NaBloPoMo Post #1 - Gotta Have Faith

While reading my brother and sister-in-law's blog over here, I learned that this month is National Blog Posting Month, a.k.a.NaBloPoMo, and if you can pronounce it, I say you're probably a better writer than me and you can probably craft a smarter blog.

But I digress.  I've decided to participate, since I've been neglecting this blog for awhile (I find that when life is good, I write much less.  Curious.)  But I don't want to ramble on about my life.  I want to actually talk about something that I feel passionate about, and this seems like a good opportunity to break a story that's been cooking for awhile.

A few years ago, my longtime friend and writing partner, John Hunt, came up with an idea for a comic book and asked if I would help him write the script.  He and I had collaborated many times before, but it had been awhile, and I think I had emailed him one day and said, "I want to get back to work," and he pitched me the idea of Faith in the Unknown.  The idea was simple: John felt that there were few adventure comics for kids anymore, and there were even fewer that appealed to girls, so Faith (the title character) is a teenage girl who travels the globe getting into adventures and trying to rescue her kidnapped parents, or as we pitched it, "Kim Possible meets Young Indiana Jones."  Basically, we wanted to write the kinds of stories we enjoyed as kids.  The first story arc alone has jet-pack fight, a mummy, and a giant shark, so how can it go wrong, right?

After writing a couple issues, we commissioned an artist to draw us a five-page pitch, and headed to San Diego Comic-Con.  Unfortunately, we learned that the damn place is so crowded, that no one really has time to listen to pitches unless you get on a list that is about a mile long.  John was able to use his industry contacts as a colorist and letterer to get us a tentative deal with a small-press publisher, but we soon learned that the company (which shall remain nameless) only pays on the back-end, and there is no guarantee that you will ever make any money, or that they'll ever even distribute issue #2 even if you do get them to take issue #1.  So, we walked away from that one.  Meanwhile, we had paid another artist to finish the book, because our first one had found other, steady work (He was that good!)  This second artist was from The Philippines, so there was a language barrier we had to encounter.  Even though we paid him gobs of money, we had to pay someone else to finish it up and then even re-draw a bunch of the pages because they were not what we wanted (John himself had to do a lot of drawing work on it.)

Fast-forward a few years, and suddenly Kickstarter is now the #2 publisher of graphic novels in the U.S., and printing costs for graphic novels has also come way down.  So, this month, we plan to set up our Kickstater campaign and earn enough money to finally, after several years, to print Faith in the Unknown, at least the first story arc.  I'm finishing up our video and taking care of the legal mumbo-jumbo, so stay tuned to this blog to follow our progress.  I'll be making an announcement pretty soon when the Faith Kickstarter campaign is live.  Stay tuned, and this month, you might see a dream come true.