Creator / Splatto Comics

Splatto's logo

Splatto Comics is an independent comic press run by Richard C. Meyer, a writer who initially started as a comics reviewer on Youtube before going on to create his own works. His press now publishes his original creations as well as tie in works to existing franchises. Other creatives who frequently work on books published by the press include Narwhal, Kelsey Shannon, Ibai Canales, and Jon Malin.

This press has been publishing since 2018. Its books include:

• Jawbreakers: A superhero series following the adventures of a team of former superheroes who became elite mercenaries.
  • Jawbreakers: Lost Souls: The Jawbreakers are hired to hunt monsters deep in the African jungle. When they learn that a warlord intends to exploit and abuse one of those monsters, a massive Killer Gorilla, they fight to protect it.
  • Jawbreakers: G0D-K1NG: When a monstrous supervillain calling himself 'God King' takes over New York City, the Jawbreakers fight to defend their great nation.
  • Jawbreakers: Grand Bizarre: A prequel detailing how the warriors who would later become the Jawbreakers met up at a strange bazaar in which anything could be bought... provided one is willing to pay the terrifying price.
  • Knife-Hand: Blind Spot: In this first solo Jawbreakers adventure, Knife-Hand must rescue his teammates from a floating castle.
  • Jawbreakers Forever: After several members of the team are killed, Silkworm rebuilds with new recruits. But when the supposedly dead Jawbreakers return thanks to multiversal chaos, the two teams must team up to stop all of reality from crumbling.
  • KUFFZ: Origin: Former criminal Kuffz decides to become the preeminent black superhero in New York, and after a Harlem-based supervillain issues a challenge, Kuffz forms a team of his own.
  • Jawbreakers: Contingency: A superhero decides to kill off his sidekicks so he can retire in peace, and when the Jawbreakers intervene, the 'hero' decides to deal with them as well.
• Impossible Stars: A science fiction story about Earth struggling against a powerful race of aliens.
  • Impossible Stars: An alien empire imposes a quarantine on Earth, vowing to destroy the planet if any humans try to leave the solar system. Earth's governments quickly yield, but the astronaut Tyler Blake has other ideas... ones for which he'll need a very fast spaceship.
  • Impossible Stars 2: A century after the quarantine was breached and the aliens vanished, the astronaut Aaron Cruz returns without having aged a day. But when Cruz is stranded on a disabled spaceship that's drifting towards enemy territory, it becomes apparent that his adventures are not over.
• Iron Sights: A gritty crime series detailing the adventures of cartels and lawmen on both sides of the border.
  • Iron Sights: A veteran rescues a woman named Esme from a vicious cartel — and inadvertently kicks off a border war.
  • Iron Sights: 2 Pyschos: Esme is now running her own cartel and has made Ramadi one of her top henchmen, but the vicious reality of the criminal underworld threatens to destroy them both. Meanwhile, the deep-cover agent Harm struggles to stay alive following the death of his handler.
  • Iron Sights 3: Harm is pushed to his limits trying to rescue his partner while Esme struggles to go legit and finds that her past may not be willing to let her go.
• Theosophy books: A line of otherwise unrelated one-shots designed to comment on current events.
  • PANdemIC: A bartender takes advantage of pandemic lockdowns to head downtown and loot fancy offices while all their usual occupants are stuck at home. But when she stumbles upon a massive conspiracy, she must find some way to escape vicious enemies and expose the horrible truth of the pandemic.
  • DO AS YOU'RE TOLD: The Ballad of NO: A madman escapes from an insane asylum and is forced to deal with the wild, pandemic-battered world of 2020 America.
  • Mind Your Business: After a wannabe hero named Phil complains that he'd love to fight the Russians in Ukraine but he just can't afford body armor and a plane ticket, an inept influencer and a petty thief work together to raise the needed funds. However, things soon go terribly wrong.
• Other original works:
  • 499: In an alternate universe where America and the Soviet Union fought a decades-long hot war, a group of teenage dissidents in the '499' art collective must face their war-weary and paranoid parents who are veterans of that war.
  • Rock 'N Roll Ninja: Four Vietnam veterans escape from ninjas to pursue their dream of forming a rock band, but the ninjas have no intention of letting them get away.
  • Garrison: An elite military unit a la G.I. Joe join forces with their COBRA-esque counterparts in order to battle an Islamist terrorist organization.
  • Is This You?: An immortal man finds himself persecuted over offensive views he held and actions he took decades, centuries, and even millennia prior.
  • P.O.D. (Payment On Delivery): In an alternate world, the Nazis made a deal with an alien race, offering a great price in exchange for military support. The aliens promptly returned to their home world to muster their armies, and in the meantime, the Nazis were crushed by the Allies... but now the aliens have returned and are demanding their payment.
  • Runner: A messenger in an army is tasked with delivering an order for some warriors to attack a giant, but the messenger is tired of being disrespected by the warriors and decides to deal with the giant himself.
  • Closer to Heaven: Aliens recruit a police officer to make sure they, the aliens, don't hurt Earth.
• Tie In Comics: Comics for various pre-existing works.
  • The Expendables Go To Hell: In this tie in to The Expendables, the members of the eponymous mercenary crew are killed and have to fight their way out of Hell itself.
  • Rambo: First Kill: In this Rambo tie in, Rambo's first tour of duty is depicted in all its bloody horror.
  • A New Kind of War: In another Rambo tie in, this one set during the Korean War, Colonel Trautman's backstory is revealed.

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This press and its works contain examples of:

• Artifact Title: The name 'Splatto' comes from one of Meyer's early comic reviews, in which he was mocking how a protagonist that had previously been shown to be extremely violent and 'tough' was suddenly reduced to a sobbing mess after seeing the body of a cat which had been run over. Meyer found the bathos to be comical, and he gave the dead cat the joking name of 'Splatto del Gatto' to mock how the cat was being depicted as more worth of empathy than all the named people that the protagonist had threatened to hurt, or actually hurt, in the comic's preceding issues. When Meyer later founded his comics press, he chose to call it 'Splatto' and gave it the logo of a cat face with tire tracks running over half of it.
• Back from the Dead: Both the Jawbreakers and the Expendables do this in the Splatto Comics oeuvre.
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: After PANdemIC came out, people noticed how it included many elements which Meyer had criticized in his reviews of Marvel and DC comics. Meyer responded that he has essentially imposed this trope on himself, wanting to show that the elements themselves weren't bad — they were just executed badly in the other works — by making a work which used all the same elements much more effectively.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The books which aren't part of larger series often focus on current issues, including the COVID-19 Pandemic (PANdemIC, Do As You're Told), cancel culture (Is This You?), and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Mind Your Business).