TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE Feb/22 - crowding my plate with things I love.
All the news that's fit to [blast into your email]
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2021 -- beyond.
Business or pleasure.
Continually thinking about how to run my comic making side hustle as a business, when it’s mostly done for pleasure, but I can see that it makes me money, but to get more money from it sometimes I need to treat it like a business, which isn’t always a pleasure.
And then sometimes you just never can tell, anyway. I can hustle away at trying to land work-for-hire gigs, and put a shitload of mental energy into it, and not land anything. Or I can make a weird sci-fi comic with a pal for no money and then it ends up getting optioned and you’re looking at a month ahead of you where it’s going to be shopped around by a production company to some very exciting places. You know, for instance *hypothetically speaking*.
Sometimes making comics is some hard business, and sometimes it’s a real pleasure. At the end of the day [literally for me], I have 2-3 hours to get it done. I want to spend time working on stuff that excites me. I like that feeling of energy you get from making a world you absolutely love.
I think I’m thinking about this because of the books I have lined up in 2021. They’re all independent comics, they’re all strange brain children, and they all excite the dickens out of me. I’ll be then sending these comics out to editors I know, looking for people who dig it, hoping for chances to pitch. I guess I’m just hoping to find the good luck I’ve caught in the past of making good comics with cool people that I gel with.
I think this also stemmed from the SPAWN news that dropped where Todd McFarlane, nearly 30 years after he launched this superhero comic, has decided to spread it out into some new titles, with an expanding universe, and he’s travelled with this baby so long and he’s still energised by it. Energised to make money, sure, but he can make money in lots of ways, and this is what he’s doing. It’s a cool life lesson, do something you really love.
Or, inversely, start cutting out and down on the things I unlove. Hmm, wonder if that’s a list I could make, and then action? I think I’ve just been crowding my plate with things I love, so that’s doing the job for me.
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Plotting V Planning.
I have two stages to my plotting/planning, and I don’t know which is which. The first is I break the story and write it out from start to finish in basic synopsis style. This is where I ensure my story has some kind of structure, that it makes sense up until the end, and that the character arcs are pleasing.
This phase alone takes a dozen, or more, rewrites to get set. It’s a lot of pages, a shitload of me writing down questions for myself to answer, and in the end I have this framework, this vision, but that’s as close as I am to building this thing.
So next up I start to map it out issue by issue, page by page. I just write one sentence per page for the issue, roughly putting down what I’m doing with that page. You’d think, with the hard work done, that this would be smooth - I’m just mapping out page numbers to moments/scenes. Alas, this is never ever the case.
I start to break scenes and try to do a good job of it. Instead of writing “Joanna does something important here for her kid” I try to write “Joanna finally fixes her daughter’s bike” and that way I know how it clicks into place with everything else, and that it can happen in one page. This means I have to work out how and why certain things are happening, and it never goes as smoothly as I’d like.
This past week, I’ve been mapping out the second volume of SHE, and I’ve been stuck doing some heavy lifting in some scenes that have slowed me down. I like to think a good job here makes the scripting a lot smoother - then it’s just rearranging panels, lines, and moments to build that sonnet structure each page should aim for. To make this true, I really need to do a lot of work in this section, and sometimes it feels like planning out scenes again completely from the start. It’s laborious, but I don’t yet know another way.
The trap is - sometimes I can write a scene that works, that’s technically functional. But it’s boring as piss. So then I need to stew, because my first ideas and solutions are rarely my best. I just really really wish they were.
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ASD&D.
Last week, I started the D&D club at school and we had 3 dozen kids turn up. Still excited by that turnout. So I sent them off with character sheets and said their homework was to write a short page of back story, and to also sketch their character.
Now, like all homework, I know not everyone will do it. But I aim to hoist up and highlight those who do. One girl walked with me on playground duty and told me all about how excited she was to draw her character, and that she’s insanely proud of the way it’s come out. My kid said he’d written his back story and I asked to see it, thinking he’d need to put in more writing because it was a little short. But then I read it, and it was genuinely quite good. There were at least 3 nuggets of information that would make the character exceptionally cool to roleplay as. That’s pretty awesome.
So the club was this afternoon and I’d say over 2/3s of the kids completed some of the homework. It was a great turnout, and I’m keen to do more with them. I’ve set them all up, so the next session is half of the group playing while half do fun activities and earn XP for their characters.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
GORILLA WARFARE: TALKING APES FOR 5e on Kickstarter - my mate Big Tim Stiles has created a zine with some D&D stuff for talking ape side quests and it looks awesome. Really makes me wanna get in on this ZineQuest business over there. Shall have to start planning.
THE TESSELLATION #1 on Kickstarter - this comic looks unreal, and gorgeous, and Mike Phillips is a good mate of mine, so it hit the trifecta for me to back it.
25 one-page adventures for D&D on Kickstarter - I’ve read these before, they’re good fun.
SHRINE, a new webcomic home - my mate Jin has just created and launched a new comic website for webcomics from him, and some of his pals, and you definitely need to check it out.
THE BRIDGEBUILDER’S CREED on Kickstarter - this is a gorgeous looking OGN. Def check it out.
SHE Vol 1 got an 8.5/10 review on Word of the Nerd - nice things said make me happy.
The Climate Crisis is Worse Than You Can Imagine - a fascinating read into someone grappling with the thoughts about true climate catastrophe, and how that presents when it’s a family man. I very much read this while thinking about my own mindset.
You’ve probably noticed the creep in of gardening content, and I make no bones about loving growing fruit/veg in our backyard, and using the produce, and wanting to become more sustainable. Tending the worms in the compost bins is a daily exercise in mindfulness for me. Recently, the groceries have come with little seed growing pods [sheets with seeds in them, pellets of soil, small cardboard cups in which to grow them]. Twice, I have asked the kids to chill with me and plant them all, and twice they’ve given me an hour of their time to chat and plant and just feel good about an activity.
Even better, some of them are growing. Little wins like this can mean a lot for the future, and I feel like they should know how this stuff works in their future, the same way I now know because of my wife. Anyway, it’s the little things, and I have to believe from them big things can grow [literally, and figuratively].
Note: don’t actually stack them this tight, they can’t breathe and mold will form. Create a checkerboard formation. The more you know :]
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
WANDAVISION - getting better with every episode. It’s really grown into something gripping each week, and the reveal at the end of the last ep was a bloody banger.
ANDERS AND THE COMET - I just found this all ages graphic novel in my library while waiting for my students to borrow and it looked awesome. I’ll try to finish it soon.
HOUSE OF EL - I’m reading this DC graphic novel to get my fix of Eric Zawadzki art, natch. It’s about Krypton, and I’m really digging it as it’s got these great parallels to how information and views are formed here about climate change, and such. Well worth giving this a shake.
Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
The usual photo I post for comics stuff is now about 4 years old. Maybe 5 years old. I don’t take many photos, and certainly a smaller percentage are “good,” but this one came together this weekend and it’s at least indicative of what I look like now.
Directly after this, I infused my tomato sipping vinegar into a Stubbie beer and the result wasn’t too shabby. The next day, a mate of mine described it as being like a Bloody Mary Beer, and so I guess now I’m making my own craft beers out of other people’s beers.
I’m fine with this career swerve.
Good photo