THC Finished! Also, on the virtues of selling out...

I'm proud to announce that The Human Cannonball #1 is just finished, and will be coming out...when I get some money. Seriously, there is no money available to print this thing. I need to set up a PayPal account and start begging.

But who cares! It's done! Pop the cork on the Champagne-in-a-box, and let's party.

I'm thinking of taking THC and offering it to Image or Dark Horse or one of those other comic book publishers, because frankly, I'm sick and tired of having no distribution or marketing. 'Tis true, I do like the whole local-hero DIY aspect of Blind Alley Comics (I'm already halfway to becoming Harvey Pekar...on the inside). But when it comes down to it, who are we kidding? Blind Alley Comics has no budget for marketing, distribution, and (often) printing our comics. Even if we managed to sell a comic to all the people we know, we still wouldn't make enough to finance a production level of any appreciable scale.

With that in mind, I'm going to put together a packet and send it out to several Indie publishers. As far as I know, Image and Darkhorse take independent comics and act as publishers and distributors; as long as you get your work done on time, they do all the grunt work. Here I am counting on what little information I have. To be honest, I'm in the dark here, and more than a little bit nervous, but excited, too. It will be a real learning experience. I'm not thinking of this as my "Big Break" or anything; that's a dangerous line of thought. This is just part of the hard, regular work I have to do in order to make the aspirations of Blind Alley Comics a reality.

If all goes as planned, I'll have sent out THC #1 to at least one comics publisher by my next blog post. Let the great fishing expedition begin...

Rick Out.

Comments

The Problem with Reconstructing Deinonychus

So as you may know, I am partly obsessed with dinosaurs. Scratch that - there's a small lobe of my brain devoted to dinosaurs. I love em, God help me. I even have a super-double-plus-top-secret dinosaur comic maybe in the works...but you didn't hear it from me. Anywho... Part of my problem is in the reconstruction of said prehistoric beasties, namely those icons of American dino-obsession, Deinonychus ( Velociraptor to you Jurassic Park aficionados...it's not just a Hollywood bastardization, there's a complicated story behind it which I covered in this old post ). Now, we all know what Deinonychus looked like: wolf-size, sleek, toothsome head balanced by a long tail, grasping front claws and of course the eponymous "terrible claw" on its hind foot. The shape is burned into our collective unconscious; you could construct the most fantastic amalgam of different bits and pieces, but as long as you include the sickle-claw, you're golden. The devil, of

Artist Spotlight: Tom Eaton

I wanted to do a quick artist spotlight on Tom Eaton, best known for his work in Boy's Life Magazine. I used to have a subscription to Boy's Life when I was a kid; unfortunately I didn't keep any of them, as they just weren't...I don't know, not really worth keeping. I just remember it as being 90% toy advertisements, some "how to get along with others" advice, the same camping article reprinted 20 million times, and some half-funny comics. As the years went on, the advertisements got bigger and louder, the articles became less interesting, and the comics section got shorter and shorter. But there was one gem hidden in the midst of the mediocrity: artist Tom Eaton. He wrote and illustrated "The Wacky Adventures of Pedro" ( BL's burro mascot), "Dink & Duff", and myriad other comics, crossword puzzles, games, and short pieces. He was the magazine's resident cartoonist, and about the only reason I actually read the magazi

The Horrendous Space Kablooie!

Sorry, Bill Watterson, but I just couldn't resist using this one...all hail Calvin and Hobbes! This comic illustrates a point that confronts us when we attempt to speak about the titanic phenomena occurring in the universe every day. We can speak of a supernova exploding "with the force of x megaton bombs", or a star that "could hold a million of our suns"...but ultimately all this is meaningless. When the standard unit of interstellar measurement, the light year, is about 8.7 x 10¹² miles, human language (and thus, comprehension) just sort of...blanks out. Here's a lovely example: I'm currently watching a JINA-CEE video about novas in parasitic binary star systems . Essentially, a small, dense star (such as a neutron star) will form an orbital relationship with a larger, less-dense giant. The denser of the two will start vacuuming material off its host, adding to its mass; however, because of its size, it compresses the material into its "

The Penguin

Search This Blog