All October long I will be exploring the context behind (using reader danjack's term) "meta-messages." A meta-message is where a comic book creator comments on/references the work of another comic book/comic book creator in their comic. Each time around, I'll give you the context behind one such "meta-message." Here is an archive of the past installments!

Today we look at the final issue of Automatic Kafka (#9, to be precise), where the creators of the book, Joe Casey and Ashley Wood, meet their creation and explain the book's cancellation to him.

Automatic Kafka was an excellent comic book by Joe Casey and Ashley Wood that ultimately was a bit too "out there" to sustain itself commercially. The book lasted only nine issues, and in that ninth issue, the hero of the book, Automatic Kakfa (an android who was part of a mass-marketed superhero team during the 1980s) meets his creators...



I love Casey's commentary about the tradition of creators appearing in comics...



Casey spends much of the issue commenting on modern comic books...







The end of the issue is especially touching. I hope that we soon get a US reprint of this series. As you can just see from the above pages, it was a standout comic.