, Tee Bosustow, was working on a documentary off and on for decades. I was EP of that, but he died in 2018. I got his daughter, Sylvie BosRau, onboard, and I hired a director to jump on. That would be Kevin Schreck, a documentary filmmaker who, among others, made an excellent film about animation legend Richard Williams called Persistence of Vision. Schreck has been an ideal partner — he’s both directing and editing — and he hired an animation director named Rachel Gitlevich to supervise 25 minutes of original animation that we are generating for our film. As we have talking heads and not much in the way of archival footage, we are carefully recreating scenes that our interviewees describe.
And we got a write-up in Variety last week.
I’m quoted in the final paragraph. You can read the whole thing here. Then Cartoon Brew and Animation Magazine carried the news as well, but we still have a ways to go.
Tim, where can I see this film????, you might ask. It’s not yet finished, but we hope to have a robust festival run in late 2026 and into 2027, and perhaps a distributor, studio, or streaming service would then be interested. We’ve also considered a DVD or Blu-ray release.
FILM EVENT IN CALIFORNIA
This is related to Animation Mavericks. We wanted a splashy event to announce the existence of this film we’d been secretly making for three years. (Or a decade, depending on how you count.) Working with animation historian Jerry Beck, we rented a movie theater in El Segundo, California (near Los Angeles), licensed several films from Sony, and projected a batch of UPA shorts for a paying audience of animation fans. We had a line-up of animation professionals to speak on a panel after the screening. This included Sylvie BosRau (granddaughter of UPA co-founder Stephen Bosustow), Jorge R. Gutierrez (director of The Book of Life), Bob Kurtz (animator and producer), David Silverman (producer on The Simpsons and co-director of Monsters, Inc.), and Tom Sito (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and you’d know him from the 1983 Masters of the Universe cartoon). Our guests all worked with and trained under various UPA staff, and several of our panelists have written various animation history books, so it was a stunning line-up. We gave out a promo card for the documentary as people exited.
As we filmed the whole panel, that involved hiring a crew of three camera operators, one director of photographer, and a sound recordist. We’d already hired a PR firm, a social media PR person, a web designer, an illustrator (for the event poster), a poster designer (for the film), and all of these things needed to be ready for that Thursday night as (hopefully) the trades would carry our announcement the next day. It’s funny how much the screening became a challenge of event planning — where does the crew park, from where do I get insurance for all the equipment they’re renting, how early can we get into the venue, which restaurants near the theater serve food late so we can take our guests out for dinner after the panel? I’m certainly comfortable interviewing people (what with writing my G.I. Joe book and all), but I didn’t realize until 5pm the night of our screening that I’d be doing some person-on-the-street interviews with exiting audience members for possible inclusion in our film!
It was a great trip. While our panelists were all local, Schreck flew in from New York, I traveled from Boston, and Gitlevich won the farthest-distance award as she lives in France. There’s so much more to say about A Night of UPA: Mid-Century Modern Animation Classics + Panel Discussion (our screening) as well as Animation Mavericks: The Rise and Fall of UPA (our documentary), but this is still my G.I. Joe blog, so if that’s up your alley, read to the bottom and I’ll include a few links.
2025 was big for another non-G.I. Joe project that I’ve been working on:
THE CENTER HOLDS
I referred to this in my 2024 Year-in-Review as Project X. And at New York Comic Con, on the BOOM! Studios – 20 Years, Here’s To The Future! panel, I was able to reveal it, at last! This is a 100-page graphic novel by Larry Hama and Mark Bright that I put together, art directed, edited, and worried about for more than a decade. BOOM! is publishing it as four issues starting next month!
I’d like to tip my hat to letterer Janice Chiang, who’s been doing a lot of revisions and corrections, and editor Tea Fougner, who picked up the baton after we made our deal with BOOM! Fougner has been dealing with formatting, corrections, cover art (I’d only ever had Bright draw one cover, suddenly we needed many more!), deadlines, and a bunch of stuff I don’t see, like getting preview pages to other department at BOOM! for online catalogs. Also a hat-tip to designers Armando Elizondo and Marie Krupina, who resized a batch of high-res files, assistant editor Ari Yarwood, who’s been coordinating with us, and designer Grace Park, who among other things, worked on the cool logo for The Center Holds. And a third hat tip to publisher Michael Kelly, since BOOM! will be donating a portion of its sales to The Hero Initiative, a non-profit I support.
PROJECT Y
This got a vague update in last year’s YIR next to Project X/The Center Holds. Nothing to report except that it’s almost done.
PODCASTING – TALKING JOE
Host Mark and I continue to record our weekly two-hour discussions of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, the Energon Universe G.I. Joe, and more. In the last year Mark also lined up interviews with Joshua Williamson, Tom Reilly, Andrea Milana, Paul Pelletier, Paul Jenkins, Marco Fodera, Tom DeFalco, Andrew Krahnke, DaNi, Chris Mooneyham, Alex Antone, Phil Hester, Mike Vosburg, Gerry Finley-Day, and Barrie & James Tomlinson. My gosh, that’s at least 14 interviews! On top of about 50 regular episodes! Five years ago when I joined Talking Joe as co-host I couldn’t imagine being here this long, now it’s hard to think of my weekly schedule without our regular sit-down!
Once a year Mark and I are in the same place, so we make sure to take a photo.
G.I. JOE BLOGGING
I posted 16 articles here at A Real American Book! Most were con reports, which have a narrower audience than a piece of behind-the-scenes artwork from 1985, but I find it important to collect my thoughts about these ephemeral events.
G.I. JOE CONVENTIONS
Attended JoeFest, the DFW G.I. Joe and Action Figure Show, and Assembly Required.
BOOK WRITING and NETWORKING
Friends/editors/fact checkers Nick Nadel, Chris Murray, and Pat Stewart continued their read-through of my text. Once I get notes from all three, and make any needed changes, I can then lock a chapter text and send it to my designer. Nadel read Chapter 20 and then jumped back to the start to re-read and comment on Chapters 7, 8, and 9. Murray re-read and commented on Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10. And Stewart read and commented on Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13! Thank you, Nick, Chris, and Pat!
That also means I did 15 small edits on those chapters, one for each set of feedback. And on my own did some medium edits to Chapters 2, 6, 8, and 13. Oh, and Nick said Chapter 20 was really long and I should break it into two, so that’s now Chapters 20 and 21. No big change there except I’ll need a title and a dramatic chapter-opener image for one of them. A fun challenge.
GI Joe collector and all-around awesome guy Ace Allgood volunteered to take a few photographs for Chapter 1 of my book. He roped in his business partner, Jim Stanger. I’m calling it Photoshoot #20, and I did not travel for it. This felt different, to rely on someone from afar, happening with me only vaguely art directing by email. Now that these files are in my possession, Chapter 1 is about ready to go to my graphic designer.
In the category of “writing,” one task that takes a lot of time is finding images, typing lists of where they go for each chapter, and then typing captions to pair with them. These lists evolve over time. Sometimes I’m using a placeholder image, like I own a big piece of art that won’t fit on my scanner, so I take an okay-for-now photo with my camera, knowing I’ll hire a photographer to capture it later. Or maybe I did hire that photographer, and now I have to comb through contact sheets and folders on my hard drive to pick out the best picture. Is it _MG_5050.tif, _MG_5051.tif, or any of the dozen that followed? Other times I have to go hunting through my boxes, piles, flat files, and Itoya folders to find something I’ve had in my own collection for years, and always knew would be in the book, but I’d never scanned it. And in a few cases, long ago I’d scanned a big piece of art in two halves, and now I need to stitch together the digital files. All of this takes time. Between two house moves in the past five years, all of these boxes and folders and such, and Finder, Preview, Photoshop, and Bridge on my computer, plus my external hard drive, Google Drive, my Downloads folder, my Documents folder, and my actual book folder, finding and labeling assets is a fun but complex. This isn’t a blog post or a magazine article with five images. Chapters have between 30 and 60! A lot of this year’s “book writing” time was this kind of asset organizing, all so I can get these Tiffs to someone else’s computer. Which segues to–
Realizing that I need 20 chapters designed and then revised (and then possibly revised again) in the coming year, I hired an additional designer, and then one more. I have long liked the idea of fewer credits — I’m the only writer while Liz Sousa was the sole designer. But along the way we’ve lost a few photographers and a few popped up for just one photoshoot, so in that category we have many contributors. And I realized the bottleneck of the high volume of design I’d need, so I grabbed one designer I know from my world of toys and conventions (we’ll call this person Designer #2), and Sousa suggested another from her world of that company at which she used to work (codename: Designer #3), so now my book has three designers. Sousa worked up some specs and has onboarded the other two, and we’ll make sure they all look consistent.
Sousa turned in her first pass of Chapter 13. Exciting! This leads back to the beginning of the book — now every chapter needs a from-scratch redesign.
I sent Chapter 4 to Designer #2. This person turned it around in a month, so I then sent them Chapter 2.
I then sent Chapter 3 to Sousa. That’s where we are at the end of the year.
Right when Designer #3 was to start, this person caught mono! I’ll get them something in 2026.
Met with an agent who has some initial interest in my book. It didn’t work out, and the more I thought about it, the less that the traditional route of agent and established publisher felt like it would fit my timeline. Instead, and this is still tentative, I’m looking to self-publishing and self-distributing. There are pros and cons for each approach, and that’s certainly a topic for a future blog post (or panel discussion at a con or Q&A on a book tour), but after years of thinking one way, the other, and then back again, this is where I am.
Spoke with a book printer and got a quote for actually printing the final book. This is exciting and a little scary.
For those of you who’ve been rooting for my G.I. Joe history book for many years, who feel like I didn’t accomplish much in 2025, let me assure you that the above few paragraphs do represent several big steps forward. An important step was that I stopped teaching in 2022. Since then, I’ve gotten back on track with my book, and each year has seen more progress and momentum. If you’re not feeling it here at the blog or with my social media posts, know that I am absolutely feeling it.
WHAT’S NEXT
-Have my friend/editor/fact checkers read and comment on the second half of the book.
-Have my designers design most of the book.
-Get my friend/editor/fact checkers to read the book again, now as laid-out pages with images and captions.
-Have my designers revise based on that feedback.
-Publish.
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Find Talking Joe here (links) or here (YouTube). Find Atomic Abe here. Follow Animation Mavericks here (Instagram). My personal/professional website got fixed after four years, and I’m having some old material taken out and newer stuff inserted, that’s here.
A Real American Book! 