Trying to Find a Comic Book Artist

Part 12: Is There a Happy Ending Ahead?

I don’t look for opportunities to beat my head against brick walls, but you might think I do if you’ve read all my “Trying to Find a Comic Book Artist” posts so far.

In our last thrilling episode, I played Musical Backburners. I went back to the gigantic prose project I shelved to undertake this Sequential Art Quest. I finished the rough draft, got it proofread, then made a hard decision about how to try monetizing it. Long story short, Book 6 in the Paradox Series is on track for publication in early September—and will go on sale shortly thereafter.

I hope to get one more significant sales spike (this time for Confronting Fate) before the biggest market buries it where no book shopper can find it without searching for the exact title and author name. (This is not my first rodeo. It’s how the ball bounces for a non-woke author who wasn’t grandfathered in before the censorship noose tightened.)

I’m already not marketing the series as hard as I should be, because I’ve already shifted my sights back to the backburner and the Quest.

It’s probably been a couple years now since I first heard of Fund My Comic.

I had no usable pages, nothing but a lot of frustration, actually, but I knew I couldn’t afford to half-step when it came to the business side of what I was hoping to do. I had never crowdfunded anything (still haven’t), but thought it might be the way to market a graphic novel by somebody unknown in the medium. So I was researching it.

Specifically, I was looking for a crowdfunding platform that wouldn’t yank the floor out from under me for not writing woketard boilerplate, as Indie Go-Go and Kickstarter had done to creatives who lean right. It’s difficult finding certain information on Goolag and the other Thought Police search engines, but after exhaustive scouring of the web, I ran across a mention of a new crowdfunder which not only specialized in comics, but also respected the First Amendment. I bookmarked the website and went on with my creative misadventures.

At roughly the same chapter of this journey, a friend of mine gave me a tip on an artist who might be interested in my sci-fi graphic novel. Problem was, she preferred to communicate on Twatter. I had quit Farceborg and Twatter cold turkey circa 2013, and couldn’t even remember my password. Well, the Quest motivated me, and I pulled my old Twatter account out of mothballs to converse with her.

Thankfully, she was honest about not being confident she could deliver what I wanted (she was not comfortable doing non-manga), and bowed out without wasting my time, effort, and money. The point here is: I started using Twatter again—only now it was X, under new management, and there was less chance of me getting banned for ideological heresy. Of course I tried to find artists there. (No luck on that front—I only found grifters and folks who don’t want to be involved with controversial work.)

On the plus side, I found a small community of other non-woke creatives there to network with. That included Gio, who is now contributing steady content for the Virtual Pulp blog (you should check him out if you’re looking to discover timeless classics, and new indie fiction—he reviews, and conducts interviews with the standout talent), and Luke Stone, who it turns out runs Fund My Comic.

I followed both of them, and they followed me back. It was from Luke’s posts on X that I found out about his video podcast “Nerd Bacon.” As with other video podcasts (I occasionally check out “the Rippaverse,” “Ask Chuck Dixon,” “A Drink With Crazy,” Razorfist and Jon Del Aroz’s videos as well), I am never able to catch them live, but I watch the playback while I’m eating or doing some other mindless activity. I listen more than watch, especially interested in anything I can learn about the business of comics. When I did watch, I noticed Luke always wore a drawing glove.

Well, that makes sense, sez I. He is in the comics business and has published his own series. He was doing what I wanted to be doing. He was a professional comic creator while, so far, I was just a wannabe.

In the midst of my struggle with Stable Diffusion, one day a tweet of his came to my attention: He had a break in his normal work, and had some time to take on a few cover commissions. And his rate for the cover art was very reasonable. Still occasionally making an effort to think ahead, I knew I was gonna need some professional cover art for when (if) I was ready to crowdfund my projects. And here is a professional illustrator, the Grand Pooh-Bah of Fund My Comic, no less, telling the world he could ink a few covers for somebody. And for a cost I could swing.

Me being just such a somebody, I made my interest known. Turns out, he could not only draw cover art for my first superhero graphic novel, but he had an extra slot open. That meant I could also get an alternate cover—which is apparently a big deal in crowdfunding. And, it so happens, I had an idea for an alternate cover.

You might be wondering why in blazes I was putting the cart before the horse. I didn’t have a graphic novel to crowdfund or market, and more often than not it looked like I never would. My every effort had been stymied and I couldn’t get either the sci-fi project or the superhero epic off the ground. Cover??? I still needed a hundred pages of sequential art before I should even begin to contemplate a cover, right? Some might say it was rehearsing a victory lap before the race even started.

An old anecdote I once heard from a radio preacher comes to mind: Two farmers pray for rain. One spends every day and night worrying about the persistent drought, and wondering if God is refusing to answer his prayer, if He even heard the prayer, etc. The other farmer spends that time collecting pallets to stack his crops on, getting his barn squared away, cleaning out culverts, digging new irrigation ditches, setting up that new harvester for his tractor, and putting a contract together with the nearest farmer’s markets. A neighbor asks him, “What in the world you doin’?” He replies, “I’m preparin’ for rain.”

I’m trying to be the second farmer, even though this drought has been relentless for years, now.

During this time, I’m still editing books in the Paradox series, publishing them, setting up promotions, etc. Simultaneously, this is approximately when I learn about Dashtoon Studio and shift my attention in that direction. And by now I’ve joined Substack, and have begun posting the chronicles of this Sequential Art Quest.

I’m in several different Discords. I forayed into that world because guess why? Yup, a lead on potential artists. Armed with a Discord account, I joined some other groups or servers or whatever it’s called on Discord. Places where artists hang out. Places where Stable Diffusion users and other A.I. art dabblers gather. And when I saw that Fund My Comic had a Discord, I joined that, too. Cart-before-the-horse again, but I wanted to learn as much about crowdfunding a graphic novel as I could, so that when (if) I’m ready to do it, I get it right the first time.

(I made so many mistakes and dumb decisions when I first became an author, I’m still upset with myself about it today. I didn’t want to shoot myself in the foot in this new medium.)

My preferences in one of those Discords was set up so that it alerted me unceasingly that somebody had messaged me. I would go there like an idiot time after time just to find out it was some group admin blasting out a hear ye, hear ye. It might have been when I finally took the time to change my preferences, or it might have been shortly before, when I sez to myself, “Self, since you have this tab open, you might as well see if anything is happening over on Fund My Comic.”

So I do. And while I’m there, I notice for the first time a channel for collaborators to find each other. After a flashback to what happened on Gab toward the beginning of this saga, I visit the channel and look around. I find a message or two from guys like me. And they are answered. Reasonably.

I type a message that probably came off like this:

“I don’t even know why I’m bothering, because illustrators are such stubborn prima donna flakes, but I need art for a couple projects. I would ask for a a collaboration, but I know you’re all about money, money, money. The scripts I want produced are for _______ page graphic novels about __________ and __________. I can’t afford top dollar or even medium dollar. Not only that, but I’m a certified right-wing boogeyman whose work is guaranteed to knot up many a Karen’s panties. If you’re still even reading this, talk to me.”

IIRC, not even three minutes passed before two different artists responded, politely, patiently, with empathy.

One of those artists was Luke Stone himself.

Both of them were available for commission for such a project. An online conversation took place, and suffice it to say that I was taken aback at how accessible these professionals were to a rookie like me.

The other artist had a cheaper page rate, but I knew nothing about him. I could extrapolate a little about Luke’s character from watching so many Nerd Bacon episodes, and from our brief interaction regarding the cover art before. Also, the interior of a comic book—the panels— were Luke’s “bread and butter” and he had a turnaround on work that sounded blazingly fast to me. Not that I could pay out that fast, but it’s always a good idea to have more than enough horsepower, just in case you ever need it.

So I leaned toward hiring Luke pretty early on. Remembering that Luke was a Democrat-turned-libertarian, I reminded him that I’m a right-wing boogieman and my story reflects that. If that was going to be a deal-breaker, better to break the deal before either of us wasted time.

It’s one thing to support and believe in freedom of the press and the free expression of ideas, even when you personally disagree with those ideas. It’s a whole ‘nother level to actually help somebody express those ideas you disagree with. Well, Luke Stone is the real deal on a whole ‘nother level. I don’t know for sure if parts of my story rub him the wrong way, because he hasn’t mentioned it. He hasn’t complained or refused to do anything the script calls for.

And he has been, frankly, drawing some kick-ass panels; making corrections without getting snippy or defensive; giving me helpful suggestions that are steering the project toward a better final product…basically being a professional. He’s that endangered species that I had all but been convinced I would never be able to work with.

I have watched tutorials on how to “flat” and color comic panels. For now, I am the colorist and letterer at the Virtual Pulp comics division, because I can afford to pay my page rates.

It is taking me forever to color the panels. I keep hoping to get faster, but I’m missing something. I guess it’s like a lot of endeavors, in that you never know how much work goes into something until you try doing it yourself. I was an avid comic reader from the age of seven to my early 20s, and despite drawing some stuff of my own, just took it all for granted (after paying for the respective comic, that is).

I’m not complaining. The project is off the ground, at last. With over 20 inked pages so far, I am one fifth of the way to having this project “in the can,” to borrow some filmmaking lingo. And once it’s in the can, I intend to finish it come hell or high water. Barring my death, a grid-down scenario, nuclear war or zombie apocalypse, at least one of my projects should be finished within a year’s time.

There will be more obstacles to hurdle. How do I build an audience in this new (to me) medium? How do I market it? What if my crowdfunding campaigns fail? Will I be arrested for passing “misinformation” or some other BS charge? Will printing and shipping costs skyrocket before I get to that stage?

Of course I’m hoping it’s mostly downhill sledding from here. Getting the art produced has been such an ordeal, I shudder to contemplate the journey to completion getting even more difficult from here. But whatever. This is something I’m committed to. Just gotta keep pushing forward.

Despite the ordeal it’s been, once I stumbled onto the right path, the “graphic” part of this graphic novel started firing on all cylinders. It’s amazing how smooth this is going, now. It’s like night and day from what it was. Like those 19th Century railroaders slogging up and down the Rocky Mountains blasting rock, clearing trees and laying track. It must have seemed to them that every swing of the hammer was futile and they weren’t getting anywhere. Then one day they reached the base of the last mountain, there was nothing before them but flat open prairie and they began laying track like wildfire. That’s what it feels like right now.

This pretty much brings you up-to-date on my Sequential Art Quest. Right now, when I’m not working my day job, doing life, attending to my prose novel career, etc., I will likely be flatting/coloring panels. I’ll post updates when I have something to report. Thanks for visiting, reading, commenting and sharing. I like hearing from you. Those of you who have subscribed: many, many thanks. I might return to the “Death of the American Comic Book” series soon.