D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

Keeping my head down here, lots of work to get done before Wizard World Los Angeles. Might have to pull some late nights here to get ahead.

I’ve been getting some nice emails from people discovering Hero By Night this week. That feels nice, the people who are randomly finding it in stores or just giving it a shot and it surprises them like this:

“Mr. Coffman, I saw your book on the shelves a few weeks ago and I held off on picking it up because I’m usually leary of new indy super hero titles because they usually end abruptly or disappear, but I took a chance because I loved the cover. All I can say is WOW! You guys have a really oddly unique book here. I can’t put my finger on why it’s different than other super hero books I read, but it’s definitely on my pull list now. I started reading the online comics too slowly, great stuff - Ray F.”

“Oddly unique”, he says. That’s interesting. But yeah, there is some sort of feeling after you read our book. A modern day nostalgia, maybe? I don’t know.

I also find it funny that I see the issues showing up on bittorrent sites. Now, you’d think that would bug me, people passing it around for free– but nope– someone took the time to SCAN in each page, ads and all! And I see there are like 60-75 people seeding the files. On one tracker I see there’s 170 people seeding it. (seeding means they have the file and they’re allowing other people to download from them) — and I see random people leeching the files, 30 at a time… so the way I figure it, this is sort of the new TRADE market. Instead of kids showing up at the bus stop to swap Spider-Man comics, they’re doing it online now. And it’s gotta be a labor of love for someone to sit there and do decent high rez scans of the pages. Even though… I’d like people to go read the comics at herobynight.com because the free pages there look SO much better.

I saw a politician of talking head on the tube yesterday saying “times are changing” — no, times have CHANGED. It’s a whole new world out here, and a lot of companies and industries haven’t truly figured that out. Just surfing along trends isn’t enough. That doesn’t make you “new media”. They need to start thinking like pioneers I think.