Sometimes you have to be adult enough to realize that things aren’t working and you need to make changes. For me, with so much going on in my life right now, I haven’t had the time to devote to doing a monthly comic book, let alone one in the half page format we’ve featured for this new volume.
The original idea was to bring something new to the medium. I switched to a tablet/phone friendly format that abandoned traditional pages for widescreen panels. They looked great and they served their purpose at the time, but in the end, I consider the experiment a failure since they didn’t produce the insane creative boost that I thought they’d bring.
Comics have been done in a portrait mode in a 6 3/4″ x 10 1/2″ format for years because they work that way. There are millions of tricks and tactics you can use by formatting your stories this way and it’s just the way I’ve learned to produce comics over the years. When I switched, it became too much work for a one man production. I was literally reinventing the wheel for a payoff that never came. My creativity was limited, my fun levels went way down and as usual, when the issue five wall hit, I stopped and let life take over again.
Obviously, I don’t want to give up writing comics. I love to do them and I have so many stories to tell, but, and it’s a big but, I have to do them in a way I can manage them while still having fun. I’ve been tempted to abandon Indesign for a more traditional comic creation package (Comic Life or Manga Studio) and go back to how things used to be. There are a lot of advantages to that. Panel layouts, word balloons, text placement, etc., all handled by a single program would be nice and are appealing though in the end, I think I’m sticking with Indesign and just going back to the traditional comic format because the other programs don’t export to jpg or pdf quite as nicely as Indesign.
My other issue is the ever present deadline. With life how it is right now, I can’t make a monthly deadline. I can’t promise you a new issue every month. I know I don’t have a lot of readers and I do want to keep you, so updates and new issues are coming as I can. I’m quickly converting the first six issues over to the traditional comic format and then we’re going to go with new issues again.
Does this mean I’m rebooting, again? No. The first and second issues will be changed a bit just to set up continuity that will make the story better in the long run. I’m sick of that first story anyway. While elements will remain, you may see it from a different perspective this time. It’s going to give me something I can work with and establish the things that I need to in the long run to keep the comic alive.
Got it?
Rolling your eyes yet?
Yeah, me to.
But I’m getting things done.
Jim