NaBloPoMo Post #12 - Early Influences

Day 12 and I'm already out of ideas.  This was a stupid thing to do!

Anyway, we'll see what I can cobble together here.  I think it my first post, I mentioned that the initial idea of Faith was to make a comic that John and I would have liked as kids.  We're talking the early to mid-80's here, so at the top of my list of inspirations were Starblazers (a,k.a. Space Battleship Yamato) and Force Five, both Japanese imports.  Boy, we Americans are lazy and we can't write cartoons.

Force Five was pretty cool because each day of the week featured a different hero team fighting the forces of evil, usually involving space ships that could unite into a giant robot.  In fact, a quick look over at Wikipedia tells me that they all did.  That was probably the draw for me.  The five shows were Gaiking, Dangard Ace, Starvengers, Grandizer and Spaceketeers.  I honestly don't remember Spaceketeers at all, but I remember the rest of them, and they were awesome (although, if I watched them now, they would probably not seem quite as awesome.).  Part of me is wondering why no one has tried this kind of anthology now.  Maybe because it's hard enough to write one show?

I think one of the reasons we used these as inspiration was the cool bad guys they always fought.  It was always a giant lizard or a giant robot or something.  Now, Faith has yet to encounter any giant bad guys as of this writing, but I doubt we'll have to wait long.  John is a huge Godzilla fan.  he is also a big Jaws fan, so that (I assume) is where he got the impetus for the giant shark.  And the Mummy?  Well, that has classic monster movie written all over it.  But I may have said too much... 

The whole idea is that part of the fun of creating your own comic is to put in the stuff you love.  I mean, the odds are that if you'd want to read it, then other people probably would, too.  The real crux  of these early influences that we wanted to capture was gallivanting good guys fighting menacing bad guys.  the fact that Faith is a girl will maybe make for some interesting scenarios down the, but at this point, she's not exactly using her feminine wyles to get by.  She's just a "good guy."  But she is a good guy that has been shaped by characters that we have been watching for over thirty years.  So, hopefully, with all that to back us up, we've created someone that people will like.

So, if you like the types of things I liked as a kid, and want to see Starblazers again (or for the first time), I recommend season II: The Comet Empire.  Force Five?  That you'll probably have to bootleg, but this is the internets age.  You can find it.  And if you're like me (and I hope you are!), you'll find it worth your time.

NaBloPoMo Post #11 - Re-post: Putting a Price on Making Comics

Since it's Sunday, and I don't have a lot of time, I thought I would re-post an old blog piece I wrote about creating faith back in February 2009, when John and I still thought that we were going to publish it through Bluewater Productions.  So, it's a few years old, but still kind of relevant.  In fact, in retrospect, it's a good thing we never published it through them.

So, here's where I was February 2009:


I was figuring out the economics of making a comic. And this is not a self-publishing deal, because I've done that before, and believe me, that was bad enough, because you had to pay for your own printing costs and work your ass off to sell it, and most of the time that meant walking directly into stores, where they may take 8 or 10 copies and you'd get half the cover price. Or buying a table at a convention and begging passers-by to look at the thing. Not exactly a get-rich-quick scenario.

Now, considering that the comic I am co-writing (and currently waiting to be drawn) is being printed and distributed, I figured that would keep my costs down. However, we had to get our own artist to draw the thing, and as artists kept dropping out, what we were paying them went up. You get what you pay for, I guess, because we have a couple guys who haven't dropped out, but we have to pay them a rate of $30 a page. The upside is they are really good. The downside is it will cost us $660 an issue. For the planned five-issue series, that will bring it to $3300, plus the $300 we shelled out to get a known artist for the cover of issue #1. At $3600 for the series, at a $2.99 cover price, if we sold 2000 copies (which I believe is the new minimum to remain in Diamond's catalog for more than a month), that puts us (minus the Diamond percentage) at $3588, or $12 short of what we put in. Now, I'm not sure if Blue Water takes a cut, but I imagine they do. They are publishing it, after all.

Now, the hope would be to sell tons and tons of them, of course. Naturally, I'm not sure how to do that. Sales are down everywhere, according to my local comic shop proprietor (who I am counting on to order many copies). So, right now, 2000 seems like a lot. We may never make it passed issue #1, which would mean we would have to collect it in a trade and sell it ourselves, which, again, is not a way to actually make a lot of money.

The good news? I would have a published comic. A credit to my name. Something to show the nephews (although they better buy it.) And if it leads to something else down the road, then I guess you can't really put a price on that. 

 

NaBloPoMo Post #10 - My Stuff

I've talked a lot in this blog about what John has done, and what our artists have done, but you may be wondering what I've done.  Well, the answer is, "Very little."  I mean, very little that anyone has read.  John and I did the Secret Monkey, and we wrote a little animated web-thing called Guitar Boy, and we wrote a space opera called Star Guards (way before Battlestar Galactica was re-booted), and we wrote something called Super-Mask, and an Avengers send-off called Heroes United.  Ok, well, that sounds like a lot, but I swear I haven't done much.
One thing I have done that I'm very proud of is take Andy Schmidt's Comics Experience Writing Class.  The only assignment for the class was to write a fave-page story, and it had to have a clearly-defined beginning and end, so that it could be a stand alone story and not just a piece of something else you had written.  Mine came out very well, I feel.  In fact, much better than I anticipated.  The class decided to get together and publish an anthology of all of our stories, so we had to hire artists to do this.  Naturally, I hired our pal Mark, and he turned around the pages so fast that one of my classmates also hired him, so I was glad to get him the work.  Here's a little preview of my story:

 These are just the pages without letters since I only had those in pdf form, and I didn't want to give everything away for free, but I did of course ask John to do the lettering for me, and he did it because he's awesome.  If you like the look and feel like you have to read it for yourself, the class put all of our stories in an anthology called Out of Our Minds, which can be purchased here, which also features the spectacular work of Paul Allor, who was probably the only writer in the class better than me.  Just kidding.  I was better.

Anyway, so, I have written a few things, but take my word for it, Faith is no doubt the best thing I've ever done, and I swear it's coming soon, so eyes peeled!