Author: vidHero

deadlines crush crush

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page 17bleh. sitting here without motivation to work. too damned hot and muggy. perhaps i am dehydrated.

working on page 18. slipped off the treadmill today and only did half a page. (i’ve been doing two each day this week. have i mentioned already? bleh. BRAIIIINNNS). blame GTAIV. that’s all i want to do right now. play play play. but i’ve played all day. so i made some chicken noodle soup with tiger hot sauce.

Kitty DistractionCarrie’s cute three legged cat is laying on some old notebooks. so cute. will post picture here.

erf. may go watch alex’s copy of They Live. been meaning to. erf.

basically, page 18 is all about driving through the city. i thought it’d be funny to have car accidents happening all over the place. it’s never said, but, Todd doesn’t know anything about driving a scooter. I thought it’d be funny to have him receiving progressively more naughty images from his girlfriend as he races towards their date. but I hate drawing cars. perhaps i just hate cars. unless they are in GTAIV. my god. ugh.

anywho. stayed up quite late last night, and finished the script/break downs for the issue. i’d left the last two pages completely unresolved, save for a vague idea of what would happen. it felt GREAT to finally nail down the text and layouts. but now it feels like the comic is done. even though there are 3.5 pages left to draw. plus all the text to go back and put in. and the extra pages to flesh it out. ugh. UGH. bleh.

too hot.

Deadlines Loom (like ancient unfinished video games)

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fav art for today

So i’m working away on issue one. Apologies for neglecting the regular news updates here. My plan is indeed to lay out the process, so i’ll post more often.

At right is a 72 pixel square sample from page 12. I thought it’d be aw-shucks-sweet to post a small sample from the latest work with every news update. Keep in mind that i’m drawing at 300 dpi, so it’s sometimes hard to find 72 little pixels to be uber proud of. … but there they are. (kyle’s face. i just dug how a few simple lines captured his mood and likeness.)

Currently the plan is to have all my art (21 pages, plus cover. plus 3 inside filler pages i guess) done by friday, so i can put it all together over the weekend and send off for printing on monday. Not sure if jonason will have his 10 page bonus story ready in time, because i can’t get a straight answer about his progress (and i probably should have been moreserious about pestering him for the past couple weeks. oop?)

I should maybe risk making this post over long to ask: how much would you pay for a 32 page comic? It’ll cost around 3.25 to print. so my plan is to set the top price at 4.99 (which is what you’ll see on the physical comic, and what you’ll find if you stumble across it through comiXpress’s online store). This is just gambling that some fat cats might have the money to burn on random shit at comiXpress, and not a price i expect anyone to pay. So i’ll print a “special!” sticker for any comic shop i can get to carry it, for just $3.99, and ask them to pay me 2 or 3 bucks each. Figure i’ll give them a free one up front to see if it grabs their attention. Don’t really expect many shops to bother.  So i’ll offer each issue for 2.99 at any tradeshows or appearances (along with notable discounts on everything else i’ll be selling). Hopefully creating an incentive/relationship with people to come to the damned shows! And then i’ll make an 8 page mini comic and sell it for a buck, just to gauge interest (and the mini comic is planned as a mystery which drives you to the website). It’s all an experiment in figuring out what people will pay. One thing i learned at stumptown was that you have to treat a self published comic like a loss leading marketing material, because people don’t like to spend more than a buck. Not sure anyone else has learned this lesson yet. 

well. i mention the pricing because it’s still forming, and i’d appreciate feedback. More later! 

Stumptown ftw (all my buts are weak)

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fav artI had a reallly great time at the Stumtown Comics Fest ( http://www.stumptowncomics.com/ ) last weekend. Almost every talk i attended was awesome and useful. Met a ton of cool people. Handed out a ton of cool business cards. smoked a ton of cool cigarettes. Was a little sick, and got about 5 hours of sleep spread over a 3 day period. (bleHgh). It was great. 🙂

I’m planning to write up the experince as a “lesson” for the Solid Fuel Studios website (which will have tons of lessons on various business-building topics, someday soon. Promise.) The highlight of the show for me was definitely having the first 6 pages of vidHero reviewed and critiqued by the editor for Dark Horse (Scott Allie). While it wasn’t what he was looking for, he offered some keen advice, and it was thrilling to suffer the anguish of having my baby critqued. He was a quiet intense dude, but very cool, and basically his advice was too loosen up the pages a bit and make it more approachable.

It’s suprisingly hard to accept and use advice, or deal with any sort of criticism from someone who knows what they’re talking about . A little voice in my head keeps saying “but but but”. (ie “but it’s supposed to have a ton of text, like a euro comic!” “but it doesn’t matter if you read the text bubbles in the wrong order, i double checked that each possible order still made sense” “but it’s supposed to be dense up front, so you’ll feel a breathe of fresh air later when the fighting starts” etc. )
But it’s clear that I shouldn’t try to explain away a professional’s free insights. (i didn’t say any of the above when he was reviewing, as i’m mortified of being yet another blind spot artist). I found the whole experience very titillating and heart breaking and exciting. And quiet. A little too quiet.

Can’t wait to see what people make of the finished comic! Currently, working on page 8. planning to rip through it and not look back, so something can be printed in time for the Olympia Comics Fest on June 7th. (but it’s pretty clear i’ll want to go back and try to unify everything at one point, such that no frame is left behind. quality/pride wise.).

Silver medal of the Stumptown experience goes to the “Monetizing Web Comics” session, which nailed every reason i started this vidHero project, and more.

posted by warren – currently up too late, having blown a few hours on GTA IV like thousands of other foolish russian-immigrant addicts across the country. Lordy but the game’s story is a great mix of scarface and … Eastern Promises? General Russian awesomeness?

babies never stepped so well

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Added the final artwork for the first page of vidHero’s first comic book issue. It’s a giant PDF (on purpose, for printing tests) that I couldn’t get to crop down to final print size (it keeps including the entirety of the image). urg.

soooo, it’s done : enough. in theory the other pages will all be done in three weeks. HO HO HO. ohhh my.