On the 8th of November last year, I sent an email to comics editor Claire Napier. I had written a 10 page script that I thought had some heart. I had a bit of money saved up, and wanted to try something that I had always daydreamed about. I wanted to get it made.
256 days later. It's ready to go out into the world. A little bit longer, and a LOT more colourful. Here are the first 3 pages. PLUS the amazing new cover from Vicky.
So what now?
We're going to run a kickstarter. As the comic is already done I'm setting a (hopefully) humble goal of £400 to kick-start the production of issue 2. If we exceed that then I'll look into producing some physical bonuses (posters and stickers) that you can get your hands on as well.
If you like what you've seen above, and want to see more, you can get notified when the kickstarter launches. Here's the link.
If we do really well then I will look into a physical printing of the comic. It's been set up to be print ready and I've had a tentative chat with a respected printer to get an idea of costs, so it's a possibility. I would love that, but it will be entirely dependent on uptake from the Kickstarter.
So what have I learned?
Making comics is a complex process. Particularly if you are unable to/do not want to do everything yourself. But it is not prohibitively complex. If you're willing to make a study of the many processes involved and open yourself up to the wealth of knowledge that is available in the world, the skills are there to learn. This is great because the greatest limit to what you can produce, particularly if you cannot draw, is going to be cost. The more stuff you can learn to do yourself, or at least support others in the doing of, the cheaper you can make things for yourself. I didn't expect myself to be formatting and laying out the comic when I started (not the actual lettering, but everything else). But I did, and that's actually been really enriching.
Making comics feels good. I've mentioned before that my previous experience is with prose. I find writing prose to be quite lonely and not particularly fun. The fun bits were always talking with people about the work-in-progress in attempt to make it finished faster. But that didn't work (curses) and, for now at least, the shine's come off the work. Comics, on the other hand, has a lovely tight feedback loop. Write a thing. Send it off. Get art back. Feed learnings from the art back into the work. It feels sociable, it feels generative, it feels fun. If you're a prose writer and what I described above sounds familiar, maybe give comic scripts a little dabble. I'd be happy to chat about it with you if you'd like. Just drop a message in the comments.
Making comics is easier with community. Not only in the sense that it's always easier (in my eyes) to do creative work when you're engaging with something outwith yourself, but also because there isn't a lot of funding sloshing around for the creation of indie and creator-owned work. Especially those of us starting out or dipping a toe. It's been really uplifting for me on the outskirts to watch my fellow creators put the call out to each other to share, boost, like, or straight up support something new they're working on. I hope to be worthy of that kind of support, I certainly think Vicky and Buddy are.
So that's it. PuddleJumpers Issue 1 is ready to go live! Thank you for reading, I hope you've found it interesting. See you next time!
Alex.