‘Is Ted OK?’ Dave Chisholm answers (and counters) your Qs about 2026’s best near-future dystopian saga

Calling your solo comic book Is Ted OK? — now that’s an interesting move.

Not that writer-artist Dave Chisholm (the man behind brilliant books like Enter the Blue and Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound) would ever be as overtly hacky to make this all about him and his life. But this is comics, after all, and I could easily see someone opting for a massively meta, self-aggrandizing affair by choosing that very title.

Technically speaking, Ted is about our titular fella, a man with a meaningless job at near-future mega-corporation (Ayn-Styne), an obsessive need to draw the same image over and over, and night terrors galore. (Oh, and he’s got one dang friend, a stray cat.) But Ted is also about Sarah, who works for the same company, monitoring Ted for reasons both sinister and also bureaucratic. But when Ted’s “mental state begins to crack, Sarah compassionately intervenes to help, and things go catastrophically wrong.”

So, no, Ted isn’t Chisholm per se, but with some of his own personal heroes (and their outlook on the importance of emphasizing the artist in the art), you could see how we might’ve been confused.

“Bob Brookmeyer; he’s kind of a deep cut for normal people,” Chisholm said of the jazz player/composer. “But he taught at New England Conservatory for a long time and he lived to be quite old.”

Chisholm added, “So Brookmeyer’s in his 80s, and and this interviewer asked him who his favorite composer was. Of course, he answered that it’s Bob Brookmeyer. And the interviewer was like, ‘Aren’t you worried about being conceited?’ And he said, ‘Who else can I trust to make exactly the music that I want to hear? Like, why would I make something that isn’t the best that I can do? And isn’t something that I want to see in the world?”

And so, in that very specific way, Ted really is about Chisholm. More specifically, it’s about one man’s efforts to (a la Brookmeyer) make exactly the kind of comic he wants to see in the world. A man obsessed with channeling, cataloging, and unveiling cosmic inspiration into a story with true existential power.

And this Dave is doing far better than OK.

Of course, telling your “own” story means that Chisholm is both writer and artist across all of Ted. And that’s interesting when you consider Chisholm’s long, fruitful efforts in collaboration — and we ain’t just talking comics, either.

“Between 2005 and 2007, I toured with a rock band and we had some really good success,” Chisholm said. “We opened for Fall Out Boy back in the day.”

And while he does “like collaborating with others…And I do appreciate the friends I’ve made in comics,” he simply believes that “I don’t have to deal with other people not bringing the same level of intensity to a project that I bring. And I tend to be a very obsessive, intense creator.”

And, to an extent, it’s hard to argue with Chisholm when the results are right there.

“I’ve drawn and colored 173 pages this year just by myself,” Chisholm said in mid-December. “And there’s 10 or 11 pages left. And most of those pages, except for the 30 pages of High Strangeness that I did this year, I also lettered. All of these pages are in addition to teaching 15 hours a week at a community music school and teaching one or two college classes a semester. And having a two-year-old at home.”

(Before we go any further, Chisholm did have help across Ted. He worked with Oni Press editor Ryan Carroll and hired some artists to help him with flatting the book’s colors. And, of course, there’s his wife, Elise, whose editorial insights are so key that Chisholm has “[tried] to push her into letting me list her as a co-writer, but she’s really reluctant to because the inciting idea of the book is my stuff.”)

But Ted is always going to be a shimmery representation of Chisholm’s singular artistic mission.

“I’m always hungry to build new skills,” Chisholm said. “And I have an analytical mind that I can sense what comics are supposed to look like. And for this particular project, it is really important to me that I go at it alone. I have such a clear vision for this book, too, that I don’t think I could possibly imagine hitting anybody up for help with the visuals.”

Still, things weren’t always so abundantly clear within the pages of Ted.

“I’ve had so many drafts of this script, man, you wouldn’t even believe how many times I wrote this thing; it took a lot longer to get there,” Chisholm said. “I had a 12-issue version that was all outlined and it was a lot more meandering. I realized that it wasn’t pitchable. And no one was going to greenlit 12 issue from from me.”

He even had 10 pages of one version already done while working on another equally lofty book, Spectrum. But by the time that book ended, Chisholm had decided to throw out “Ted 1.0.” And, as it turns out, that move was for the better.

“Sometimes it started with the big thing where everything is going wrong,” Chisholm said. “And then it was like, ‘Well, you’ll never guess how I got here.’ And to me that feels a bit like a betrayal. But then it’s still kind of in there, because on the very first page it says, ‘I caused a car accident today.’”

And there’s some other parts of Ted that made it through its long, sometimes violent development process.

“So those 10 pages, I think there are some panels where I literally cut them up and then put [them] on the board,” Chisholm said. “I think Ted had different hair.”

But the end story (massively layered and expertly executed) is the end result of the dedicated and detail-oriented approach that Chisholm himself champions.

“I think the place where I’m really meticulous is in the writing of the thing,” Chisholm said. “I think that it’s cool that my art is coming across as really meticulous because I would say that it tends to be made in a pretty frenzied…maybe frenzied isn’t the right word, but there’s always a real sense of urgency. Like, ‘I just have 20 minutes to work right now.’ I really have like one day a week when I can really dedicate the whole day at my desk.”

But it’s more than just good time management skills. It’s ultimately a means for Chisholm to trust his instincts above all else.

“I think maybe what comes across as meticulous is maybe just a really strong decisiveness with it,” Chisholm said. “You want to practice making the right decision the first time with the first line that you make. And you want to practice having a really, really clear vision before you start working on something and don’t let it start really blurry and then come into focus. Give yourself maybe 10% of improvisation space in it.”

Chisholm says there’s two reasons for this approach and belief set. One is his “background in jazz. When you’re improvising jazz music, you only have the right now, and you have to decide…and whatever you play, you have to accept.” The other is his work as an instructor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he uses his course titled “Visual Storytelling for the Graphic Novel” to guide students into knowing and following their own gut instincts.

“I have a lot of illustration majors, and the folly I see is they learn a process that is really inefficient and indecisive,” Chisholm said. “Sure, it does allow them to investigate in a cool way where it’s like, ‘OK, let’s turn over every rock and examine every possibility.’”

Chisholm added, “There are times with my comic work where I look at some of the decisions that I’ve made in that state and I think, ‘Well, if I would have sat on this for a little bit longer, and maybe I would have come across a better solution.’ After thousands and thousands of pages like that, you slowly get better and better at making those good decisions the first time.”

And, at the end of the day, it’s about not only trusting in any given piece of art, but that you’re contributing another brick in something altogether bigger and more substantive.

“Every time I sit down to make a new project, I know that I’m building a body of work,” Chisholm said. “And I recognize that, and I always want to be challenging myself.”

Knowing yourself (and which draft to push to the finish line) doesn’t mean that Ted didn’t face other developmental roadblocks. The massive premise alone could have seen Chisholm get irredeemably lost in the creative desert.

“When you’re working from a big concept, or a series of big ideas and big concepts, it’s really easy to let plot dictate what your characters do if you’re not really careful,” Chisholm said. “And so it’s really about making sure that all of the character decisions are coming from inside of them.”

To help keep control, Chisholm employed some other advice from his hero Brookmeyer. If you’re going to make something for yourself, it also means being able to surprise even yourself.

“He always wanted to put something in every piece he wrote that he…I believe he called it a ‘what the f**k moment,'” Chisholm said. “Where he wanted something in there that he didn’t know how it was going to work until he heard a band play it.”

Chisholm added, “With every book that I do, I try to add something to my repertoire, whether it’s part of the comics visual storytelling language or a way of rendering or something with the lettering. I’m building this big vocabulary and this big body of work. I’m always trying to put something in that’s like, ‘Is this going to work out? Am I pushing too far with this?’”

Chisholm said it’s gotten so intense that, as he was finishing up issue #6 right around our call, he kept asking himself, “Who wrote this, man? This is impossible.”

Luckily, all Chisholm has to do is then remember his past works, and how he’s done things to make books truly novel and special (even with the seemingly lightest of touches.)

“I’d say 90% of the really radical stuff in Spectrum that people credit to me was in the script [from writer Rick Quinn],” Chisholm said. “There was a lot of innovative visual storytelling stuff that was in the script dictated to me, and I was, in a lot of ways, Rick’s hands. There were some spots where I put my own spin on it…like issue #1. There were no indicators of circular panels in issue #1. And I put them in on just about every page. And then he picked up on that. And then it became part of his scripting.”

And if you look at the many parts that went into Ted as a whole, you can see not only Chisholm’s pure talent, but an artist developing and extending in real time.

Perhaps one of the more interesting “expressions” of that is the focus of Ted itself. You’d think given the book’s name, our boy Ted and his ongoing breakdown would be the star of the show. But then you’d be partially wrong.

“In Ted, there’s two main characters,” Chisholm said. “Ted is the title character, but I really think Sarah is the main character of the story. She’s the person who we get the most interiority.”

That tracks for the author’s treatment of Ted; Chisholm said that he “wanted him to look unsettling; not even like a nerd, just someone who you want to avoid when you’re walking down the street.” (Mission A-freaking-ccomplished.)

But there’s also a more significant reason for the “shift,” as it were.

“If I’m talking to Americans, the person who did all the planning for Christmas and birthdays was not dad, right,” Chisholm said. “And if dad was in charge, then it didn’t get done, right?”

Now, Chisholm admits he’s talking in huge, sweeping generalities. But the point remains that there’s a certain break down of emotional vulnerability across genders that matters within Ted.

“Doing the things that make life pleasurable and nice…I think women have been conditioned for that to be some point of pride,” Chisholm said. “Men…we tend to take pride in, even look at me making this book, in doing shit ourselves.”

Chisholm offers a great example: “Look at the back of any record by a female artist; there’s a lot of songwriters listed on each song. Our gut reaction as men is to be, ‘This is bullshit; she’s not writing stuff herself.’” But rather than being “Captain Ahab in our own minds hunting our white whale or whatever,” Chisholm hopes that there’s bigger lessons to be gained.

“This is examining that, and the way that trickles into empathy,” Chisholm said. “The way that trickles into a lack of empathy for men and then an abundance of empathy in women.”

So, sure, Ted may not be the star, but that doesn’t mean he’s not important. By starting with our hero in such disarray (to the point, as the title indicates, the book itself doesn’t know how he’s doing), Chisholm is actually trying to build Ted back up.

“Whenever my students are doing an original story, and there’s a bigger story, I always ask them, ‘How is your main character broken at the start of the story,” Chisholm said.

That tough but important question makes people question their assumptions and to really develop these organic, wholly approachable characters with flaws and texture.

“This is going to sound like ‘old man yells at a cloud,’ but I think a lot of people, when they’re writing their first stories, it becomes entirely like wish fulfillment,” Chisholm said. “They want their main character to be as cool as hell, and doing cool things and making the right choices all the time. I think it’s important to really know how your character is broken at the start of the story, and then you want their own agency and decision-making through whatever conflicts they encounter to address that brokenness in some meaningful way.”

He even takes it further still. You can’t even have your characters in place if you don’t have another vital story element fully cemented beforehand.

“Frank Capra made It’s a Wonderful Life. And he was really big on knowing what your theme is first,” Chisholm said. “He was like, ‘I don’t even know who my main character is until I know what the story is about.’ Then you can carve out your main character and their desires and wants and needs and why they’re hurt. You carve it out to fit the theme.”

And from there, it becomes a matter of using theme as a north star for all the wonderful character planning/development.

“And then you can carve out every other character, the same traits but the inverse of the theme,” Chisholm said. “So like fun house mirror versions of the main character.”

So, then, what is the theme of Ted then truly? There’s one answer that mostly fits.

“I never, ever once thought this was about COVID, but you’re totally right,” Chisholm said. “I never really thought about this as a cipher for that very weird isolation.”

But there’s another answer that works much, much better. Chisholm said Ted is, at least in part, about the “fallout” that occurs “when things start to go sideways. It’s about how these different archetypal people deal with that fallout along with sci-fi adventure.”

Yet even that maybe doesn’t work fully for this book. Not because it’s not accurate, but that it’s a little “catchy”; it sounds good on paper, but maybe it also limits the story. It’s something that the musician Chisholm is more than familiar with by now.

“It’s like pop music,” Chisholm said. “There has to be a hook in the first issue, right? And the hook has to be strong enough to carry people through a whole-ass series.”

Only sometimes the hook is all we ever get, and that’s an issue for genuinely effective storytelling.

“I think what I see a lot is the hook being the most compelling thing about the series and not necessarily the execution of the story,” Chisholm said. “And maybe I’m going to be a victim of that with this book. But in my pitch to Mad Cave Studios, I described this book as a Trojan horse, where the hook that happens at the start doesn’t carry. It holds its cards close to the chest regarding where it’s going to go.”

That’s a huge reason as to why Ted can be so hard to talk about contextually. Even Chisholm is “hesitant to say specifics because I don’t want to spoil anything in the story.” Part of that is, of course, by design.

“It’s part of this mystery box tradition, where there’s a series of ever-escalating mysteries at the heart of this story,” Chisholm said. “They’ll all be addressed, I can promise that. But then I’m also keeping those cards close to my chest, and so maybe I just won’t ever divulge that stuff because I don’t want to say anything that makes the reading of the thing really prescriptive for people.”

Because despite his years of work and study, there are parts of the larger comic-making experience that Chisholm just doesn’t like or fully understands enough to best employ.

“I even hate writing solicitations for each issue, because by the time the issue #2 solicitation comes out, people won’t have read issue #1 yet,” Chisholm said. “And so it sucks because you can’t help but spoil parts of issue #1 when you write the blurb for the second issue. Or even those silly little things on social media, where it’ll be a book cover and then a bunch of little arrows that are pointing out that say, ‘This is about family problems.’ I want people to read this and be like, ‘Oh, this is about me. This is about this and that.’”

Again, though, Ted sees Chisholm pushing himself to break through these shortcomings and obstacles. He’s making it hard on himself for a reason, folks.

“In the solicitation for the first issue, it says the scope of this book balloons out with each issue,” Chisholm said. “I called it a B story, which it’s not, but it’s this seed of this promise of, ‘This is going to get really big.’ It’s not just a little personal story of two broken people finding each other as they both scrape bottom. There’s bigger scopes and stakes, and these two stories unfold in parallel.”

That’s right, in addition to the tale of Ted and Sarah, the book has another storyline involving Noah, owner of Ayn-Styne and the world’s only trillionaire. He’s interviewed by a journalist about “The Dome,” which may have to do with a global conflict leading to the devastation of some town or region.

In a lot of ways, it’s this “B story” that feels like the proper star of Ted (sort of like how Sarah is the real lead). It’s another instance where that distinction exists given the sheer mastery of the book’s creator.

“I’ve finished through issue #5 of this, and the B story sort of becomes the A story for issue #4 in terms of the structure,” Chisholm said. “Because like all comics, it’s a very formalist thing where I’m going to do this as the end of each issue – put this little B story and progress it. So I script all of this B story separately and then chopped it up to fit this. And I tried to put stuff at the end of each issue that was just cliffhanger-y enough or just enticing enough to be like, ‘Oh, I remember this.’”

But the B story’s appeal goes deeper still. For one, it’s timely to the point of being painful. (Said Chisholm, “When I started writing this, this was all very pie in the sky satire and ridiculousness. And now it’s like, ‘Oh no, this is actually the world we’re in.’”)

Well, it’s not exactly in our world. For one, Noah is actually likeable; perhaps I’m mentally diminished from too many years of Elon Musk exposure, but it’s nice to see an entitled rich guy trying to ruin the world in a way that’s actually not the most stupid, sniveling way possible. It’s endearing in how different it feels, truly.

Not that it was Chisholm’s intention to humanize Noah or anyone else.

“There’s been this whole hustle agenda in pop culture in the last 20 years of, ‘Let’s tell Cruella de Vil’s backstory and make her sympathetic,’” Chisholm said. “And it’s like, this is a woman who kills puppies; there’s no redeeming that. There’s this urge by writers and storytellers to humanize and justify every bad guy. Like, Ben Linus on Lost all of a sudden is this sympathetic character. No, this dude is terrible.”

And while he doesn’t “want Ted Bundy to be humanized,” Chisholm can see that a figure like Noah serves a very important purpose.

“You have to think how does one person amass this level of influence? There has to be a certain level of charm in this person; a confidence that’s unearned but relentless,” Chisholm said. “If the worst person I’ve ever known had a trillion dollars and had all this influence, all of their self doubt would be gone. Or, it would become like what you see with Elon now where it’s like…everything he makes is a reflection of his own inferiority complex.”

The B story is also where we get the most actual, concrete idea of what Ted is about and the true scope of this fictional world. On the one hand, that’s a result of Chisholm’s “problems” with exposition-heavy stories.

“People talk about Saga #1 as the quintessential issue #1,” Chisholm said. “And I think what they forget is there’s a page of info dump on it. There’s a paragraph of, ‘These people are fighting these people.’ And, like, who gives a shit?”

But what Chisholm comes up with (a quick-but-through info dump from the journalist to Noah that works contextually and is interesting to read and never once heavy-handed) is quite brilliant. And perhaps that’s because, for the rest of the first two issues at least, that “exposition bomb” is really the lone instance of this book offering up too much info. It is Chisholm bending, but not breaking, his own rules and beliefs to further the story.

“I have a real love-hate relationship with the Sarah narration through the story,” Chisholm said. “Because I have a love-hate relationship with captioning and narration in comics. Text is easily the most efficient way to communicate information. And comics are a profoundly inefficient medium for the information density, right?”

Even still, Sarah’s narration is actually handled rather perfectly.

“I didn’t want it just to be her commentary on what’s happening,” Chisholm said. “So it’s circling some mystery about her as well. It’s all a voicemail that she’s leaving in installments for somebody. It allow for that cool thing to happen in comics where the visuals are telling one story and the narration is telling a different story. And the two of them grind up against each other, and that tells a third story.”

There’s other moments like that across Ted, instances where the medium itself tells so much of the story.

“I don’t think we’ve necessarily gotten quite there yet with that part of it in terms of reading the first two issues,” Chisholm said. “Other than the fact that the voyeuristic aspect of Sarah’s job obviously works really well because it puts people in little boxes that she’s watching on the screen.”

It’s just one of the ways in which Chisholm thinks comics are “special.” But adoration doesn’t mean maintaining a blind eye, and as he’s demonstrated already, Chisholm is wholly aware of the medium’s deficits.

“I obviously love comics…but you can’t match the immersion of film in comics,” Chisholm said. “Or television even for that matter. And you can’t match the information density of a novel, either.”

But there are still “cool things that comics can do.” For instance, none of those other mediums can offer as much story and space at one simultaneous moment.

“It almost always involves having a sense of simultaneity on a page,” Chisholm said. “Having multiple streams of information in a single view. And then the ability for us to use these quirky bits of formalist visual language to represent elements of the story. Film exists in a fixed temporal space – unless you use the pause button and rewind it and then it’s less of a proper film and more something different, right? With literature, it can be hard to flip back and find something at a glance.”

It’s a tendency and approach executed brilliantly across Ted, but it’s a “tradition” that Chisholm has seen for decades in comics.

“There’s so much information density in each of the nine panels on each page,” Chisholm said of Watchmen. “Each panel is crammed with a full background and a lot of detail. It’s the thing that rewards repeated readings.”

Chisholm added, “There’s a lot of thematic continuity. This was also the case with Spectrum, I think, where if you read Spectrum for a second time and a third time, you get a lot of connective tissue between it.”

In Ted, perhaps the best moment of this “relationship” between story and format comes when our lead, freshly returned from hanging with his stray cat pal, is playing video games. The shift between the game and an especially apathetic Ted feels as if it’s thematically significant.

“Definitely one of my favorite things about comics versus film is the fact that you can pick up like a book, like a big chunky Batman book like this, and I don’t have to read it in order,” Chisholm said. “It obviously makes more sense when I read it in order, but I can flip back the things really easily. And it’s almost like this time travel kind of thing that allows you to place bits of important things in any way that you like. You can draw enough attention to them early on that people will think it’s like a hooky thing – people will remember that video game scene, right? Then it’s like, ‘Is this going to come back? Does this matter?'”

It’s this creator’s way of playing with us, the reader. And just as quickly as he’ll use one scene to poke our brains, he’ll zigzag in another direction entirely just pages away.

“Near page four, there’s Ted drawing this little picture, and then there’s hundreds of copies of that same drawing in his drawer,” Chisholm said. “So that’s me, sort of passively, saying your questions will be answered…Like, we are getting some kind of answer here of what he’s trying to capture in that drawing.”

It’s also very much a response to reader’s expectations. We demand to be dazzled from the get go, and if Chisholm must do that, he’s certainly going to go about it in a way that he finds satisfactory.

“We put a lot of pressure on page ones; it’s like we have to cram every bit of your theme on page one,” Chisholm said. “And it’s like the paranoia in panel one. And we see this dude and then this space alien on panel two and and then we get that line.” (The line again, of course, is “I caused a car accident today.”)

Given the methodical and massively thoughtful way that Chisholm approaches Ted, you might think he’s the literary type. Which is to say, he believes that comics are a truly elevated platform. Timing wise, this part of our chat came at a perfect moment, as across Bluesky folks were, as Chisholm put it, “debating what makes comics literary.” And like the online denizens, Chisholm has some thoughts.

“There was something I saw that said…what makes writing literary is when the writer wants you to notice the sentences and the construction of the way it was written,” Chisholm said. “That’s versus if it’s all about plot, and then it’s not literary.”

But even that analysis has some flaws, too.

“I think a lot of people in that bubble of conversation looked at it like, ‘Well, that means that literary comics just are going to be more wordy,'” Chisholm said. “But I think it’s actually more that if you make comics that make people notice the form, or make people deliberately know this hand of the artist making it, then it’s literary.”

Of course, then that opens up its own “floodgates,” as Chisholm put it, that certain stakeholders “would probably think is uncomfortable to call it literary.”

He added, “Like, is Nightwing literary? When the right people are making it, maybe it is. You end up with a lot of superhero stuff in there because a lot of superhero stuff…there’s so much history there, an abundance of it that is formally playful.”

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But generally speaking, Chisholm has a problem with this whole dang conversation.

“The zeitgeist sees folks like Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, [and] Daniel Clowes; these people are seen as serious cartoonists,” Chisholm said. “And the zeitgeist sees people who make sci-fi and superhero stuff as not serious cartoonists. They see that stuff is literary and this stuff is not literary, and I think it’s so much more gray. It’s akin to thinking that rock music or jazz music can’t be serious music.”

The “solution,” as it were, very much speaks to the heart of Ted itself: All of it’s relevant because all of it can be really real.

“The distinction between low art and high art is garbage,” Chisholm said. “And the distinction between commercial art and high art is garbage. Like, it’s all about the people making the thing and how clever they are and how smart they can be with it. With Ted, I’m putting a lot into this thing, and I want it to be taken seriously, but it’s also pulpy and fun and weird.”

And Ted is certainly something you can take serious. It’s a formal and artistic accomplishment, with Chisholm pushing the very limits of his skill as this furious, inventive creator who is evolving sci-fi with each new brush stroke. It’s also quite powerful thematically and narratively, as we get this relevant, poignant and generally effective story about our wild modern condition. And, if absolutely nothing else, it keeps you feeling uncertain and perpetually guessing at every point. It is, in short, totally worth the pauses, rewrites, hard work, juggling acts, and other sacrifices big and small.

With any luck, people will see Chisholm’s efforts, and Ted will get the praise it’s duly deserved. Will that make Ted truly OK? Since he’s not actually his own creation, Chisholm can’t really answer that. But when I pose the question anyway, he’s got a good response. Not one that offers hope per se, but honesty in spades, and that’s what we really need right now. Because even if we’re not OK, there’s always more story to tell — you just have to go out and tell it.

“Uh, are any of us OK? I think that the less you think about it, then the more OK you are…that’s a sad answer,” Chisholm said. “He’s on fire on the cover of [issue #1]. So no, dude, he’s having a rough time. Maybe by the end he will be?”

Is Ted OK? #1 drops February 25 via Mad Cave Studios. (The FOC is Monday, February 2.)