Last time I gave you the intro and the first misadventure. Here’s what happened next:
After waiting months to hear back from the publisher, I finally accepted that whatever happened, that deal was dead.
But the old dream was revived and the juices were flowing. I decided to try getting the sci-fi graphic novel produced myself.
(Looking back, if I had to do it over again, I would, but still: I did not understand what frustration would overtake me in the next step of the journey.)
If I could find an artist I could afford, I’d foot the bill myself, run it as a series on Arktoons, then get it bound in paperback and release it that way. Maybe I should finally try crowdfunding, sez I. The story’s based, seasoned with some red pills, but it’s set in a world that is not a metaphorical stand-in for the geopolitics of 2022 Earth, so IndieGoGo or whoever might not cancel it mid-campaign. And there was a new gunfighter in town, I heard, called FundMyComic which specializes in comic book crowdfunding, and respects the First Amendment.
I’m really glad now that I waited on that crowdfunding idea, rather than put backers in the position of waiting years (at least two-and-counting, now) for me to deliver a finished project.
Thank God my financial situation has improved significantly since the period I went through from 2005 to 2017. But I still don’t have money to burn, now or two years ago. This project requires a big sacrifice in precious resources that are needed for other aspects of life. I had to get the best bang-for-the-buck I could scrounge, and even then I would have to do a lot of scraping just to afford the artwork. I’m not a known creator in comics, so it’s not like I could just start a Patreon account and expect backers to appear and start contributing to an artwork fund. I’ve got 11K followers on Amazon, but you’d never know it from the number of reviews my books get. And how many of them read or care about sequential art?
I already had a Fiverr account; so I began searching…I decided to submit Page 3 this time, because it would give me a chance to see how the artist would do with some of the vehicles and other tech.
The artist who I contracted with repeatedly asked for time extensions, and I allowed them. After waiting 9 days, he finally submitted a rough sketch that he had obviously just thrown together in a matter of minutes. Here I was thinking 9 days should be enough time to draw and color 6 spectacular panels. What I initially got was no better than what I could doodle myself.