Merchants & Fares
Chico’s world is the merchants and the fares — storefronts, stables, and customers who need a package carried across dangerous country and will pay coin to see it done. It is a small world, and everybody in it keeps accounts.
Blackwater Comics · First Book · In Production
Issue No. 1 — “A Night with Chico”
California gold country, 1852. Chico Fernandez is a working courier with three rules and a horse named Cristóbal — and one day’s ride that breaks every rule he’s got. An epic crime noir about bad bargains, gold dust, and the long road home.
Bulletin
Help us draw our very first comic. Blackwater is looking for a cover artist and interior artists — plus ink and color — for Midnight Rider Issue No. 1. The story is written. The pages are waiting.
Know an artist — or are you one? The full search is below, and the details go out first through the Blackwater Letter.
The Comic
Midnight Rider is an epic crime noir set in the 1800s — gold-rush California, where every ride has a price and every bargain has a catch — featuring a character never before seen in comic books: a working courier whose whole world is fares, miles, and a code he can’t afford to break.
Chico’s world is the merchants and the fares — storefronts, stables, and customers who need a package carried across dangerous country and will pay coin to see it done. It is a small world, and everybody in it keeps accounts.
A courier’s life is arithmetic. Every ride has a price, every mile has a cost, and the difference between the two is supper. Chico does the sums the way other men say their prayers — daily, and without skipping.
Then there is a day like this one. Ride after ride pays less than promised, costs more than expected, or goes sideways outright. It is not a tragedy — it is worse than that. It is bookkeeping. By sundown the day’s ride has left him poorer than when he started, three pouches of gold dust are in his hands, and the only way home is a night ride.
Who Rides
A Mexican courier in his early twenties working the gold-country roads around Columbia, California. He rides alone, keeps three rules, and has a strong opinion about how he gets paid.
No costume. No legend — yet. Just a working man, a satchel, and a road that keeps collecting what it’s owed.
Chico’s horse — and the only partner he’s got. Steady, stubborn, and he drinks first. Always.
Every mile of the book happens at his pace. When the road turns bad after dark, Cristóbal is the difference between a bad night and no morning at all.
Inside Issue No. 1
Issue No. 1, “A Night with Chico,” follows a single day — from first light to the ride home after dark. Walk it hour by hour:
Chico saddles Cristóbal in Columbia, takes his fares, and does the morning sums. A working day, like any other: coin for miles, home by dark, rules intact.
Ledger: even · Rules broken: 0 of 3
Three pouches of gold dust. One scale at the end of the road. “Well, I’ll be.”
The Working Code
Three rules, learned the hard way — they kept him fed, alive, and out of other men’s trouble. Issue No. 1 breaks all three.
Select a rule to see how “A Night with Chico” breaks it.
The Side Story
Before the night ride, there was the day. “A Day with Chico” is a little comic — a side story that follows Chico through one ordinary, rule-following day on the road: the fares, the merchants, the arithmetic, and Cristóbal drinking first.
It’s the free introduction to Chico’s world. The main event is the series itself — Midnight Rider Issue No. 1, “A Night with Chico,” where the same day runs long and every rule breaks.
The day = Chico with his rules · The night = Chico without them
The Search
The story is written. What Midnight Rider doesn’t have yet is its artist. We’re looking for illustrators for the cover and the inside pages — and for ink and color. The direction: pulp-poster covers that stop a stranger cold, and raw, kinetic ink on the pages.
The first thing anyone will ever see of this book — Chico and Cristóbal, the road, and the night coming down. One image that has to stop a stranger cold.
The inside pages of Issue No. 1 — a full day’s ride through gold country, told in panels: merchants, fares, camps, and a road that keeps collecting.
Strong, confident ink that can carry dust, lamplight, and midnight in the same book — the noir half of this crime noir lives in the blacks.
Color that knows the 1800s — sun-beaten days, red-sun evenings, and one long night ride. Gold country should feel like gold country.
That’s where the artist-search details go out: what we’re looking for, and how to share your work with us.
The letter carries the full brief for the cover and the inside pages — no guessing about what the book needs.
The concept art on this page is exploration. The hired artist’s designs are the real lock — Chico, Cristóbal, and the country, drawn for good.
The Imprint
Midnight Rider is Blackwater’s first book — not its only country. The imprint was built to carry stories across genres under one banner: if it’s got a dark streak running through it, it belongs here.
Midnight Rider — crime, gold, and the courier’s road in gold-rush California.
Strange signals and far country — the same storytelling, pointed at the future.
Present-tense stories: streets, cities, and trouble that wears today’s clothes.
Capes and powers, grounded the Blackwater way — every gift has a price on the ledger.
The Blackwater Letter
The Blackwater Letter
Occasional letters on Midnight Rider — the artist search, the first real art when it lands, your free copy of the “A Day with Chico” side story, and news of Issue No. 1. No noise, no spam.