D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

Today is “cat gets fixed day!”- No longer will I have to hold him up like a prisoner in my basement and go and give him super treatment, or his daily fitness regimine. Hopefully after today the vulcan-like anger/passion will subside as he wonders…. hey, where did my balls go?

Yesterday was my son Dillon’s birthday. We had a special surprise lined up for him, and that’s all I’m going to say about that. That and THANKS to Jamie, we’re the coolest parents in the gosh darn world right now.

I CANTZ FEELZ MY LEGZ!!!! - Well, I can feel them. But there is a weird tingling numbness on my upper thighs above the knee, feels like very light pins and needles. In my brilliant self diagnosis (see, no health insurance for myself) I’ve deduced that the problem is a side effect of my previous lower back sprain a couple weeks go, wherein I still have a pinched nerve or crink of some kind. Doesn’t help that I’ve been sitting a lot lately, so I’m going to try to get some exercise every night at the kids football practice by walking the track and doing some stretches in the morning.  The numbness is mildly annoying, but I can’t complain too much, I have good friends who have lost legs or are stuck in wheelchairs who are some TOUGH mofos– so they should punch me in the nuts if I’m ever complaining about such things. Of to which, I am not. (sorry, about the rambling deadwood-speak)

WHat else… what else… I’ve been thinking about some complicated political issues lately. In my new side job, I’m hearing a lot of differing opinions about the war. Some people feel like the Flobots “don’t support the troops” or they’re just an anti-establishment band or something, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. At all of their full sets, they mention the war, but also say no matter how you feel about it we need to support the troops there, pray for them and not just pull them out lickity split, but bring them home responsibly and not leave a vacuum behind. It’s a very tricky, delicate thing, and politics poured on top of it like gravy doesn’t help. I’m not very masterful in diplomatically speaking my mind, when I get an email that’s like “FUCK YOU! I HATE YOU!” I usually delete it and don’t respond. Years ago, I’d maybe write something witty back to make the person angrier, using my amazing passive aggressive superpowers. But I’ve witnessed some pretty tough conversations lately that really make you think about all sides of an issue. Where are people coming from? And the fact that there’s never just two sides to a story, there can be 3 or 4, 100. My friend Jamie seems to have a mastery of this, an easy intuitiveness that’s dead on in most cases. In the lyrics to some of their songs, they write about how words are more powerful than bombs, the pen mightier than the sword, etc… they don’t just talk that talk, I’ve seen the walk. It’s amazing how the right choice of words in what could spiral out into a VERY bad situation, can totally disarm and calm.

Anyways, thinking about all of this stuff is inspiring to me at best. At worst, it makes me want to get out and do more, and that’s not such a bad “worst”. My goal is to somehow be to put a little of that magic into my work somehow. Behind the scenes, I’m creating something special based on all of these things… something that blows the doors off of other stuff I’ve done in the past year or so.

“Change the SWORDS to WORDS and lift continents”, indeed.

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ON a lighter side– the Will Draws keep going along. I’m off to work on some of those post haste. I think I have about… somewhere like 400 waiting to do, and more keep filing in as I go. I have to thank people for their patience, if this were my full time thing, I’d be getting them out a lot quicker. My MAIN goal this week are the WIll Draws. I’m still on orders that came in around the 18th-19th, which was when we had the link on the Whedon blog. After that, I’m cranking into the Seth and Metafilter rush of orders. So crazy! It’s so much fun though! I really do want to collect them all now into one book or something just for fun too. I have a folder on my iphone, they fit perfect and they are awesome to scan through. You know the years and years I did comic strips, in newspapers and on the web, I never really liked to go back and “admire” and enjoy my work, I liked it when I was in the moment drawing it, but could never go back and feel the same way, in fact, i’d go back and realize how boring I’d drawn the talking heads in lame black and white comic strip, almost looking like copy-paste (the kind you see in a lot of online webcomics)– but with these little random things, they are SO much fun to go look back on, just the variety of things I get to draw… I swear, my mind just shuts off, because I come across some and I don’t even remember drawing them, it’s like I’m looking at the drawing for a first time again. You don’t really get that feeling in the day in and day out production of a comic strip. It’s no wonder most of those guys grow to be socially crippled and jaded as they feed that monster.

Last week felt like a BUST workwise, and not to mention more work pouring in for commissions and the WillDrawAnythings (which I’d better get working on so I’ll make this fast!)

All sorts of things going on on the homefront, my wife’s stepmother who she just went on vacation with has had an apparent heart attack and is in the hospital.  I guess she had the heart attack while in the hospital, but still, pretty scary stuff. We’re hoping she gets better soon.

Our planned trip to Washington DC to see and meet with the Flobots might be a little tricky to pull off, but I’m hoping the universe aligns and allows all things to be corrected. I was looking forward to grabbing some video clips and other stuff down in DC.

Soooo… I have about a bajillion WillDraws to attend to this week, and I’d better go get started on that. It’s really brought up a plethora of business requests and commission requests, and things have been very very busy… but busy is good! I haven’t thought about anything that was getting me down in a good long while, and actually, when the things do creep into mind, they seem small and petty, and it feels like I’m five steps beyond it all. So that feels pretty good.

To the drawing board!!!

Only 24 hours to snag up the Hulk Cover art I did for Hero Initiative and Marvel. It’s for a worthy cause!

I just realized, a year ago tonight, I was being toasted on the roof of a hotel overlooking San Diego Comicon, and had a bunch of people kissing my ass. It meant absolutely NOTHING in the long run, and most of the nice things said by some people were obviously a bunch of lip service.

I can’t say I’d rather actually be anywhere other than right here in my studio tonight…

Day four of I’M ALL ALONE WITH NO ADULTS TO TALK TO! — I’m missing my wife hardcore here, but trying to bury myself in work so I don’t think about it too much. Geez, it seems like this week of all weeks there has been so much stuff to deal with all on my own, and it sucks GIANT ASS. My oldest son had his tonsils out last week, so he’s on a medicine regimine, my cat decided to bust into crazy Vulcan like HEAT where he goes nuts and sprays on everything and wants to challenge me with those pungle sticks (play kirk vs spock theme music here) - And it’s also the first week of football practice for my two sons, usually from 6-8 Monday through Friday… I’ve brought multi-tasking to a whole new fucking level… but WOW… am I freakin tired. Right now all I can think of doing is going in and sitting down on the couch and watching ghost hunters or something recorded on DVR, but alas…. there’s work to do! I’ve been staying up until about 2am every night… not on purpose, it just creeps up on me.

Uhm….. the Will Draw Anythings have reached a new level of crazy. First I got linked by one of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, and that turned into a link on metafilter.com shortly after…. and before I knew it, I had oh, I don’t know… 300 something odd orders coming in, and counting. Not to mention requests for side jobs, logos, commissions and all sorts of stuff. THere are brief moments where I feel like I may have made a BIG mistake in opening that up to the public, but hey, as long as people are patient for their $2 drawings, all is well! Every time I look at my inbox, I kinda giggle maniacally to myself. I might be looking for a REAL publisher to take these on as a collected book or something. They’re so fun to look back on, and people seem to really be getting some enjoyment out of them.

On top of all of those zany WillDraws…. I’m of course planning more Flobots work, and there are things going on behind the scenes that are very interesting. I have a new format and update schedule and general management thing I want to do… I can’t talk much about it, just keep watching. Speaking of that… I gotz to go finish an update! Chapter one should be ending very soon…. next two updates are so….

I’m out!

Thought I’d embed this here. It’s so true, it’s almost painfully depressing, but funny as hell.

Just getting around to the net today. Was up most of the night with my dog who was scared shitless over the storm we had. It was pretty loud, maybe the loudest thunder and lightning I’ve ever heard in recent memory. Sounded like bombs going off in my yard. Oddly though, I found the sound soothing and could have just slept through it. My kids did. The dog didn’t… so…. late start.

I’ve been the topic of conversation between my friend Al Nickerson and Dave Sim over creator rights issues, something both are passionate about and write about extensively. Dave refers to me as “The DJ Coffmans of the world”, in regard to just selling my work away to companies, or as if to infer that that’s all I have an interest in doing. I know he meant it generally and I don’t take offense to that, I think the world knows that Dave Sim is an opinionated fellow. I’ve been an admirer of his work for some time, and sometimes I scratch my head when I hear some of the quotes about mysogeny or religious views… but other times he’s brilliant. He did the self publishing world a great service in publishing his guide to self publishing in the back of Cerebus comics way back… when? Jesus, I’m getting old? Nah! Anyways, I wanted to clear something up about my view on “creator rights”, because I’m surely not against it at all.

Creator rights to me, use to be about, well OWNING your work, complete control. But there’s more to it than that as well. A code of ethics, the ways creators should be paid, and how creators should also be professional towards their publishers, back and forth. Most of which, I’ve broken into a million pieces by just telling the truth or my honest opinion. All many people know of me is Hero By Night, and the fact I sold it away, but I did so willingly because well, I wanted to make money. Some people still argue that when you do that, it’s a one time thing and you’re done, and years from now they’ll make zillions and you get nothing . Some cases that’s true in the past, but it’s not the case with my deal, and that’s why I went toe to toe with so many people criticizing my deal. Even though Platinum probably HATES me now, i’m still connected to Hero By Night and I’ll benefit from anything they do with it in the future. Sure, maybe they’ll shelve it for good, but I reckon if the chance to do anything in tv/film came along, they’d jump at it because, well, it’s business and they’d want to recoup some of their investment on it, and turn a profit. And when or if they do anything with it, I get a cut. That’s why I always felt like this was a MUCH better deal than Jack Kirby or other godfathers of comics got. They got NOTHING but headaches and heartbreaks. So at least it’s SOMETHING.. it’s one thing that’s out there somewhere, for better or worse.

And to any of my detractors who despise me, or ramble on about how bad it was for me to do, I’ve not ignored the things you’ve said. It’s actually got my brain itching to do full on creator owned stuff again, and you’re partly right. And luckily, I’m not a one trick pony, and I have plenty of concepts I’d like to explore that I’m being way more cautious with in the future. Even though this ended rough, it was a good experience for me, I learned a lot.  For now, unless it’s drawing other peoples characters for like Marvel or DC or some other writer’s project, I’m pretty much leaving Work-For-Hire alone. I won’t work work for hire on things I created and that other people own.  I don’t regret doing it, I just won’t do it again any time soon.

So, Mr. Sim doesn’t have to worry about the “DJ Coffmans” of the world making his job harder, because I think they might actually make it easier… and well, to my knowledge, there’s only ONE me. And I’ll be off somewhere creating fun comics.

Well I looked over the new Wowio contract with Platinum’s new items listed in the contract amendments and I’m going to have to pass on it, here’s why.

There will be new multiple ways for you to monetize your content, let’s take a look at the actual text and I’ll give you my own personal beefs with it.

1.      AMENDMENTS TO AGREEMENT.  The terms and provisions of the Agreement are hereby amended as follows:

1.1    EXPANSION OF GRANT OF RIGHTS.  In addition to the grant of rights by Publisher under the Agreement, Publisher hereby grants and conveys to WOWIO the following rights in and to the Content:

The right to display page images derived from Content for free in a web browser with interactive display advertising (“PREVIEW”).

* BOOM. Right off the top you’re essentially giving them the right to use the content inside your ebooks as pretty much “webcomics” that they’ll monetize by selling advertising and boost their pageviews. They go on to say they’ll give you 20% of any advertising made, more on that in a bit…

Publisher shall have the option through the Publisher account interface to make “Ebooks” eligible for sale and to set a sale price (“ECOMMERCE OPTION”). If Publisher elects to activate the Ecommerce Option, Publisher hereby grants Company the right to sell Ebooks without embedded advertising. The default setting for this option is “inactive”.  For purposes of the Agreement “Ebooks” shall mean self-contained electronic files, one format of which shall be Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format.

* The thing that made Wowio work in the first place was free downloads. If I’m going to sell PDFs to my fans I can do that myself direct over my own website. Sure there will be creators and publishers who don’t know how to do this, and this will seem like an easy service to use, but you’ll be giving up HALF of your sales to them. 50/50 just seems ridiculous to me, and in my own personal opinion there is no market for selling these ebooks, other people have tried and failed miserably.

Publisher shall have the option through the Publisher account interface to make Ebooks eligible for free distribution with embedded advertising when sponsors are available (“SPONSORSHIP OPTION”). If Publisher elects to activate the Sponsorship Option, Publisher hereby grants Company the right to distribute Ebooks for free with embedded advertising. The default setting for this option is “active”.

*”When” Sponsors are available? What happens when sponsors aren’t available? That seems really vague. Who’s going to be in charge of getting sponsors now? Platinum?!? UGH.

1.3    ROYALTIES.  Schedule A to the Agreement is hereby deleted in its entirety, and the following shall constitute the Royalties payable to Publisher under the Agreement:

For revenues derived from Preview, Publisher shall receive 20% percent of the quarterly gross advertisement revenue generated by interactive display advertising on pages that contain page images from Publisher’s Content.

* This was what set off alarm bells in my head initially. So, they’ll be using your content to generate pageviews that you have no way of accessing, nor do you know how much advertisers are paying, so you have to just trust whatever they say you made off of pageviews without any system of checks and balances mentioned. In light of Platinum Studios telling me that Hero By Night only generated 800 bucks in ad revenue for a webcomic that has been online since October 2006 and consistantly had the HIGHEST pageviews on all of Drunk Duck… I don’t have faith that they can either A. figure out real well paying advertisers, or B. tell the truth about how much they actually made off of web advertising revenue. You might find yourself in the same position of asking… wait, we had all these pageviews and we only made 50 bucks this quarter? — and they’ll say something like, Well, that was the going CPM…  better luck next time. I also don’t think it’s an accident that they’re only willing to cut YOU in on 20% of their web revenue… but hey, why wouldn’t they cut you in on 50% of that? I mean, they want 50% of YOUR ebook. That just doesn’t seem well thought out at all, and it smells bad to me.

For revenues derived from Ecommerce Option, Publisher shall receive 50% percent of the quarterly gross revenue generated by sales of Ebooks of the Publisher’s Content.
For revenues derived from Sponsorship Option, Publisher shall receive (i) 50 cents ($0.50 USD) per download for eTexts of less than 100 pages; and (ii) One dollar ($1.00 USD) per download for eTexts of 100 pages and above.
All Royalties shall be paid to Publisher on a quarterly basis, within 45 days following the end of each calendar quarter.

* Couple things here... again, the thought of splitting 50/50 profits on an ebook sale with anyone is ridiculous to me. And the part about when you’re SUPPOSED to be paid, turns my stomach a little in the light of the situation I was in with Platinum. I’m guessing everything will go smoothly during the “transition” period when the old Wowio people are still managing things.. but when the keys are handed over to Platinum, I’ve got a BADDDddddddd feeling about people being paid on time. That’s not an assumption, that’s a proven fact, regardless of the articles written about creators owed, printer representives telling me they were owed and COMIC BOOK NEWS sites telling me they were owed money… and the Drunk Duck kids over there, there was a bunch of “mobile wallpaper” people never paid. I have a really good friend who had his wallpapers up through their service before, and when he asked, he was told that “none sold” but he knew better because his own family had boughten them from the site!!!! — Anyways, THAT’S who will be running this shindig now. That’s who owns them. You have been warned.

To end things off… even if I wanted to stay on under Wowio with my other ebooks I had there… I got a follow up email asking to FAX the form in signed ASAP so they could get it back to me. I think someone in management is out of touch, because not that many comic creators have fax machines these days. It almost sounded to me like if there was a contest and you needed to send in videos, they’d ask for VHS. That’s neither here nor there. I mean… you’d think Wowio would say, get us a signed PDF file… right? Maybe they don’t know how to sign it and send it back? Who knows….

Anyways, that’s why I’m bailing. Had it not been for Platinum being involved and buying them out, maybe I’d be able to trust the system a little bit more. I’d have more faith in Wowio too if they hadn’t actually, well, basically if you look at it, they PAID Platinum to buy them out with shares. That doesn’t sound like a company that was doing very well for itself, and they must not have had many more offers if they settled with Platinum, a company in the midst of a bunch of public money trouble. That’s not inside information, that’s public information that anyone can look up at the SEC.gov site.

Good luck to everyone.

Hey, the HULK cover I did for Marvel and Hero INitiative is up, go bid on it and check it out!

HULK 100 cover by D.J. Coffman

Well my wife has gone to the beach with her Dad and Grandmother and Stepmother, and I’m holding down the fort at home with the kids for a week here.  They’ve had it pretty tough this year with the death of their grandfather on that side of the family, so hopefully some time away to clear their minds and just “get out” and see other things will help them all cope in different ways. My wife especially, who lost both her grandmother on one side of the family, and her grandfather on the other this spring. I’ve spent the past couple years going to all kinds of places and cities and such and leaving her with the kids, so it’s only fair when this trip was offered to her, pretty much all expenses paid, I wanted her to take it for her.

Plus, now I’m thinking this could be an AWESOME brownie point to try to go to Dublin Ireland in September with the Flobots to catch them on their European tour! muhahahahaah.. (she’d kill me) - I so would want to go to Ireland though and look up old family haunts there.

Odd that the very night she left, our youngest cat decided to go on a SPRAY fest of some kind… I was up until 2am cleaning things and searching for where he pissed, like a damn hound dog sniffing around. Meanwhile, my actual hound dog was of no help at all, just snoring and farting over in a corner. THANKS, DOG! — I got so peeved, I just put the cat out on the porch with food and water. He’s pretty much afraid to leave the general area of the porch so I didn’t reckon he’d run away. I tried getitng a hold of the vet to see if we could get him in before next monday for fixing, but I was told that he needs shots first and then you have to wait two more weeks before declaw and neutering. so… UGH…. I could just leave him outside, I felt too bad, so thanks to BOB for the idea of using the big dog crate we had as a little makeshift JAIL for the cat’s ass in the meantime. Hooked him up with litter and food and water, and it’s a MUCH bigger cage than what he’d get at the pound…. and much better than finding him as roadkill in front of my house too. Bob suggests I joke with my wife and tell her the opposite…. that I came home today and the cat was smashed all over the road and looks like he was torn apart by Apaches…. I meant helicopters, but Bob said it was funnier if I meant angry Apache Indians. I’m going to tell my wife that i pulled in with the kids to find the slaughterfest all over the road, and that the kids were crying and howling… then I’ll spring it on her. I don’t want to ruin her whole trip thinking there’s a dead cat painting our roadway. So for now… my basement is… CAT PRISON!

The Will Draw Anything Day was going good yesterday. I put a good dent in the orders, but then the Dr. Horrible pic I did ended up as a link on Whedonesque.com and a bunch more orders came in and erased the progress I made. I’m not complaining though, the more the merrier, I just hope people are cool with waiting during these busy periods. Hey, it’s only 2 bucks. I actually have some people paying me more than 2 bucks, saying they feel bad for only paying 2 bucks, which I appreciate, but it’s no necessary. Those Whedon fans are pretty nice people. I also got a job offer from a TV type blog to do something there, but I’ll have to think about it because I’m pretty busy right now with the FLO right now and other things.

I’ve already noticed that I’m WAY more comfortable doing penciling directly on the Cintiq now, and that’s going to save me time in the future here. I use to do pencils on paper and then scan, and then do inking and coloring on the screen– but it was just a matter of being faster and more comfortable with the tools on paper.  I’m working on the FIRST flobot installment done completely on the screen today, and should be posting that later tonight at Flobots.net, and then I’ll be getting back to more Will Draws as well. If it weren’t for the cat problem late last night, I probably would have been in the #90s by morning, but such is life!

Oh, today is also the first day of football practice for the kids too. Will have that all week to contend with in the evening, but it’s fun to get out and watch them play and have fun. So much of my working life has revolved around the net for the past 8 years… sometimes I’m tempted to just pull the plug and take a year off of online blogging and networking or posting in forums and that… just sort of do the basic things.. update the art, do my work and just go radio silent for a year. No drama, no headlines, no opinions from me… just good comics. I don’t know if I could ever “unplug” now though… the system…. has me….

It’s Sunday. A day of rest? HELLZ NO! It’s time to DRAW ANYTHING.

I’m going to try to get a WHOLE bunch of these done all day today and my goal is to get caught up. Right now there’s about 50 or so sitting in the waiting list… LET’S DO THEM!