12 hours left on the Kickstarter to raise the printing cost of the Order of Tales one-volume book. The $14,200 printing cost is covered, and the percentage Kickstarter itself takes, and now we’re well into the territory of paying in advance for shipping out everybody’s books. Thanks everybody.
I started a Kickstarter project for the Order of Tales book a few days ago, and forgot to mention it here! It’s about halfway funded already, which is VERY EXCITING.
There will be 2,000 books and it will cost around 12,000 dollars. There’s an awkward video you can watch at the link for more details. Thanks so much for supporting the book and helping me spread the word! You are all the best.
I saw the movie The Tree of Life recently and thought about it. This probably won’t make sense if you haven’t seen the movie; you should see it.
A medium gains legitimacy and respect when people making work in that medium legitimize and respect it.
Comics as a whole are in the process now of gaining that legitimacy, and it’s because of the people doing good work in that medium, more than any other reason. Superficial aspects like deciding to call them “graphic novels” instead of “comics” don’t help. Good work helps.
Webcomics are a subset of comics, and for the time being are seen as a distinct thing because of their mode of distribution. They’ll probably lose the prefix before too long, but who knows. They are in some ways becoming the new “indie” comics, and replacing the niche filled by minicomics and zines, bit by bit. Because it is effectively free and easy to put this stuff online, it will naturally have a lower signal-to-noise ratio than print comics, and a lower percentage of good stuff—and I hope it is always that way.
There are a lot of really excellent and varied comics being published online, and if there are more it will help all of us: the ideal self-policing culture that decides which comics are good will become more streamlined and accurate. Creators will work harder and have more good comics to judge their work against. More people will care about webcomics. There will be more good things to read on the internet.
If you are making or aspire to make a webcomic, take your work seriously, be engaged in it, and believe in it. Do good work, and be consistently critical of it so you will keep improving. You have your reasons for choosing this particular means of distribution, so own it: don’t think of it as a shortcut or an excuse to do anything less than the best you can.
- Evan
Warmup drawing made in several passes, fiddling with a scifi idea I have which is, at this point, little more than aesthetic, and which I haven’t put as much effort as I should have into writing in earnest.
The alien you might recognize from an earlier post. I think his name is Than, with a non-vocalized “th,” as in “thin” but not in “that.” Tried to design some sensible pressure-suit for him. The plating on the chest is supposed to mimic his weird ribcage. The human is named Monro. This was mostly an excuse to do weird lighting stuff.
Put up the new short story! It is the first of a 3-part thing… a format and length I haven’t dealt with before. Very happy with how it’s turned out. Tried a kind of new approach: working outwards from a central, abstract concept, which I’ve tried to represent in a visually interesting way. Don’t want to say too much before the rest of it is up.
Hi everyone! I recently started a Kickstarter project to raise money for the new edition of the Rice Boy book. If you’d like to preorder the book, or a number of other cool things that are on the way, please consider helping out!
Thank you!
EDIT I forgot to link to the kickstarter woops
I have been thinking about space aliens recently and I made these guys up. They can fold up into little defensive balls. Their eye is on a stalk and constantly flicks around to see in three dimensions, like we do by having two eyes. They are mentally connected in some way that leads to them having little sense of ego, and functioning like a massive cluster of ant-colonies. They are space-faring and have built enormous, haphazard space stations all around their home planet.
“One’s view of the world and one’s technique are indivisible” - Hayao Miyazaki
“Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd” - China Míeville
“Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction. The fantastic [maravilloso] is the contradiction that appears in the real.” - Luis Aragon
