www.CaptainTemerity.com

Well, if there’s a bottom of the writing barrel, here’s wear I etch my initials into it until I see light coming in from the other side.

Hey! Going with the recent theme here of “looking forward, not backward” and trying to motivate myself to be something more than I am, I am going to do some bullshit exercise and “Visualize My Success!”

First, I don’t know if there is such a bullshit exercise. I’m paraphrasing self-help gurus in my imagination, having never met or paid attention to one. Also, it’s me, so all exercise is bullshit.

But what I want to be doing right now is one singular thing above most anything else. And that’s a comic book/series/graphic novel/webcomic with my best buddy Levi that I envisioned some 11-15 years ago (the time escapes me). And I am stuck. Like, hard stuck. Which is weird because I pre-plotted a lot of it at that time, but now that I’m facing the challenge of moving on it again, it’s being as stubborn and elusive as I am when someone wants me to get off my ass and apply myself creatively to something. Heh.

I did write, again some several years back now, what was to be the first two “issues” of the comic book. Standard sized floppy, so the scripts were 22 pages each. I had, a few months ago, started doing a video podcast of me reading the scripts, interspersed with some storytelling about the ideas for the comic and the history and such, that I only made available to Levi. He had been on a kick of watching other comic-based YouTube casts while he was drawing, so I was hoping this would motivate him. It as also an excuse for me to go back and look at what I had written then and see how it worked for now.

And it mostly worked. Wish is both good, in the sense that I don’t feel like it was a total waste of his time. And it’s bad, because I now have to feel like I can write stuff today that stands up. And worse because one thing I’m most definitely shit at is editing myself, and I can see parts of the scripts that I know need to be sanded and spackled or just all around excavated and done over.

Also, I’m now looking at the format of 22-page floppies and not sure that’s the natural state for this comic. Levi wants print, and I absolutely do as well. I grew up with it. I have worked at or managed three different comic book stores in my adult life, so I completely want to support shops today and have my stuff on a shelf in the last one of them still going strong (and maybe for my dear friend Kathy, owner of my last comic shop, to offer through her store-without-a-store model to the loyal customers she refused to leave high and dry when she finally retired). But the landscape for comics has been changing already for some time, and this year with the pandemics and natural disasters and shutdowns and economic devastation and everything else, here in the states there are less comic shops that just about ever. And less people trekking out of their houses to buy them.

So there’s digital. And I don’t think I ever planned on doing this comic with one component and not the other. But whereas ten-plus years ago webcomics were technically a thing (and, as the guy who put together the DontAskComics.com site for Levi’s stuff I have been trying to be a part of that thing for about that long), the new frontier for digital seems to be a couple of bigger landing sites instead of everyone’s single dot.coms like they were. Webtoons and Tapas. There’s others, sure, and I’d still put stuff on our site too. But the ad revenue streams have shown less and less prosper. You either do a Patreon or a Kickstarter, depending on your book’s final form. And nothing cuts either of those off. But the more I’ve seen of these two modern webcomic aggregators the more impressed I am by them. Or more the people who host their work on them.

So, let’s start a list, shall we?

The first part, of course, is me doing the work. Writing the comics (beyond what’s done. Hopefully well beyond). Then having Levi enjoy them enough to want to draw them. I don’t like pushing something on someone that they just don’t want to do. All the “making” is part one. And it’s a huge part. The most important part, and if it was just that when all is said and done, I’d be pretty much fine with it. I owe it to myself to make this comic. It makes me happy. The characters and the story ideas and even the stuff that I’ve actually completed honestly makes me happy. So it is and should be enough.

But let’s say, after all that, I get to start looking at what could potentially come next. Like the Stretch Goals on a Kickstarter for instance.

Part two, then, would be publishing the work beyond our own site. And that would be print, if possible, and on one of those webcomic hosts. I admit, right now my bias is towards Webtoons simply because I’ve been following it more. Some people I really like, a couple I’m even friendly with, are doing their comics there, and since i learn from my peers first and foremost, it seems like I would like to follow them. I don’t know if there’s any required exclusivity, but that’s a down the road thing anyway.

Part Two.1 I guess is that Webtoons has a program for compensating their creators. A couple different tiers, but one is more lucrative. I’m going to again point back to the part where I said, and meant it, that I would be happy enough just to finish the work. But work that you also get financially compensated for is rather nice when it happens. And I’d happily put that money on Levi, because his job is way more labor intensive than my job (no matter how much I whinge and cry over my part of it currently). We also have some people we would enjoy being a part of this project in one way or another, and being able to pay them for their contributions would make me feel a lot happier. On the print side, I guess it would be getting the current comics distributor(s), whatever that looks like at the time it happens, to accept the book, list us in their catalog, and having shops take a chance on it. Maybe some of that would have to work in tandem with Kickstarter or Patreon, I don’t know. After a time, it starts to feel more about the funding of the book than the making of the book and that’s where my head gets tripped up because I feel like asking anything for something I’ve made seems greedy and misguided to me. I know realistically that it’s not, because I would want to pay anyone else doing the hard work if the roles were swapped (and I do support the work of other comic creators). But that’s just my personal gripe with myself that I’m trying to work through.

Can we go further? Oh yes. And this is where the dreams are so pipe-y that Danny Boy hears them from glen to glen down the mountain side.

Part Three is recognition. And I mean, a biggie. Because there are a couple of prestigious awards that comics have that are like their Emmys and Oscars. And at least two of them are named after personal heroes of mine in the industry. One of them, named for Dwayne McDuffie, let’s be honest, should not be rewarding any work I’m doing. I will always push for diversity and inclusion in all things, especially the art medium I love the most. But since we’re not nearly close enough to that actually being norm, I think there are far too many deserving creators that need to be recognized.

The other one I’d love to see happen though is Mike Wieringo’s awards, the Ringos. Like Dwayne, Mike was a beloved person and creator by just about everybody. And there’s a webcomics category, among some others, that I could see our little comic being qualified for. Good enough could be something else entirely, sure, but like I said, this is about what I could wish for, not what I think or expect to happen.

This isn’t meant as a slight against the Eisners I have to point out. It’s mostly just a me thing. I grew up reading and loving McDuffie’s and Ringo’s stuff, so they hold a special place in my heart.

Let’s do one more. And like the publishing/paying thing, this is multi-part because the second factor is a bigger deal to me than the first.

Part Four would be getting the comic optioned. Ideally as an animated series. With all the streaming platforms starving for new content, this seems like the one time when this could be more possible for anyone. And I do love and believe in our little comic idea. More because of Levi, but I say that knowing that I am Levi’s biggest fan in the world. I created this idea based solely on wanting to make something for and with him. But his art has always brought me so much joy, from the first moment I saw it. And I think it would look incredible brought to life on a screen. And I’m not making this comic strictly to be able to try to sell it as a show, because the comic is and always would be its own thing. It just feels… really natural that it could also become something else too.

Which finally brings me to Part Four.1. If there was a chance of it becoming a tv series, I would very much like to be a part of the writer’s room. Not the showrunner, I’m not crazy, that’s way outside of my skill set. But to just sit in a room of other writers all working on ideas towards this one, crazy, fun, wonderful thing. And I’d like to do that with anything really, it wouldn’t have to be something that was originally my idea. But I just don’t know how else that would ever happen at this point in my life. I’m not young or brave enough anymore to try to run off to Hollywood or New York or any place where shows are being written and made. I have my family here in our little house in Michigan and I am so content to finally have this spot of our own with our river and my parents close by… Uprooting is off my agenda.

But a couple of weeks? A trip here and there. Some virtual meetings to talk story. Yeah. All that sounds really good.

And that’s it. It’s just me talking out loud about wishes and hopes and not a lick of it is worth a damn until I can get script three worked out and feel like I can then move on immediately to script four. And a lot of those wishes are not just lofty. They’re bats-settled-in belfry.

(I’m assuming lofty as a word relates to an expensive penthouse apartment and that’s why its high-ranked. Language is fun when you don’t actually follow its rules.)

We’ll have to see if it’s worth it to say this stuff out loud. Does it just further embarrass me when some or none of it comes to pass? Does it feel like a kick in the beans when tomorrow I come back here and can’t think of anything less deserving to journal about? Or does it go on my virtual vision board and hold me to a standard I haven’t been very good at setting for myself?

If nothing else, yesterday I was talking about wanting a haircut. At least I aimed a little bit higher this time.