- Is Ted Okay?
- Issues 1 & 2 available now
- Issue 3 on sale 04/29/2026
- Mad Cave Studios
- Written & Illustrated by Dave Chisolm
This is a story about Ted and Sarah.
Ted, isolated and paranoid, works for a mega-corporation owned by the world’s only trillionaire. He suffers from night terrors, obsessively draws the same mysterious figures again and again, all while listening to one track of music on repeat–oh, and the only “person” he ever talks to is a stray cat. His humanity is hanging by a thread.
Sarah is a new arrival to the city, fighting her own demons, and her job is to remotely spy on Ted to ensure he doesn’t hurt anyone…or himself. When Ted’s mental state begins to crack, Sarah compassionately intervenes to help, and things go catastrophically wrong.
IS TED OK? mashes up the paranoid existentialism of SEVERANCE with the cosmic sci-fi of AKIRA while exploring what happens when the act of help goes horribly wrong. From creator Dave Chisholm (SPECTRUM, MILES DAVIS & THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUND), Is Ted OK? is a spectacularly unpredictable yarn–each successive issue shatters the scope of the previous, all without losing its core: a search for human connection in an oppressive, paranoid world.
Okay, so what is this comic about? Well, there’s Ted. He’s… uh…
Hold on, there’s Sarah. She’s a… with the…
Wait, I’ve got this! It’s all about Noah™, who is… he runs the… (and why does he have a “TM” after his name?)
Look, there are plenty of comics out there that will give you a linear story with a group of characters who fit neatly into one of the many categorized archetypes. And then there’s Is Ted Okay?. The one thing I can tell you with all confidence is that Ted is most definitely NOT okay. Which is our entrance into this story about conspiracies, powerful corporate entities, and the stress involved in caring about a fellow human being enough to ignore common sense.
Creator Dave Chisolm hasn’t put up an easy read, but he also hasn’t made anything close to a boring one. His characters are tightly interwoven, their lives tied together with no clear idea of how or why. And as chaotic as the storyline is, Chisolm’s artwork falls right into that same theme. It reminded me a little of some of the stranger stylistic choices found in old issues of Heavy Metal (Metal Hurlant, for any Europeans who’ve stumbled across this article) magazine, the panels as full of fever dream delusions as anything resembling reality.
Which, if there could be a theme to Is Ted Okay?, might just be one of maleable reality. As Ted stumbles about, trying to determine the line between truth and delusion, and Sarah follows Ted, trying to figure out how best to help him, there’s a world happening in the background. The reader gets glimpses of that world in small teaspoon-sized portions and is allowed to make the same discoveries as their POV characters at about the same time. Through it all, mysterious oligarch Noah™ (seriously, what’s with the ‘TM’?) moves his pieces across the chessboard.
Without a doubt, Is Ted Okay? won’t be for everyone. There are people who don’t have the patience to wait, who just want to know what it is they’re reading from the start, and that’s fine. Life is all about those choices… unless you’re stuck in a mind-numbing job, working for a faceless corporate entity that tells you what they want you to do without explaining why they need it done and discourages any reckless human interaction while you’re on the clock.
If that’s the case, choice is a luxury you may not have, and this comic series might be more important than you realized. Just be aware… Noah™ sees you. Noah™ knows.
Final Score: 10/13
To get you a little caught up, a few pages from issue #1…
And now, from issue #3…
Neat, huh?
