11.17.2005

Here's the Thing... #16 - Improving

There’s always room to improve, there’s always something you can learn off of other people – there are always ways to build off of what you learned. A couple of months ago I talked in length about Justin Jordan’s promotional mini-comic that he handed me at SPX. I’ve wanted to put one together for myself and finally got around to doing it in time for the Washington DC Counter Culture Festival. I started with Justin’s design and I improved on it. You may look at this and find some of your own ways to improve on mine. But either way I’m going to walk you through, page by page, and give you an understanding of where I was coming from.

For starters, as I mentioned in a previous article, I try to direct people to my website. That’s my plan – that’s how I want to build my audience, that’s how I want to network – I want to bring people to me. My website is very personal, it updates five days a week and it has a good sense of community. The more people I have there, reading and especially chatting, the greater my case is when I tell a publisher I’m bankable. I’m worth more than $2.99. So my mini was designed to parallel the personal touch from my website while reminding people continuously that this is just a small part of what I’m currently doing – they have access to plenty more, they just need to go to the website.

I’m not going to get too much into the printing, that’s Matt’s job and he does it well. He helped me a lot with this, first through his columns on this site and also on the side when I was laying this out. It was digest sized so I got 4 comic pages to a single page. It was 16 pages long, I got it printed off at my local copy shop for 3-cents a page, it cost me 24-cents a book. I got the long-reach stapler that Matt recommends getting for thirty bucks at Office Depot. Ok, let’s talk about the book now.

First off is the cover:

Like Justin’s I went for a minimal cover although I tried to make it a bit more stylish. His was title and names, symmetrically laid out. I tried to off-center it a bit, give it an intriguing title and put the names of the creators who helped me on the front to give a sense that a fair amount of people are taking a chance on my work already. I called it an “Ashcan” which, historically, is a disposable book only printed to secure the rights. I personally love the term, but before I write these articles I try to kick up some discussion on various message boards and on two of the three I went to this time someone said they hate the term “Ashcan”. Honestly, I think nitpicking the term is a bit clown-shoes but I may reconsider using it next time.

The second thing about the cover is the fact that I printed the price despite the fact that I was going to give it away for free. What this does is give the comic value. Without a price it’s nothing more than a promotional pamphlet. It’s a postcard. It’s a 16-page business card. With the price on it, it’s a comic. It’s a comic that I would normally sell, albeit for only 50-cents, but I am giving it to YOU for free. It shows that I value my work and that I value your opinion.

Then I do the intro page, just like Justin’s mini:

With my intro page I tried to make it a bit more personal, a light-hearted anecdote about why I’m doing comics, followed up by my experience as an editor and an overview of me as a writer. In retrospect, I messed up and didn’t put my web address on the intro page, just referred to it. That will be rectified next time. I then introduce the stories and creative teams before getting onto Six Shots:

(These aren’t the best resolution for bandwidth considerations, if anyone wants a copy of the ashcan, email me and I can either send you a link to a high-res packet that you can print out on your own or I can mail it to you. Which brings me to my next point, the ashcan only costs a single stamp to send.)

I chose “Six Shots” first because it’s a more accessible story. When it was printed in Western Tales of Terror it was well-reviewed. It’s quick to read, Marco does a great job with the illustrations and it reads well – most people will “get it” and I have faith they’d enjoy it, as well. I then followed it up with “All the Wrong Choices”:

“All the Wrong Choices” is the opposite of “Six Shots”. It’s not very accessible. Hardly anyone “gets it”. The thing is, it wasn’t meant to be “gotten”. It’s really open for interpretation, I know what it means but different people get a different story out of it. It wasn’t well reviewed when it was printed as a back-up in Elk’s Run #2 so it goes second.

When we were printing Western Tales of Terror a lot of thought was put into the order of the stories. The first one was always a shorter story (I believe it was always five pages except for issue 4) with one of the bigger names attached provided it had great art. The multi-part story was always at the end; this way the person can read the stand-alones first and get a feel for liking the book before hitting him with a story that doesn’t have immediate closure. Before the multi-part was the feature story, it was always the story that belonged to our headliner (with the exception with Phil Hester’s story in issue 2). This way we can remind the reader that our anthology features top talents before they plunge into the multi-part story. Obviously with each issue we needed to adjust the formula but every time we laid it out we wanted to do it in such a way so that the person reading went from beginning to end and, if he skipped a story, the next one would be one he’d likely read.

I followed the same model with this ashcan. You never want to just throw stuff together. You want to hold onto your audience, and part of that comes down to assessing which stories are stronger, which ones are weaker and how you should order them. If someone skips two segments of an anthology in a row they’ll likely put the book down and not pick up the next one. If someone doesn’t like the first story, they likely won’t finish the anthology or simply skip to the headliner. With “All the Wrong Choices” I understand a lot of people won’t like it, so I sandwiched it between two power houses. “Six Shots” and my selected Moose in the Closet story:

As you can see I started with an introduction to The Moose in the Closet. Let the reader know that, by the end of January 2006, this story they are about to read is going to be one of 260 stories. And then I hit them with the story which is mildly offensive but it’ll likely make you shoot milk out of your nose from laughing. To put it bluntly, it’s a story about me pissing all-over myself at a bar in Boston when I was in college.

This is a story that people will ask me to tell their friend when I’m at someplace where the people I’m hanging with are finding out about my past through my website (like a convention, for us comic types). They’ll actually say, “Jason! Tell my friend about that time you pissed all over yourself!” They make the request as if I told it to them personally, as if they didn’t read it off of a website. For that reason I decided this was the story to tell in the ashcan, it’s the one that feels “real” with people.

After the Moose in the Closet story I moved on to the “Convention Confessions” strips Jacob and I do for a local DC newspaper. Nice quick hits, easy to digest – one page of some funnies tucked away as if it was “bonus material”.

Then the outro:

The long “thanks list” does two things. First it once again makes the book more personal; it parallels the feel you get from my website. Secondly, it once again makes it a comic and not just some promotional material. I put time into this, people helped me create it, it was a labor of love and I’m proud how it came out. This is my baby, my first comic produced entirely by me, where I rounded up the artist, has complete creative control. And you got it for free. It’s almost like I’m giving you a little piece of my soul. Not bad for something that cost me 24-cents to print and is, in essence, nothing but a promotional pamphlet.

And then the back cover:

I needed to put something there, never waste a page, especially when you’re paying to get ink all over it. The back page again paralleled my website; I put a lot of pictures up there, and allowed the book to end on one last funny.

So, like I said, I took Justin’s design, thought about it, tailored it to my needs and tried to improve on it. Some of you will look at this, think of some new angle, hand me a copy at a convention and impress the crap out of me. It’s a great resource, especially for writers. It tells more than a business card. It tells more than a script or a pitch. It shows that you can produce, that you can network and that you have a voice behind the characters you’re creating. I’ve already gotten good feedback and I’ve seen an increase in traffic to my site, I’d say it was a success – especially considering 100 copies of this book cost me 24-bucks to print.

Go make one already.

(I have one more Here's the Thing... planned for early December and that will be the last one for this year.)