Monday, April 7th we launch our new comic, THE GOD CHILD over at Keenspot.com. Head over there if you’d like to know a little more about it. Behind the scenes I’ve been creating this series with writer Ally Monroe since January under our newly formed banner, FLAMMABLE SOLID STUDIO. There’s also a site for that endeavor, but pretty much all roads lead to God Child.
We had shown the pitch packet around to a few publishers and all showed interest. But in the end, after weeks of deliberation, we decided to go it alone for now. We may seek an interested publisher to print the bigger tradepaperback collections. Really a lot of the sticking points for us were the “small print” in many contracts that could get us stuck somewhere or have a creation locked up. Even a “creator owned” one could be technically locked in with many pubishers “in perpetuity”. I’ll never sign another contract with that in it. Been there. Got the t-shirt. (No, seriously, we all did get t-shirts)
So how will we raise money if we’re giving away the comics for free??? Well this time around we are going to use a great service called PATREON, which is crowdfunding site for artists and creators. Sort of like an ongoing Kickstarter. It allows fans of our work to become “patrons” where you can give $1 a month, or more. In return we offer some cool rewards and bring you behind the scenes at Flammable Solid. We even came up with a fun “Mystery merch club” where you get a new piece of Flammable Solid merch every month, t-shirts etc. We really want to get as transparent as we can in showing the fans how we make comics and the fun we have behind the scenes. The more fans who get behind us, the more things we can do like going to conventions, printing books and possibly even launch more titles with new creative teams where they would be paid for their work and retain ownership or a nice royalty on things they work on that they didn’t create. (yeah that’s far off but the big picture in my mind) It’s possible though if readers get behind us and like what we are putting out. We even got in so early I was able secure the personal user name “comics” so our link is http://patreon.com/comics – Go check out the rewards and intro video
Speaking of which…. I can’t say enough how proud I am of what we’ve done so far. Not that it’s the best story or art ever created (far from it) but I’m just having so much fun fleshing out this new world of characters AND being able to do it with somebody I love makes it even more special to me. I can’t wait for the world to see it. That said…. it’s a big departure from my previous works. It’s not all-ages. It’s dark. It has some humor thrown in, but deals with touchy subjects. We didn’t hold back. I’m proud of some moments where the art and expressions really tell the story so well. While I’m not the best artist out there, and I’m shaking off some rust, it just feels really good to NAIL a page or two and think…. did I draw that?
Mark your calendars, The God Child starts on Monday, April 7th 2014 at http://godchild.keenspot.com