2010: The Year in Review
Happy New Year! And what a year it was! Here it is, already time for another year in review post. Doesn’t seem all that long ago when I was writing this https://www.blacksnowcomic.com/?p=381.
Lets start by addressing what I wrote last year. I basically stopped work on my children’s book. Why? Just lost interest I guess. Maybe I’ll revisit it some day.
If you cared about my pets, then read on. I hatched 3 more Crested Geckos and bought a beautiful, bright red female. The first baby, Cresty, is doing very well, almost a full grown male now. My sister has the second one, Alice, also almost a full grown male. Unfortunately my sister doesn’t want hers anymore, so now it’s my dad’s. Too bad you can’t keep the males together. We sold the other two, in exchange for a 6 foot tall screened cage. Really cool. I recently broke down my salt water fish tank and my fresh water community fish tank. I opted for African Chiclids instead, and they are awesome. The other tank I gave to my dad, and he stocked it with big land hermit crabs.
Looking at my goals I posted, some where achieved and others weren’t. Did I keep my vow of at least one completed page a week? No, I missed two weeks, but that means I did do it for fifty weeks. Not so bad. I will attempt to keep that resolution going this year as well. I did draw a lot. 10 Day Camps in 2010. Why only 10? That’s all we wrote, then we just kind of stopped. Why? In favor of the 2010 born comic strip I’M FAMOUS! Speaking of, since it’s creation in January I drew 72 pages. And a cover.
As far as Black Snow Issue 0, well I guess we put that on hold. What was it going to be? A better intro for new fans than Issue 1. Somewhat of an origin story that would explain how these characters all came together. Why didn’t it happen? We had a hard time writing it, and eventually felt it hurt the comics overall momentum, opting to move on to Issue 7 instead. It never got beyond a collection of ideas. I wouldn’t mind revisiting it some day.
Why didn’t Issue 7 happen? Mostly because I couldn’t get Alex to write it. He was too focused on I’M FAMOUS! Honestly, it has become pretty obvious to me over the years that it is really hard to get Alex to write anything. It is frustrating, and the best solution I’ve found is to basically start writing things myself until it motivates him to take over. Hopefully he’ll step things up some day. So I finally got him to start on Issue 7 a couple months ago. Some scenes got written, some were still just outline ideas. Then we made the decision to scrap the Issue format.
We will be going forward with the graphic novel format. Everything written for Issue 7 has been incorporated into Black Snow: Last Call. I put up the cover a few weeks back, hopefully I be able to start drawing some pages soon. Again, most scenes still need to be written and some are not even outlined yet. Alex seems excited about being able to tell a longer story, so maybe that will get him to write faster. It hasn’t yet though. I may need to just start writing some myself. In any case, I’m really looking forward to drawing it.
You may remember reading about Black Snow the Movie several months back. Well, I wrote up a very ambitious outline after Alex and I discussed it, then I handed it off to Alex to review and start on a script. You can probably guess what happened. Yes, Alex didn’t write anything. You feel my frustration?
What good is a writer who won’t write?I’d always hoped if he wasn’t writing he could at least help in other areas, like promotion or the website. Unfortunately that hasn’t really happened yet either. He does do a bit now, so I do appreciate that, but he could do a lot more instead of relying on me to do it all.
What else did we accomplish in 2010? We successful became Black Snow Comics, as we now offered 3 titles. We had good, consistent traffic to the website. I totally redid the website, designing it myself from scratch, and making it a lot more creatively in line with how I always wanted to present these comics. We had a booth at the Alternative Press Expo, where we got to connect with fans and other comic makers. We got advice and praise from the legendary Larry Marder. We sold some comics, hats, keychains and stickers. We learned a lot about printing and made hard copies of all 6 issues of Black Snow and the first 50 pages of I’M FAMOUS!. Gained more of a following on Twitter and Facebook. We also found out that people love I’M FAMOUS!, as we had apparently stumbled upon a comic with more mass appeal than Day Camp or Black Snow. I started the very popular blog posts where I comment on each new page. I was also shocked to find that people LOVE it when I write about wrestling, reading the posts by the thousands. I recently drew my first totally digital art and sped up my drawing process. Lastly, we reconnected with our love of comics, with weekly trips to our local comic books stores and reading a lot of current and classic titles.
So what does 2011 hold? Hopefully the start of Black Snow: Last Call. I won’t hope for the completion in 2011, as we plan for it to be somewhere between 120 and 160 pages long at this point, and that seems unrealistic. Maybe in 2012. We plan on continuing with I’M FAMOUS!, and I’d like to keep completing at least one a week. With this new digital style speeding things up hopefully it can be even more than that. More Day Camp? You never know, but I sort of doubt it. Alex doesn’t seem to have any interest in it, and our hands are fairly full with the other projects. I plan to continue to improve my drawing. I have A LOT OF IDEAS when I finally get to work on Last Call that I think will raise things to another level. The digital art of I’M FAMOUS! has the promise of experimenting with new, exciting ideas as well. We plan on returning to APE this year, with a full table this time. We may look into other shows as well. I’d like to see us complete our movie script and shop it around. Maybe we’ll start selling some of our stuff online. And finally get some shirts.
Well, only time will tell what will actually transpire, but thank you (in advance) for being along for the ride!
Happy 2011!