Oluwafemi Oluwatobi picked up the Best Comic Book Artist award at Comic Con Ibadan 2026 for Red Days, a self-published crime story set at the onset of a Nigerian zombie outbreak. It was the kind of recognition that tends to follow a creator around, and it has: Red Days has also drawn Creator of the Year nominations for Oluwatobi at the BCII awards. What wasn’t public until now is where the series goes next. Red Days is joining The Machine Publishing, with the studio taking over the series going forward.
The news surfaces in GEAR 1, a free promotional digital magazine that The Machine has released to mark its anniversary. Alongside a first look at Red Days Volume 1, the magazine carries an interview with Oluwatobi about the move, the story’s origins and what changes now that it sits under a bigger studio.
Red Days follows three teenage boys, Lati, Ola and Chike, in the chaotic aftermath of a robbery in a small Nigerian town, unaware that a plague is beginning to spread around them. Volume 1 collects chapters one to four of an eight-chapter, two-volume series, including the previously released debut issue that helped win Oluwatobi his award. In the interview, he traces the idea back to watching The Walking Dead and reading World War Z, and to weighing up different ways of setting a zombie apocalypse in Nigeria before landing on the current structure: the outbreak in the background, a crime story at the front. Asked to pitch it in three words, he settles on “Gritty, dark, Nigerian.”
On the move to The Machine, Oluwatobi points to the studio’s handling of its flagship title, Celestial Eyes, as the reason he wanted the same treatment for his own series, and describes the support so far as good. His stated ambition for Red Days is straightforward: to see the story through to its conclusion, with everything else, awards, adaptations, and a wider readership following from that.
Red Days is one of two titles joining The Machine’s roster for the first time in GEAR 1. The other is Modmight, a remade version of a comic Julius Imasuen originally self-published for three issues before shelving it in 2018. The new Volume 1: Origin Arc reworks the first three chapters and adds two more, with Imasuen writing and drawing alongside Cuisel Peach and Tolu Adeojo. It follows Jason Afure, a university student who discovers he has gained powers from a cosmic cloud that struck Earth, in a version of Lagos reshaped to accommodate the story’s extraordinary humans, or “Xomans.” In his own GEAR 1 interview, Imasuen traces the character back to 2012, when he was known as Jason Grey, a New York-set hero with no particular resemblance to his creator, before a chance visit to a Comic Republic event pushed Imasuen towards building characters who looked like him. He puts the move under The Machine down to workload: with Peach now helping shape the story from its opening chapter, rather than joining midway as before, Imasuen says the partnership frees him up while giving the series a bigger audience than his earlier, self-published run reached. A prequel one-shot, Datenight, is due the following month.
The rest of GEAR 1 is given over to The Machine’s existing line. Celestial Eyes, the studio’s flagship supernatural mystery series, returns for a third volume, with the magazine carrying an interview with creators Adepitan Omotayo, also known as EOA, and Ifeoluwa Owoade, the award-winning creator of Hounds and Jackals, as well as exclusive pages from the next chapter. Ulofyu gets its first graphic novel, alongside a second instalment of the Worlds one-shot anthology, subtitled Worlds at War, with an interview featuring the Hue Brothers, Lord Blue and Cuisel Peach.
The magazine also uses the occasion to look back. The Machine launched on 21 June 2024, built out of an earlier, folded studio called Amaze Comics Ent, and closes its second year with twenty publications in its library. Along the way it has picked up two Glyph awards for Celestial Eyes at ECBACC 2025, a Nommo award for Best Graphic Novel at the Ake Festival, Comic Book of the Year at the inaugural NICE Awards, and five wins from ten nominations at Comic Con Ibadan, where John Uche took Best Writer and Best Emerging Talent, Cuisel Peach won Best Letterer, and the studio itself was named Best Emerging Studio in 2025.
GEAR 1 is available now, free, on The Machine’s website.
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