A thank you gift to the substack subscribers - The Fine Art of Violence

After years of a single dominant champion, a sea change is upon us.

I started out working in the MMA media in 2013 with Vice.com’s mma site Fightland. Editor Josh Rosenblatt saw something in my vision for treating MMA as a quest for redemption and validation and offered me my first column. Fightland it would later turn out to my surprise, was covertly financed by the UFC and after a while a new editor came in, changing the format and we parted ways. The journalists and editors at the big sites were fans of my artwork, but none of them could figure out how to work together. I wanted to be MMA’s artist, but no one was going to offer me my dream job.

In 2018 I started publishing editorial cartoons on twitter which caught the eye of Kid Nate who offered me a regular column called MMA Squared. That regular column gave me the foothold to reach an audience and the confidence to create my dream job: making art books about MMA, and so The Fine Art of Violence was born.

I reached out to Kid Nate last week wanting to work with BE’s writers and editors to put together a new kind of Fine Art of Violence. The next book will not only feature art about the fights in the cage it will also tell the most compelling journalistic stories of 2023 outside the cage. This year saw the president of the UFC commit domestic violence on camera, Bloody Elbow itself be cut from its corporate parent, Vox Media, and come back from the dead through this Substack subscription to do the best journalism in MMA about the UFC Class Action Lawsuit.

While I sell hard copies of the book I also publish digital version and would like to gift a copy of FAOV: 2023 to each paying Substack subscriber in early 2024.