Fresh stories, same psychic mayhem: Matt Kindt on returning with ‘Mind MGMT: New & Improved’

Great stories are a little window into a creator’s heart and mind. So if you really want to know Matt Kindt, you just have to read Mind MGMT — all six volumes (and the four Bootleg issues, of course).

“It’s probably my natural state of being for creating,” Kindt said during our recent Zoom call. “Honestly, all of my ideas are Mind MGMT ideas…unless they become something else.”

Of course, for all intents and purposes, Kindt was mostly done with Mind MGMT. Aside from Bootleg — a run Kindt loves but also says “felt really wrong…letting someone else draw it” — the final issue (#36) dropped way back in October 2015. It’s a massive, sprawling tale that, as far as Kindt was concerned, “ends neatly and it really works in a bubble.”

But no stories are ever truly finished — just as people are perpetually unearthing some new wrinkle or secret they’ve held onto for years. That’s why despite the sense of finality he’s long maintained, Kindt is set to return to his “natural state” with the forthcoming Mind MGMT: New & Improved.

Prepare to meet Matt Kindt again — for the second (?) time.

“A Barrage of Bullets and Brain Matter”

As Kindt tells it, he was hesitant enough in returning to his weird world of otherworldly espionage.

“When I made the move to Oni, they asked if I would be interested in relaunching it,” Kindt said. “At first I was like, ‘Mannnnnn…,’ you know what I mean? But then I started thinking about it, and I still have notebooks full of Mind MGMT ideas.”

And it’s not just that this story world is especially comfortable for Kindt — it’s that in some ways, it was tailor-made for regular enough returns and “resurrections,” if you will.

“I was trying to come up with an idea for a series that could tell any story, and I could go anywhere or switch genres a little bit. That model, the closest thing I could think of, was Sandman, which went on and on for multiple books,” Kindt said. “[Neil Gaiman] was able to tell different stories and go to different places. And there’s some core characters, but I thought that I don’t even need a core character. I could just keep doing Mind MGMT books — the idea of Mind Management as an organization or just that concept is enough to tell stories for the rest of my career.”

As such, each new book or story can fully reflect where Kindt is at both creatively and personally at any given moment. And this time around, he really wanted to get his Dashiell Hammett on.

“When this series starts out, it’s basically a murder mystery,” Kindt said. “The culprit, the murderer…that character is an idea I’ve had for a very long time. There was never a space for it until I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll make it its own book and its own story,’ because the story of that character, I think, is one of my favorite ideas. This character was just waiting for this moment to do this new book.”

Given the angle, Mind MGMT: New & Improved #1 introduces us to two new leads, Detective Gemini Delphi and Detective John Swon. The old Mind Management is gone, “exploded in a barrage of bullets and brain matter.” Delphi and Swon now find themselves tackling new and strange puzzles, including a “supposed suicide victim run over by a train..with his arms found in a trash can five miles from the tracks.” It’s ultimately a much larger mystery involving former agents, each one killed by a “faceless killer capable of evading even the most pervasive digital surveillance.”

The stories and people may have changed, but it’s the same Mind MGMT because of what really matters. Namely, how it asks big questions, like “Has Mind Management returned?” Or “Did it ever go away?” And, yeah, you’re totes paranoid, but as the solicitation demands, “are you paranoid enough?”

Added Kindt, “It’s present day-ish, 10 years later, with all new everything. I just wanted to make it so if you’ve never read Mind MGMT, you could just pick it up here and then don’t worry about the old stuff. I mean, go find it if you’re curious.”

“Full of Conspiracy Theories…”

As excited as I am for our new heroes, one of my one initial questions was about Meru, the sharp, undeniable lead from the first series. In keeping with the “completeness” of the preceding story, Kindt feels like she’s all wrapped up, adding, “I don’t want to be checking in on her again. I know where she is and what she’s doing and what’s happened and everything, but I didn’t really want to tell that story.”

And while he said it’s now the story of Delphi and Swon, Meru still pops up in at least some aspect of Mind MGMT: New & Improved.

“There’s a prose page at the end of every issue. It’s the inside back cover, and Meru is in that,” Kindt said. “So that’s how you’re going to get her presence is right there. It’s how I bridge the old series to the new series – you find out everything there. It’s leading up to something. I don’t want to spoil what that is or when it is even, but it definitely will circle around and tie in. That was something I hadn’t done in the original series.”

(If you’re not keen on prose in comics, Kindt is right there with you: “I hate big blocks of prose and comics. But it’s in the inside back cover, so you can skip it. Like the first time you read Watchmen. I know you didn’t read that prose. Nobody did.”)

Kindt even got a little inventive with the back cover for each new issue. And you can thank a, um, especially enthusiastic fan for that strange slice of inspiration.

“I got the craziest…I don’t know if it was fan mail or it some sort of crazy zine,” Kindt said. “It was full of conspiracy theories and all kinds of racist stuff. It was really hard to decipher someone’s weirdo manifesto. It looked like it’d been Xeroxed 1,000 times. I kept that for years; had it in a Ziploc bag because my wife wouldn’t let me touch it because it looks so nuts. That’s the template for the back inside cover. I designed it to look exactly like that thing. And I’m using that as inspiration for these backstories.”

“Less Afraid in General”

Not to already dismiss or denigrate New & Improved before it officially drops, but the most interesting bits may involve Kindt himself (and, by extension, I guess even his enthusiastic fans). Because not only was he hesitant to tell this story, but Kindt was fully aware of how he’s changed as a creator in the last decade-plus — and not always for the “better,” mind you.

“The other part was just the amount of work it takes,” Kindt said. “I’m, like, 10 years older and I’m doing everything for the book. I’m not going to hire a letterer. No one else is going to draw it. I didn’t know if I’m up to a monthly book again because it’s a lot of work.”

But as those “pops” of innovation have already proven, Kindt is maybe sharper than ever (at least in some areas/functions). The creation of the book itself may prove more physically demanding, perhaps, but Kindt is with it exactly where it counts.

“I think I’ve gotten better. It doesn’t seem as hard as it did back in the day,” Kindt said. “I’m just less afraid in general, I guess, of what the reception of it is going to be.”

Because once where there was doubt, now Kindt feels a proper bit of confidence. Or, at the very least, a certain kind of calm.

“In the original series, I feel like I was out to prove something,” Kindt said. “Like, ‘Here’s what I can do in comics,’ or ‘Here’s what comics can do.’ Like, let’s use every inch of the page and let’s do all this and that. Coming into the new series, I didn’t want to repeat that. I’ve done like all the texts on the sides and all the hidden things. There’s still some of it, but I’m doing it in a different way.”

Perhaps part of it is that Kindt is embracing the kinds of storytelling approaches he’d normally avoid for various reasons. New & Improved is an exercise in creating what he called a “10-minute read,” adding, “I was consciously trying to dumb it down. I was trying to make it the most streamlined, easy-to-read comic that I hate. I probably failed; I couldn’t help it.” (In Kindt’s defense, issue #1 is still a very breezy 20-minute read.)

And while the “old” Kindt would’ve been afraid to tackle a story in this manner, the “new” Kindt was ready and raring to go.

“I think old me would have been scared – ‘Oh, people are going to think that I’m just dumbing it down or something.’ But now that’s OK,” Kindt said. “I want people to maybe think that. So when you get to issue #5, it sort of turns a corner, but I’m trying to lull you into feeling like you’re in a safe place. I feel more confident waiting until issue #5 to twist things around. And before it was like, ‘I’m going to lose people by issue #3.’ Now I don’t care. Hopefully, if you stick with it, there’s a bigger payoff.”

That’s not to say the book still isn’t quite challenging; Kindt revealed that he himself “got lost” while recently completing issue #5. (Again, in his defense, the intro of that issue is this massively meta, decidedly layered storytelling device that could be amazing if it doesn’t melt anyone’s brains. Or maybe it’s amazing because it likely will melt your brain?)

Because after years of putting a lot of himself in these books, New & Improved isn’t quite as personally resonant. It’s still got plenty of Kindt in its pages, but mostly in a way that seems to reflect his newfound attitudes toward aging and how that relates to his continued creativity.

“I was talking to my wife yesterday and said, ‘It’s not that old people don’t care what other people think; they just are themselves,’” Kindt said. “I think when you get older, you realize, yeah, people aren’t even paying attention. People aren’t even thinking about it. So I think when I was approaching or attacking this story, I was just going to put my most fun ideas or a lot of me in there and then no one’s going to care.”

“Oh my God, Where am I?”

Now, that doesn’t mean to “not care” in that no one wants read this book. Rather, in the sense that all of his former hold-ups are a non-issue, and Kindt is free to, as he said, really and truly be himself. And that’s manifesting in some very special ways.

“I don’t know how to say this,” Kindt said. “But I feel like I’m better or more conscious of how I can manipulate a reader.”

Kindt added, “The bigger idea this time for me is how to manipulate a reader in a way that makes you feel comfortable. With the first three issues, I want you to feel comfortable in like, ‘Oh, it’s a detective duo and they’re solving these weird murders.’ I’m trying to pull from genres that people are comfortable with. Procedural detective stuff, and ‘will they, won’t they’ romantic stuff. I tried to pick the most popular tropes – the things that are people’s comfort food when it comes to TV shows and movies.”

For Kindt, that “comfort food” is his aforementioned return to crime comics. First, he started reading more pulp novellas. Then, he got busy “doing a webcomic about crime.” (Ne’er Do Well is quite the interesting approach to crime stories in general.) And then all of that sort of “leaked” into this new series (and issue #5 especially).

“That’s a genre where you can kind of tell almost any story,” Kindt said of crime. “Frank Miller’s Daredevil was a crime comic. It’s a safe place to do stories – as long as there’s a crime involved, you’re good to go.”

Kindt isn’t a fan of all crime books. He said that he collects “hard case crime paperbacks,” and while the “covers are always great,” some of the stories “are just horrible; some of them were just turning my brain to mush.” The best crime stories, then, seem to have a bit of “magic” to them.

“When I was in high school, I read all the Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett books,” Kindt said. “At the time, what I liked about it was that it was like a time travel machine. Chandler…he’s writing in the era he’s living in – the cars and the clothes. I don’t know if the dialogue was exactly accurate, but the terminology and everything…I liked that. As I got older, I got more into history, which is like time travel, but it’s a little more accurate.”

More recently, he fell for James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, a 1941 novel about a woman who opens a successful restaurant to support her family only to have to deal with waves of sudden betrayal and personal animosity.

“I don’t even think it’s a crime book,” Kindt said. “I think it’s a domestic drama. It’s all character-driven. So that would maybe inform this Mind MGMT series – I wanted to do more of a page-turner feeling at the beginning to get you going and then let it slowly go off rails. To get you in just enough where you’re like, ‘OK, I’m in.’ And then you’re like, ‘Oh my God, where am I?’”

As to why he turned to crime, Kindt still isn’t 100% certain. However, he knows there’s at least one aspect of the genre that he can respect. It is, as you’ve likely already guessed, something that will 100% filter into Mind MGMT: New & Improved.

“I don’t want an unsatisfying ending,” Kindt said. “I think you can leave a little bit up to the reader to fill in the gaps or to come up with something, but I don’t think that’s always as satisfying. With a good crime book, there’s no ambiguity as to what happened. Maybe how you feel about it is ambiguous, but you can’t deny that ending.”

“The Idea Was Derided by Everybody”

Until we get to that magical ending, though, we have to get to know our two leads, Delphi and Swon. Not only did their names come from one of Kindt’s old notebooks, but so much else that informs their overarching characters have been simply waiting for their moment to shine.

“I had a graphic novel a long time ago about a detective who was a super-smeller and could smell everything and solve all these crimes,” Kindt said. “She was a Sherlock Holmes character. The idea was derided by everybody. Nobody liked that idea, but it stuck with me.”

Whether or not “Private Nose” could’ve been good or not is irrelevant. (That’s my title, but feel free to steal it, Kindt or any other creators reading this.) What matters is that the idea percolated for the right amount of time, and before it finally reached the page, it filtered into Kindt’s real life. (That’s sort of a theme, yeah?) More specifically, after years of his wife running a candle shop, and Kindt being somewhat bad at recognizing odors, he’s finally learned why these silly little things mean so much to folks. Art imitates life and life imitates art, ya dig?

“Every once in a while she’ll make one, and go, ‘I like this one because it reminds me of Christmas when I was 10,’” Kindt said. “I liked the idea of this sense having memories linked to them. And then I liked the idea of this character who could use this sense, borrowing from that old idea of the detective that could use scent to discover things. But it’s also somebody who’s self-regulating, too, just to keep himself from going crazy. It starts with [Swon] blocking everything out. In the end, he’s having the opposite problem. Like, ‘Oh, which one’s happening?’”

Swon, then, is a man who very much lives in his own bubble (something Kindt is familiar with as a self-described perpetual daydreamer). He uses his keen sense of smell to crack the many mysteries at hand as well as pull back when his work becomes overpowering. He’s self-aware almost to a detriment, and that’s very much an interesting way to be for a cop/detective.

Gemini, meanwhile, has a much different ability (and corresponding set of issues/opportunities).

“Her main ability is micro-expressions,” Kindt said. “I’m a product of Gen X, and there’s people calling out people with microaggressions. That was interesting. I’m sure we’ve all done it 1,000 times, but I like that idea of somebody who could weaponize that and do it purposefully. She’s constantly doing it to manipulate people. There’s another side, too – I don’t want to spoil it, but that’s a passive version of what she does, but there’s a more aggressive version of what she can do.”

As such, Gemini is very much of the world, a distinct counter to her partner. Where he’s in his own head, she’s in the heads of everyone else, making mental chess moves to control situations, uncover information, and generally dictating the actions and feelings of those around her. She’s the doer and decider, if you will, that makes sure everything gets done.

At this point, I asked Kindt if he knew where these two “templates” came from, and if it had anything to do with his own personal relationship/dynamic. (Especially given the aforementioned candle story.) While he was hesitant to compare his wife to Gemini, he did tell one story that pretty much sealed the deal.

“We had some flooding recently, so we were dealing with these workers coming and going,” Kindt said. “I absolutely don’t want to deal with it. And she’s so good at it because she won’t take any shit.”

So, does that mean we could eventually see sparks fly between our two detectives?

“You’re onto something,” Kindt said. “I’ll say that there’s a lot more to both of them than you find out right away. Stop thinking about it so hard. You’re going to spoil things.”

“This is a Pipe”

Romantic queries aside, there’s one other aspect of New & Improved that I was curious about: How exactly do you tell a Mind MGMT story in 2026?

In a series that’s all about the tenuous nature of both truth as well as the role of perception, it must be hard to tell a great story when Donald Trump has pushed us all into this hellacious, post-truth timeline.

Kindt’s response? “I connect to make sure I’m aware of everything that’s happening. And then I have to disconnect.”

Which isn’t just Kindt being vague AF. Instead, he’s exploring these ideas of truth and understanding, but doing so in a way that seems to fit with the canon of Mind MGMT.

In the first series, there’s an actual Shangri-La that’d been previously been discovered. In its walls is a library overseen by a group of monks, who have objectively recorded the entirety of human history. I repeat: the entirety of human history.

Said Kindt, “Who killed JFK? It’s right there. [The monks] were history’s human video recorders.”

Kindt went on to say that the idea, born out of discussions about Heaven with his preacher father, now serves as the centerpiece of Mind MGMT: New & Improved.

“That’s the heart of the new series — this library,” Kindt said. “What is it? Where is it? Who is it? What’s it all mean? What’s the value? What kind of power can you wield if you have that book?”

So, what’s that got to do with our post-truth existence? Well, no matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office, eventually the universe will self-correct (to what extent we cannot ever truly tell), and the truth will take root. Mostly.

“I was born in the ‘70s, and so you go through the ‘80s and you assume politicians are lying and this and that,” Kindt said. “But you can decipher the truth, or the truth seems to eventually surface. Now there’s people that just lie about every single thing, you know? Then add in AI and deep fakes. So you have to backtrack – where did this come from, and do I trust that? Even still, you have to make a little bit of a leap of faith.”

It’s an idea or approach baked into every strand of Mind MGMT‘s very DNA: Truth and perception are often what you make of it. As much as people can manipulate you, folks are capable of shaping their own reality right back in their faces.

“It just reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Marcel Duchamp,” Kindt said. “Specifically, ‘This is Not a Pipe.’ One of the old covers of Mind MGMT, which is my favorite, it’s got Meru and she’s bent into the shape of a pipe. And it says, ‘this is a pipe,’ a play on that painting. Every day we’re living in that world – ‘it’s not a pipe.’”

Kindt added, “All that’s informing this series – are you even reading this comic? It’s this universal idea of people want the truth, and you want to know what’s real. I’m not saying that it’s not about that. It could be about that – and it’s a romance.”

“I Like Drawing and Thinking About Stuff”

So, just how far does Mind MGMT: New & Improved actually extend? And is this truly the end, or is there something more still to dance down the pipeline?

“I have a two-year plan,” Kindt said. “After that, I don’t know. I don’t think I can do it monthly for longer than that just because it’s so much. I could take a break and then do another standalone or six issues or eight issues or even new graphic novels. I love doing stuff in different formats.”

Beyond that, it’s more of the same for Kindt. He’s got an assistant to handle his social media, which leaves him ample time for what he really loves the most: “I like reading books and I like drawing and thinking about stuff.” And, of course, playing Fortnite. (Kindt uses matches for professional purposes, calling them a “conference call where we’re shooting things.”)

But whatever comes next (personally, artistically, etc.), Kindt obviously isn’t done growing across any of these essential fronts. Mind MGMT: New & Improved is, perhaps above all else, proof of what happens when even a seasoned artist finds the courage and drive to push themselves and their art. It’s a book that fully lives because its creator was able to try new things (even if they seemed weird and/or scary at some point) in the name of more vibrant storytelling. Ultimately, it’s less about weird powers and mysteries and the nature of reality — it’s about making art that redefines life for the creator and audience alike.

And just you wait till you see what kind of growth and changes Kindt has in store as he further reveals himself as a singular artist like few others.

“It’s weekly family art night, and I wasn’t liking how my painting was turning out,” Kindt said of a recent such gathering. “So then I said, ‘I’m going to paint left-handed and see how that goes.’ I cranked out a bunch of paintings. They turned out great, better than my right-handed paintings. One day I’m going to write and draw the whole thing left-handed or paint the whole thing left-handed. But it has to make story sense; it’s definitely a different style.”

Mind MGMT: New & Improved #1 is due out June 24 via Kindt’s own Flux House imprint and Oni Press.