A love song about Meridian, ID

James Joyce couldn't get away from Dublin fast enough and then he spent his whole life writing about it. Something similar attracts me to my old home town. I left a couple of months after graduating high school and it took nearly twenty years to return. In the intervening years, Meridian and Idaho in general sort of haunted me. I felt like a child who wanted to reject his parents but who realizes that everything he is today is because of them. Finally returning didn't help assuage this aching sense of nostalgia I felt because the town had changed so much. Where there had once been a sleepy farm town, I now found a cookie-cutter version of the mall-filled cities you find everywhere in this country. Driving through the city was like looking at a series of double exposures where I couldn't help but see what used to be superimposed on what is. Now that I know it's gone forever, I feel even more attracted to the Meridian I grew up in.

More thoughts on the flagpole

First, a big "hello" to everyone who's coming here from WarrenEllis.com. I hope you stay a while.

I received some questions and comments about my post regarding my web comics idea. These comments have led to more thinking on my part regarding the project and I thought that rather than stick my responses into the comments section I'd turn it into a new entry. Am I over-explaining?

Michael, age five, brought up one's inability to control all aspects of production, i.e., those unreliable artists. He says, "But I think the bottleneck comes when you have to talk to an artist to commit to a year or more before they see proceeds, let alone color, letters, logo, etc." Good comment, Michael! I should have addressed this in yesterday's post. Ideally I would work with artists who could color and letter their pages (we are talking about eight pages a month which doesn't seem unreasonable to me), and who would agree up front to stay on board through the life of a title. Even if they could only color, I could conceivably letter the pages as I've been doing with 100 Girls. And I hope that the artist would remain motivated to stay on schedule because they would be co-owners of whatever title they helped produce. Any theoretical profits would be split 50/50 if/when the title started to generate same. This would go for any profits--printed matter, merchandise, and, I know this is a long-shot, media rights. Given the enfranchisement I hope artists would understand that it would be in their best interests to stay on schedule. Does that seem workable? We could also build a backlog of material, maybe a couple of week's worth, before we went live with a story.

Finding agreement, in principle at least, Thomas says, "Cartoons and images are created to sell merchandise (shirts, etc.) that relate to the post via passive sales avenues, i.e., xkcd.com and all the sites you mentioned." Thanks for the vote of confidence, Thomas. I'm considering bringing you on board as CFO.

Finally, Friend of the Blog, Lani brings up a whole crop of good questions. To whit:

"Do you have enough time to commit? What will happen if/when other gigs come up?"

I think I do have the time. For the web comic, I figure I'd have to write eight-pages of material a week (once I get four projects to the point that all I have to do is write them, of course--there would be a fair amount of work getting to that point). Eight pages is something I can do in a couple of days. That would leave at least three days a week to work on other comics projects, and whatever other writing projects might come up.

"There will be a lot of work done before you get any financial return and the financial return may be minimal. Will that feel okay in the long run?"

It would sadden you to know how little money I have made writing comics so far. I am used to putting in a lot of work and having very little return to show for it. I am not in this to get rich quick, I promise. I think it might be difficult selling that truth to any artists I might try and convince to work with me. One of the reasons I want to do this is to get more and varied comics projects in front of people. I hope it would eventually make some money, and, to be truthful, I might need to abandon the project if it became clear that it would never turn a profit, but I am willing to take the long view on this.

"You already have a bit of a fan base to spread word of this around, right?"

Calling what I have a fan base is being generous, I think, but yes, there are folks who read my comics and let me know they enjoy them. And I can reach out to them, I'm sure. I also maintain a presence on several online communities and message boards and would get the word out that way as well. Eventually, if I feel like this is something worth pursuing, I will need to come up with a workable business plan and promotion will need to be a part of that plan.

Okay, there's my new thinking on this. Now, what do you think?

Photo parade

Many new photos up on our flickr page. These bring us up through last weekend. None of this batch have captions or titles. I am sure that some day, perhaps after Oscar goes off to college, we'll get around to that.

Let's run this up the flag pole...

I've been thinking a lot about new comics projects lately, and ways to circumnavigate the sometimes torturous approval process of the comics publishing companies. I don't fault this process--having been a submissions editor at Dark Horse Comics for about a year, I understood that my role was to act as gate-keeper. And even though I now have (a precious few) contacts, editors to whom I can go directly with new material, the approval process is still cumbersome. I believe I've mentioned that once I turned in the pitch for Gear School, it was more than a year before I was told it was approved and I could go ahead and start writing it.

Now when I sit down to start making notes on a project, I think about that theoretical year-long wait and I become discouraged. For the past few months I've been thinking of a way to produce comics and to get them in front of people in a more timely manner. The answer, maybe: web comics.

Being as I'm not artistic, in fact I have a medically diagnosed case of lack of drawing skills, I'd need to con convince some artists to join me in this endeavor.

I've been thinking that I'd work with four artists on four different stories to minimize the impact on any one artist's schedule. Eight page stories would update on Fridays, with a different story updating each week. Story A updates week 1, story B on week 2, etcetera. Some months are five weeks long and we could build in skip weeks where no stories are updated--this would give everyone, especially me, the occasional week off. Or a skip week could feature a self-contained story drawn by a guest artist. Following this schedule, we (the artists and I) would produce 32 pages, or a floppy comic's, worth of comics every month. And each story would produce a collection's worth of material every year.

One would hope that these stories would be popular enough to warrant collecting, whether it be on a POD site like Lulu.com or to shop them around to traditional publishers. One would further hope that we could merchandise these comics as well--you know, t-shirts and the like.

The inspiration for this came from a few different places. A few years ago, when I worked at Dark Horse Comics, I created and administered something called Strip Search which was a weekly web comic that featured up-and-coming artists. There's Warren Eliis's and Paul Duffield's FreakAngels which updates six pages of new comics free every week and which has had one book's worth of material collected and printed so far. Finally, a whole host of web comics have attracted a wide following and seem to make a profit selling merchandise--Diesel Sweeties, Overcompensating and Penny Arcade come to mind. My reasoning is, of course, "if they can do it, so can I." This may be flawed logic, but that's the kind I like best.

The final reason for this little venture would be to work on a variety of projects, some of which might not be as commercially viable as the mainstream publishers would like, but that might find a niche audience on the Internet.

And it would always keep me working, too, which is a good thing.

Obviously, these are initial thoughts and I'll need to do a lot more thinking before, and if, I move forward with this. But I would appreciate any thoughts anyone reading this might have.

Internet, I await your judgment.

Banning update

Earlier in the week, I posted about some trouble my friend, Kevin, was having staging Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile at the high school where he teaches. You can read that account by scrolling down, or by going here.

It was an eventful few days for Kevin and Co. They have a secured space, and an organization on campus, the Eastern Oregon University Democratic Party, will be funding the production. This is excellent news all around, and I want to congratulate Kevin. It's nice to see the good guys persevering.

Once again, I'd encourage you to go to Kevin's blog and check out his latest updates about the play.

I am constantly finding reasons to be enamored with Miss Kate Beaton.

Picasso and Einstein walk into a bar...

Last week, The Wife and I spent some time in her home town, La Grande, Oregon. It's a really beautiful place, one we've talked about moving to from time to time. In fact, it reminds me a lot of where I grew up, Meridian, Idaho. It's a farm community in a valley. It's somewhat isolated, and it's somewhat intolerant, unfortunately.

A friend of ours, Kevin Cahill has taught at La Grande High School for a number of years, and he also directs student productions there. This year he was attempting to stage Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile. I say attempting because a few weeks into rehearsal, a parent got hold of a copy of the play, a play that had been approved by the school's principal, I hasten to add, and she found it objectionable. Long story short, she got a lot of her like-minded fellow citizens to sign a petition and presented it to the school superintendent, who then ordered the play shut down. Kevin appealed this decision to the La Grande school board but lost that appeal. He and the students have since been offered a space at the local university to perform the play (though the university president did at first bow to pressure from conservative community members), but the fact that they have to go off-campus at all is astounding.

I attended the school board meeting where the matter was discussed and I was, frankly, taken aback by some of the comments I heard. Many community members admitted to not having read the play, but they felt they knew enough about based on what they'd heard about it. Kevin's argument that the play had been staged by other high schools, including West Linn HS which is also in Oregon, and that the play had won some of those high school drama competitions, was met with disdain. "This may be an award-winning play in other communities," one speaker said, "but things are different here in La Grande." They certainly are.

The story is being picked up by sources outside of La Grande, something I'm sure the school board hoped would never happen. The AP has run a story about the banning (and they supply papers nation-wide with their coverage). Here's the AP story which ran in my local paper, The Statesman Journal. and The National Coalition Against Censorship has commented on it on their blog.

Kevin has done a wonderful job of documenting what the experience and I'd encourage you to go to his blog and read it. Parts one, two, three, and four.

I wish Kevin the best in this and I can't express how sorry I am that it's come up at all, but I'm confident that the play will go on. And when It does, I'll be there opening night.