![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On Comics, and What I Want to Do With Them
Dec. 3rd, 2013 09:59 amSo while it was on sale, I picked up the latest version of Manga Studio 5 EX, and it is, quite frankly, the bee's knees. Going through the tutorial videos and looking at things that can be done with it gets me all fired up and wanting to do some comics!
...But... what comics?
I periodically get people wanting more Suburban Jungle and, while I'm glad they like it so much, that story is finished. I mean, yes, I do know more stuff that happens to the characters: Tiff and Leonard move to the Pacific Northwest and have a liger son named Louis. Dover and Comfort have a pair of bouncing baby cheeger twins who are just about as much trouble as you might imagine. Drezzer eventually moves from photography into being a television producer and also does eventually find a permanent partner in the form of the leopard that drove a wedge between himself and Colin all those years ago (go fig). And so on. So yes, more stuff does happen, but it's not really a story, just a sequence of events.
I miss the fun energy of telling that kind of a story, tho. I have tried multiple times to come up with exciting adventure comics, with varying levels of success. Most were stymied by the sheer lack of time I had to work on them, and now that I've got the time, there's a definite problem of "time-to-returns" issue. Comics take a long time to draw, and don't make a lot of money. When I was doing Suburban Jungle, my goal was to make it pay for itself, which it did, but not much more. Now that I've "gone professional," I need to make what I'm doing pay the bills as well, and that's a much higher bar to reach. As evidenced by NaNoWriMo, I can probably crank out two or three novels a year. Comics, on the other hand, I don't know if I could produce the kind of volume I would need (and generate the sort of sales I'd need to generate) to get as much bang for my buck.
Dunno, I'll keep mulling over the issue. There's no escaping the fact that so many of the things that were my early inspirations have run their course. As I've said elsewhere, I couldn't just sit down and create Suburban Jungle today, because the world is a different place than it was in 1999, and I'm a very different person than I was then. The question now is, what do I create with the Me of Now, for the World of Today?
-The Gneech
...But... what comics?
I periodically get people wanting more Suburban Jungle and, while I'm glad they like it so much, that story is finished. I mean, yes, I do know more stuff that happens to the characters: Tiff and Leonard move to the Pacific Northwest and have a liger son named Louis. Dover and Comfort have a pair of bouncing baby cheeger twins who are just about as much trouble as you might imagine. Drezzer eventually moves from photography into being a television producer and also does eventually find a permanent partner in the form of the leopard that drove a wedge between himself and Colin all those years ago (go fig). And so on. So yes, more stuff does happen, but it's not really a story, just a sequence of events.
I miss the fun energy of telling that kind of a story, tho. I have tried multiple times to come up with exciting adventure comics, with varying levels of success. Most were stymied by the sheer lack of time I had to work on them, and now that I've got the time, there's a definite problem of "time-to-returns" issue. Comics take a long time to draw, and don't make a lot of money. When I was doing Suburban Jungle, my goal was to make it pay for itself, which it did, but not much more. Now that I've "gone professional," I need to make what I'm doing pay the bills as well, and that's a much higher bar to reach. As evidenced by NaNoWriMo, I can probably crank out two or three novels a year. Comics, on the other hand, I don't know if I could produce the kind of volume I would need (and generate the sort of sales I'd need to generate) to get as much bang for my buck.
Dunno, I'll keep mulling over the issue. There's no escaping the fact that so many of the things that were my early inspirations have run their course. As I've said elsewhere, I couldn't just sit down and create Suburban Jungle today, because the world is a different place than it was in 1999, and I'm a very different person than I was then. The question now is, what do I create with the Me of Now, for the World of Today?
-The Gneech
