Month: February 2011

It’s weird, but I suppose unsurprising, that you can browse the web for months and yet completely overlook something, even when it’s right up the alley of what you might be looking for. For example, while checking information for our visit to the upcoming WonderCon (no booth, just attending), I noticed an advertisement for something called Gone Zombie. Lo and behold, upon clicking the link I was presented with 80+ pages of a well illustrated, full color zombie webcomic that I swear I had never found reference to in any of my Googling up to that point.

That might just be my blindness more than anything, since I did put in “zombie webcomics” today and got a link on the first page of results, but then again maybe they only recently did some search optimization? I freely admit I don’t follow every single zombie webcomic out there, but I do at least like to be aware of my fellow travelers. This is more difficult than it might seem given the high startup (and shutdown) rates in the webcomic world, but with Gone Zombie I found a project that’s been updating since before Zombie Ranch even started, and has definitely not been abandoned. On the other hand, it’s not listed on TWC or any of the other usual suspects, so I don’t know how good they’ve been about getting the word out so far (his blog mentions they were part of the Zuda competition before Zuda stopped hosting most of their comics, but I admit to not having followed the Zuda much).

Therefore, for what it might be worth I’m going to play Good Samaritan and do my part here in directing the dozen or so of you wandering by this blog to give it a look. Stephen Thor (how cool is that name?) is a first-time author, but he’s crafted an engaging story so far and I’m enjoying his sense of pacing. Also, he’s gathered a team of very-much-not-first-timers around him to do the art and lettering side of things, and that really shows in the final product. These are folks who have worked for Marvel, DC, Boom!, and there’s more than one of them on the team… ask Dawn how much more time she could devote to details if she had a professional inker, colorist, and letterer working with her and she’ll respond with a wistful sigh. But though I’m sure these guys aren’t all working as volunteers, the website has absolutely no ads and even the (very occasionally updated) blog is tucked away. That means there’s not much in the way of additional content once you’ve clicked your way through the storyline, but there’s also no filler or distractions, so it’s a very pure experience.

Speaking of the purity of the experience, in the one interview I found with Stephen Thor, he confesses that he reads absolutely no other zombie comics or webcomics, out of fear of his own work being influenced by them. That almost turned me off, seeing as sounded like a similar attitude to what Stephenie Meyer has been quoted on regarding her Twilight series and vampires; however, where SMeyer has never read Dracula, Stephen has at least seen (and loves) Night of the Living Dead and several other zombie and horror flicks, and has an intelligent grasp on what the genre is about. It’s just a shame that should I meet him at WonderCon, I most likely won’t be able to talk to him about my own comic on account of his phobia.

It also means I’ll probably never see a mention of Zombie Ranch in his blog, but hey, being a Good Samaritan is all about selflessness, right? Gone Zombie is a fine little comic, so if you haven’t found it already, go now and give it a read.

I’ve occasionally made mention of the other blog site I write on, I think most recently back just after Long Beach Comic-Con 2010 when I felt like I had so much to cover that I outsourced my review of The Walking Dead premiere over that way. Most of the time The Satellite Show remains the place where I talk about things I don’t feel are terribly related to Zombie Ranch, but on occasion there’s overlap. I’m a geek, and I like to talk about geek things. Sometimes I like to talk about those things in a place with much less of the PG-13ish limits I impose upon myself here. I can be quite the potty mouth when I get worked up. Heck, even when I’m not worked up.

Anyhow, if you don’t mind a little harsh language and are any sort of person who sells, or intends to sell their creator creations at a Comic-Con, or are just interested in that sort of thing in general, I highly encourage you to click on over and give my latest rant a read. The tl;dr version is that I think the “hard sell” approach has no business at a Comic Convention, and in fact commits murder/suicide on the whole atmosphere.

So how do you sell? You sell by having a nice, well organized, visible display area. You sell by having a selection of items to fit people’s budgets. Most of all, you sell by allowing people the freedom to walk by you without a second glance.

Does that sound absolutely insane from a sales standpoint? Maybe. Dawn and I are still relative noobs at all this, but because of that I’m probably approaching things from the mindset of myself as an attendee. I like to be able to browse without being hassled, especially at a place where I feel like I should be having fun, finding fun things, and talking to fun people. Getting the feeling from someone like I shouldn’t be breathing their air, much less looking at their stuff unless I buy something is a complete buzzkill. Also, there’s a lot of different kinds of comics out there, particularly nowadays in this brave new world of webcomics and Print-On-Demand that enable independent efforts on a scale previously undreamt of. Am I interested in all of them? No. And so, given that, isn’t it patently unfair to expect that everyone passing by will be interested in mine? Sure, there’s a case to be made for “Try it, you might like it”, but that makes comics seem uncomfortably close to your mom telling you to eat your broccoli.

There are people who will walk by you without a glance. There are people who will walk by you with a glance. There are people who will, in fact, try your broccoli (for example, paging through your sample comic… you do have a sample comic out, right?) and then decide they don’t like its taste. I think it’s important, if not crucial, not to take any of these outcomes personally. I strive for that “no obligation” feel, even if it’s a slow day. Maybe even especially if it’s a slow day, because those are the times I’m happy for visitors who might want to just indulge in some geek chat to pass the time.

How well does the no hassle approach work? Well, let’s put it this way: Zombie Ranch is a webcomic, where every last page is available for free, at any time, to anyone with a browser and an Internet connection. I tell this to people right up front if they’re giving signals of interest: “We’ve been publishing as a weekly webcomic for over a year, but we also have our first print issue there for $5 if you’re interested. If not, we’re online… feel free to grab a postcard with our URL and come check us out there…”

I think that’s a nice way to let them know that if they’re just browsing, that’s a-okay by me. Really, all I ever expected was to pass out those postcards, but we’ve been selling a fair amount of the print comics. Not so much through the online channels, but in person, people I’ve never met before end up buying… sometimes right away, sometimes later on in the day, or the next day. Maybe even the next convention. Are they liking the taste of the broccoli that is Zombie Ranch? Or are they returning because they had the freedom to walk away without any awkward feelings? Or both?

Let’s face it, charging even $3.99 for a comic on a store shelf when you’re a self-published relative unknown is dicey at best. But if you get to meet the creators personally and have a good vibe off of them, well, hell, I know I’ve bought stuff at conventions for that reason. But that good vibe is important… if you seem presumptive of someone’s money, or desperate for it, I think people pick up on that, and that’s when things can get uncomfortable.

Or maybe I’m completely misreading the whole thing. But hey, people are buying a $5 print issue or even a $20 special edition, even knowing they could get it all for free online, and they’re doing so with a smile.

That’s gotta count for something.

Can you believe it? San Diego Comic-Con 2011 finally got its online badge registration up and running this last Saturday, and sold out within 12 hours of the opening bell. Not only that, but “up and running” was a severely relative term for those trying to get their passes, as apparently there was a lot of F5 refreshes happening due to capacity error screens. Not only that, but some days were being mistakenly reported as sold out that then would be available again on a reload.

The third-party professional registration service Comic-Con contracted (after two failed tries doing things themselves) managed to get everything sold, but not smoothly. Apparently the demand and load on their servers was still “several orders of magnitude higher” than their worst-case estimate… which makes me think their case planners did a rather poor job.

Not to say I would have done better… I figured demand would definitely be higher than last time around, but if you’d bet me on everything selling out in less than a day, I probably still would’ve bet against you. Lots of people were caught by surprise for Comic-Con 2010 when the four day passes were gone in the first few months after registration started, but that was still a few months (and the one day passes were still available a lot longer after that). This year, admittedly, there were so many problems that a registration that was supposed to start by September didn’t happen until now, but still, going from a few months after the opening bell to a few hours? That’s something I’m not sure anyone predicted. It’s a game changer event, and I’m going to be really curious to see what policies CCI is going to try to put in action for 2012. Will they stop allowing people to pre-register for next year while this year’s event is in progress? Because I’m quite certain that’s going to be the plan for every attendee that got in, on the first day they can, and in that case they might have to shut it down before Sunday even comes about or the entire convention could be sold out before online registration even occurs. Hey, after Saturday, I’m willing to see that as not just possible, but inevitable.

Dawn and I were above all the fray due to our returning professional status, but we have friends and associates who weren’t so lucky and can only attend for a few days, or possibly not at all. Then again, Comic-Con is such a big event that there’s plenty to do without setting foot in the exhibit hall, so it’s not a total disaster for those that already have reservations for the whole time. My condolences if any of you reading this missed out. Here we were being disappointed about not getting a Small Press Booth, but now I’m counting myself lucky that we’re able to attend at all!

On a much humbler convention front, we brought Zombie Ranch to the 1^st ever Inland Empire Comics Expo this past Sunday, and for a tiny inaugural show with no big name draws I have to say it went very well, especially considering it was up against the Big Game (believe it or not, using the “S” word is restricted by the NFL to the point they sue people over it if they’re not authorized sponsors). Now to be honest, it did seem to get empty of both attendees and exhibitors around the time of kick-off (which I doubt was entirely coincidental), but our time spent there was quite worthwhile. I don’t know how well the Expo did as a whole, but we got to meet several enthusiastic new folks and introduce them to the Ranch, which is the bottom line for Dawn and myself. I still really love being behind the table at these things and getting to blather on about my concepts and answer all the confused, yet intrigued questions like “What do they feed the zombies?” or “What’s the floating robot thing?”

Alas, our scale model Cambot has finally given in to the wear and tear of several other convention visits. We turned him over to his original builder to see if he can be salvaged and returned to working order, so feel free to send your positive thoughts that way, and perhaps his little LED light may yet glow anew.

This week’s comic was hopefully worth the wait for you faithful readers. No dialog from me, but my oh my was there a lot of work regardless.

That probably doesn’t make much sense, since you’d think all the burden of work in a wordless page would be on the artist. And truth to tell, I’ve seen some comic scripts where what’s given to the artist is something along the lines of “Captain Cosmos and Lieutenant Walrus approach a spaceship”, but if I gave something like that to Dawn she’d probably want to murder me in my sleep… no, no that’s not right… she’d probably want to murder me while I was wide awake and could fully experience her ire. Not right away, perhaps, but certainly if she made her best guess at what ‘a spaceship’ represents, spending hours on drawing it, only to have me tell her she’d gotten my vision ALL WRONG.

So as a comics writer, I think you have two options when dealing with your artist on details: Get specific, or be ready to accept that what they come up with may be wildly different than what was in your head. How specific? Well hell, folks, Dawn and I once discovered that we had an entirely different idea of what a “tank top” was. For her, a tank top was a spaghetti-strapped little number only women wear. For me, a tank top and an A-shirt (or in common American slang parlance, a “wifebeater”) were interchangeable terms. As you can imagine, my discussion with her on what Uncle Chuck should be wearing became much more complicated than I’d imagined.

Therefore, despite having written up several paragraphs on how the Zane’s Ranch House should appear, I spent several more days finding reference images, and trying to piece them together with my meager Photoshop skills into something approaching that whole “writer’s vision” thing that she could then work from. These are probably the times where the people who both draw and write their comics as a solo act have it the easiest. Then again, they still have to try to live up to their own imaginations, so maybe they also have it the hardest.

I still do remember talking to an artist of Fables at Comic-Con and asking them how Bill Willingham communicated what he wanted. Well, apparently Willingham is quite the artist in his own right and just draws it all for the artists to… re-draw? I don’t quite know how that works, but that was the process. I do know that when I asked what the options were for someone without drawing skills he told me “Learn to draw”.

I was annoyed by the answer then, but looking back on it now… hmm, no, still annoyed. Can’t even truthfully say the guy meant well, with how it was said. Not one of my more positive convention experiences, and also such a disingenuous answer given how many comics out there are produced with only the barest hints given of what should be drawn. Again, though, I figure the flip side of that is the writer looks at the end result, finds it different than what he imagined, and just shrugs and cashes his paycheck. On the other end of the scale, Alan Moore is no visual arts virtuoso, but is (in)famous for his scripts spelling out minute details of character, setting, and how things should be meaningfully arranged from panel to panel.

I’m somewhere in between, I suppose, gravitating towards one end of the scale or the other as the visual importance of a given comic strikes me. And then every so often, even though I still haven’t learned to draw, I’ll break out the Photoshop and do my best to pretend like I can. I wanted this one to be something special, especially after we made you all wait a week to find out why Rosa was saying “Wow”. I hope at least some of you agree with her.