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Just a little transition page! Good timing for me to have a simpler page this week, since I am pretty dang tired out from all the last-minute excitement of the Kickstarter project. It was a huge success – 808 backers for a total of $36444 (over 240% of the original $15000 I asked for).
I’m loopy with gratitude. It will take a good long while for those funds to translate from operating funds into any serious income, but being able to publish three books without major financial risk is quite a gift for a small businessperson like yours truly. And I’m excited for what it means for volume two of Family Man.
I’m grateful to Kickstarter for providing a clever, fun and intuitive platform. While I don’t think it’s the perfect system for every project, this has been a great experience for me and a wonderful way to play with longtime readers and attract some new ones, as well. And now I’m very much enjoying the newfound peace and quiet of my post-project inbox, and taking great pleasure in all the fiddly art and pre-press work that I have left before it turns into a whole bunch of books.
All the progress I make on that front will be restricted to backers of the project from here until I start getting physical proofs, but before the project finished I did post a single rough version of the first page from the new Bite Me! short story that will be appearing in the anniversary-edition (PDF and print). Posted below for your perusal and enjoyment!
It’s been desperately fun to revisit these characters, and the process of putting the grey washes down digitally – while figuring out how to retain the very hand-done character of the original – delights me.
A number of people have written to me expressing dismay that they didn’t come across the project until after it had closed. Don’t worry! I’ll be selling copies of the books produced for quite some time, and they’ll go on sale to the general public towards the end of October; the extras (prints, patches, bookplates etc) are the only things exclusive to project backers. I’ll let you all know when the new books are available for purchase!
I’ll see you all next week – when we find out what Ariana is waking up to…
The New York Times has sent a reporter – the media and entertainment journalist (and grizzled author of many a puff-piece) Michael Cieply down to Comic-Con International this year. I’m skipping out on the convention this time around, so I succumbed to vicarious tourism and read his most recent posting, blearily titled “Even at a Comics Event, You Can’t Defy Gravitas.”
It starts with the inevitable descriptions of those hilarious losers who dare to have fun by showing up in costume and the usual bit about people speaking Klingon (he proves his too-cool-to-care-about-this-stuffness by calling it Klingonese; the language is properly called Klingon, unless you’re so hardcore as to draw reference entirely from the original Star Trek series, where I believe it is referred to as “Klingonese” solely in the classic episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” Hi there! I have zero shame about the fact that I know this!)
At any rate, in a momentary breather from making fun of the 30,000+ people in attendance, Cieply takes the time to quote a moment from a panel on comics in educational settings.
“It’s frightening,” said Lisa Vizcarra, a science teacher at Carquinez Middle School in Crockett, Calif. Ms. Vizcarra, who seemed to set the day’s tone, was speaking to a Comic-Con audience about a looming pedagogical crisis: Students, distracted by video, are no longer responding to comics as an educational tool, even as schools increasingly use them in their curriculums.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do, and that’s why we’re here today,” she told a room packed with teachers and other listeners, one of whom had a raised rubber hand on the top of her beanie.
Okay, first off – shut up about the beanie, dude. Seriously. We get it. What a bunch of weirdos!
But really, Mr. Cieply’s observations are pretty standard fare for mainstream reporters sent(enced) to cover something they don’t much care for. (He reserves praise for the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie preview upstairs, because unlike those gloomy Guses who care about the state of a medium and an industry, it was “fun.”)
What bugged me about this was the sort-of-quote from the educator.
A brief disclaimer: I’m not a licensed teacher. I’ve taught workshops for adults, but I have no certified classroom experience for primary or secondary education. I don’t know what “works” for kids “these days” or how the nine million and three near-insurmountable challenges facing public educators today happen to intersect with the use of comic books in their classroom. I don’t know how much Ms. Vizcarra knows or cares about comics in general.
But I think she’s wrong, or more likely the way Cieply summarized her comments (and those of her fellow panelists) is wrong.
I completely believe that Ms. Viscarra has objectively observed an increasing difficulty in engaging her students with educational comics. But I don’t think the problem is that the students are “distracted” by video. (Is there a movie playing next to their head while they’re reading? Are they confused as to why the pictures on the page aren’t moving?)
Furthermore…video? Whuh? There’s been regular use of video in the classroom since the VCR became a common thing, and it’s always been a treat for the students because video is often less engaging than other classroom activities. You can safely zone out. Video is what happens when there’s a substitute teacher, or you’ve finished the chapter but have a day of class left before winter break, or your teacher honestly needs twenty minutes off so here, let this PBS special explain covalent bonds to you. I saw Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land more times than I can count over the course of my education.
No, I think kids are “distracted” by text messaging/social networking and games, which are basically new forms of two activities most mammals are inescapably drawn to: chatting and playing. Those aren’t going anywhere.
Something else is going on to make kids distinterested in the comic books that a teacher hands them.
I think the problem that Ms. Viscarra is encountering is likely connected to the fact that kids are reading more comics than ever. I’ve met a lot of kids, and the ones who have any natural inclination towards enjoying words and pictures and stories (any two of the three will do) are also naturally drawn to comics. Right now, the comics most readily available to them, and the ones that are most focused on being enjoyable before anything else, are manga. But experience tells me that kids will read just about anything in comic book form, SO LONG AS IT’S GOOD.
There’s the catch.
At a certain age and after a certain amount of exposure, kids are sophisticated enough to recognize lameness. They are sophisticated enough to recognize when they’re not being taken seriously, and when the people preparing material for them are doing so by rote, or under the assumption that kids will like anything that has bright colors. Or that the publishers are taking advantage of the fact the teachers who select materials for students won’t be able to distinguish “genuinely engaging” from “suited to the latest trends.”
As a kid in the late eighties and nineties, I read every comic book I came across. Good, bad, didn’t matter. There were so few of them (compared to prose books) that I functionally loved them all until I got old enough to gain access to and read all the “grownup” comic books and take a proper sounding of the depths. If I were a child now, I think I’d be a lot pickier, because I’d have so much more to choose from. The more there is to encounter, the quicker a kid will form their own taste, and learn to tell the real thing from the ersatz.
Thus the kids who read comic books are more likely to perceive the difference between a book made with love and skill and enthusiasm by dedicated creators, and a book commissioned by an indifferent and underpaid editor with a set of publishing guidelines designed to exclude the possibility of any genuine interest or fun (lest a parent complain), subsequently foisted upon even more desperately underpaid artists and writers toiling under extremely unfavorable terms and hating every moment of the rotten gig.
That second kind of comic book is always going to be terrible. Benignly mediocre, at best. I know this because I’ve drawn some of those crummy edu-comics. At various times, I’ve simply needed the money – the incredibly tiny amount of money – and doing some bad work under circumstances that made me cry but that still involved drawing was better than doing some bad work under circumstances that made me cry and could have been performed by a trained rat.
I love kids, and I love educating people through stories, and I love drawing, and I love writing. Educational comics work should be gravy for me, a really enjoyable way to earn a living while making a positive difference in kids’ lives and doing some of the activities I most love. I’ve had a few truly good gigs facilitated by people who genuinely cared and fought for me in the face of limited resources, and I’m proud of the work I did with them. But in the shadow of those successes there are some truly underwhelming, indifferently managed projects that you won’t ever see on my portfolio or resume.
You’ll only find them in a classroom. The standards are lower there.
So educators can no longer rely upon the sheer novelty of the medium to trick children into ingesting educational material. And educational publishers can no longer rely on the trendiness of the novelty to sell books to teachers desperate for a quick ‘n easy way to fool those “reluctant readers” into sitting through class. The fact is that your average school kid is more likely than their teacher to be qualified to distinguish between a genuinely good educational comic book and a bad textbook in hastily applied comic book drag. And that’s a real stumper for the average educator who’s trying, with severely limited amounts of time, money, and knowledge, to figure out what to order for their classroom this year that will keep the children from murdering each other.
It’s unfortunately up to teachers to try reading some comic books themselves so that they can develop their own smell-detectors when it comes to quality. I fear that many will simply dump comics because they didn’t turn out to be a silver bullet, and thus miss out on a medium that, at its best, is absolutely wonderful for education. (Believe me: I’m voluntarily reading and enjoying an educational comic book about economics right now. Economics, for god’s sake.)
But most publishers can do better, too, and by putting in a modicum of effort could do themselves and their customers a lot of good.
If you want a comic book that is likely to succeed in the classroom, it had better be:
I’m not silly. I know that these conditions don’t exist in 98% of all publishing circumstances, especially such limited-market endeavors as comic books and educational materials. Time, money, talent, and giving-a-damn-ness are all highly limited resources. That will never change. But when an industry is so bizarrely undereducated about their own audience and product, as publishers largely are about comics in education, I think that everybody loses, and loses for no real reason.
These are our wonderful kids. And this is a potentially wonderful medium. They both deserve our best effort.
What a busy week it’s been! Here’s a quick round-up of all the excitement.
And, over in the Land of the Kickstarter, we’ve cracked $23.5k (less than $1500 to go until fox patches!) and an amazing 511 backers. That is beyond spectacular.
I’m also finishing up design work for the Outfoxed print edition. One of the things I’m happiest about is a repeating pattern that will appear on the inside covers. It’s a whole panoply of laundry from the story!
You can download a desktop wallpaper of this pattern by visiting the Kickstarter version of this post.
And, lastly (for now), I’m putting together the spreads for the Danse Macabre 2.0 book! That means I get to write nasty little revenge ditties like this one. I live in Portland, so this one was especially satisfying.
Hello, all – for the last several months I’ve been scheming away on My Next Big Thing. (Or, you know, my Concurrent Big Thing, since my graphic novel Family Man continues apace as I accumulate new pages for Volume II.)
You might’ve noticed that I’ve been sold out of Bite Me! books for awhile. As in, over a year. I’ve gotten so many e-mails and messages asking about it, and it’s driven me crazy every time I’ve had to reply “they’ll be back again soon! When I can make them better quality! And add stuff! And the elves return to Middle Earth!”
You might also have noticed that there hasn’t been a print edition of Outfoxed yet. Most of the comments on it I sum up to “This is great! Where can I buy a copy?” Up until now the answer has been nowhere.
And, if you were one of the people who wanted to buy an original piece from my Danse Macabre 2.0 illustration series but missed out or couldn’t afford it, you’ve asked me when I was going to do a collection or issue prints.
Well, I have some relevant and exciting news for all of you, because I’ve decided it’s finally time to open up pre-orders and fund a print run!
Of all three books! Through Kickstarter!
Here, let me explain, via video. (It’s only four minutes, and there are jokes.)
I’m excited, gang. I’ve become a much better at this stuff – the practical side of bookmaking – since I last made a book, and I’ve become astronomically better at it since I first made a book. I know how to make a book more quickly, at higher quality, at a lower cost, and get it to you with greater speed. Perhaps most importantly, I know who to ask for help rather than trying to do everything by myself.
But I can dream up the fanciest stuff on earth to no avail – ultimately it all depends on you folks, my lovely and distinguished readers. I don’t want to make things you’re not interested in.
So, if you’re interested in owning a copy of any of these three projects – please consider contributing! The success (or failure) of this campaign will have a big impact on how I print my work in the future. (The future of Family Man volumes will hinge, at least in part, on how well this project does.) Creator-owned self-pub is absolutely the most effective way I can turn my work into income.
Thanks in advance, all!
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Moon and stars and snow and wolves! And that dang gun. Next week: what have the ladies have been up to?
This work week finds me busy at work on a project that will be launching next Wednesday. I hate those “OOH SECRET PROJECT I CAN’T TELL YOU ABOUT” posts that everybody falls victim to posting online; if you’re only an occasional peruser of my work, this is just your official advisory to check in sooner rather than later. Your bookshelf will thank you later.
Lastly, if you’ve been looking for some more 18th century historical fiction, I’ve been plowing through the prose novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell.
Mitchell is a wonderful stylist, and when he’s in Historical Mode he does a marvelous job of taking a setting and wrapping it around your head. (His plotting can be rather cruel, though, so if you’re squeamish about characters being knocked around, seek comfort.)