Category: Writer’s Blog

An old saying goes, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I may have brought it up before. It keeps echoing back in my head any time I attend a panel on writing or comics, or these days am on such a panel. Or heck, even when someone comes by our table at a convention and asks for advice.

Now I’m not sure that I feel like a king any more now than I did several years ago, but I’ve begun to consider that the realm of fiction is, was, and continues to be one big land of the blind where even the experts would be lucky to have a single functioning eye. Ask thirty writers what makes good writing and more often than not you’ll get thirty different answers… sometimes very close, sometimes wildly different, but none of them 100% the same. Ask the same thirty writers ten years later what makes good writing, and they may not even have the same answers their younger selves gave. I don’t even have to be speculative there, Alan Moore published a guide in 1985 that not a decade later he was considering the worst sort of uninformed tripe. That’ll make you question whether their vision is any better now than it was then, right?

Is commercial success the way to tell who should be dictating good from bad? Only if you consider Fifty Shades of Grey the best novel ever published in the English language, and E.L. James the pinnacle of the writing craft. Personally, I like to believe there’s more to it than that.

What about critical acclaim? Well, ask thirty critics whether a given writer is “good” and chances are at least one of them may be completely ambivalent, if not actively hostile. There’s just no security in fiction, no infinitely repeatable formula the way a chemist can be certain combing two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen gets you a water molecule. There are just artists groping their way forwards the best they can, hopefully connecting with an audience groping back the other way, and if someone gropes something sensitive you just have to pray that will be an ultimately rewarding experience.

Does all this mean I see no point in giving or receiving advice on writing? No. Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be part of panels or writing these blogs. It’s a conundrum that seems as contradictory as the advice sometimes is, and like I said I do keep musing on the land of the blind and whether the only partially blind make for good leaders or are just stumbling themselves and their followers towards the pits of related Biblical proverb.

I think what I keep coming back to is another old saying: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I like finding out about, and passing on, certain observations of form and function regarding the art. Here’s what this guy does. Here’s what this girl does. Here’s what I do. Check out all these tools and inspirations. Come on down to the stream of my thoughts, and drink as deeply as you want. Or, having had a look at what I showed you, trot away to find something more palatable to your thirst.

I can’t guarantee, after all, that the water is pure and good — maybe I might just have a higher tolerance for dysentery than you do.

I’ll admit, physically Dawn and I have been feeling cruddy for the last few days. It’s like we’re getting the “con crud” ahead of the convention this time instead of after it. Still, I can reach over now and hold in my hands the 200-page published trade paperback collection of our comic book. I can do a search for Zombie Ranch on Amazon.com and bam! There we are. This weekend as we sit down behind our table at the seventh annual Long Beach Comic Con, we’re going to have the books for sale to Ye Publick for the first time.

That’s all kind of amazing to think about. Sometimes we joke about how the comic is our “child”, and if I ran with our comparison we could think of our debut online and at the 1st LBCC in 2009 as the occasion of its birth.

This, then, would be like seeing that kid graduate college. I mean, if our kid were graduating college at Age 6, which is one of the ways the metaphor falls apart. The sense of pride (and time and money and effort spent) is undeniable, though, even if it’s not really comparable. I really feel like we’ve reached a positive milestone, and that’s a great feeling to have.

Of course, as many college graduates find out, graduation doesn’t guarantee victory in life. Even as we reach further, Dawn and I try to be very careful with our expectations and not get too heady with any idea of success. I expect that this weekend’s debut of the trade will sell maybe 5 copies at most to people we don’t know. I am ready and willing to be proven wrong, but if we sell absolutely none at all beyond fulfilling Kickstarter backers and friends who missed out on the Kickstarter for whatever reason, I am prepared for that. Pride in achievement is a very subjective thing, and if I wanted to get back to the parent thing, well, mom is far more likely to pin their kindergartner’s first drawing to the family fridge than The New Yorker is to feature it in their magazine. Unless maybe mom runs The New Yorker. Mine, while a lovely and very capable woman, does not. On the other hand, I still like to think this product came together well enough that I can unashamedly ask thirty dollars for it.

It’s entirely possible that not too many people out there will agree, which is understandable, especially if they don’t know us or our work. But for now I want the “kid” to know that its parents, at least, are proud and glad to know it’s here.

This modern age of ours has seen the dream of self-publishing become a plausible reality for more people than ever before. What’s been an interesting process for me this year is the discovery that “self-publishing” can represent offerings on several different levels, with varying degrees of complexity.

Well, okay, using the word discovery would imply I was blindsided, and that’s not true. I knew that the process of putting together a trade paperback collection was going to be more complicated than our previous runs of individual issues, which in turn were more complicated than printing books at home or uploading images as a webcomic. I’m very glad we didn’t start out trying to do a big graphic novel and instead opted for a slow escalation of offerings. Right now you can click back to our first episode and see that–although I’ve been gratifyingly told by many people that they didn’t and don’t mind–the lettering is a bit of a train wreck. We didn’t even settle on a unified font for our dialogue until we were already several pages in, and there are probably people out there who took one look at that and left grumbling at another product of rank amateurs shitting up the Internet.

Thankfully there were enough people who didn’t leave that we felt encouraged to keep going, and keep learning, until finally we reached 2015. The Year of Our Kickstarter. And because that Kickstarter succeeded, it is the year of Zombie Ranch: A Tale of a Weird New West, Volume 1. We are published.

But we were published before, weren’t we? Technically speaking, every time we update this website with a comic, we’re considered to be publishing it and a de facto copyright is established. Every print issue we’ve put out, even the cheapo preview comics we made for Long Beach Comic-Con 2009, represented a publication and establishment of a copyright as our particular expression of ideas and concepts were committed to “fixed form”.

All of this is true, and yet there is a whole new layer of complexity that you can dive into once you’re trying to move on to what marketers love to term “the next level”. One thing we never had on any of our home printed or print-on-demand issues, for example, was an ISBN: The International Standard Book Number. This is that number and accompanying bar code you see on books (including comic books) being sold at stores or, say, on Amazon. In the U.S. they are sold and issued by exactly one company–Bowker–and though they used to be much cheaper, the modern age of self-publishing has ballooned the price considerably, starting at $125 for a single number. You can print a comic up yourself or have someone print it for you, but without an ISBN it exists outside of the usual distribution channels and might in some eyes be said to not exist at all.

Urf, I need to back up a bit. I think this post might end up even more disjointed than my usual blathering, but… so… we’re published and available, right now, on Amazon.com, by virtue of having finally gotten our book approved by Create Space. To be entirely honest, that “publication” happened on August 15th, but we haven’t been trumpeting that to the heavens just yet because there were other things happening, like our Kickstarter printing run (not through Create Space) which I sent the final files off for on August 8th. That run hasn’t finished yet, but we just recently got a small early order that I could use to, among other things, mail copies off to Washington, D.C. for a formal copyright registration above and beyond the de facto one — also a first for us. I applied and paid for that registration electronically on August 22nd, but the copyright office does not count that until it receives all necessary materials. Said materials should have been received by them as of Monday, but their dang system has been offline since the weekend so I can’t verify that yet. It probably doesn’t matter all that much considering I won’t even get the certificate back for several months.

Confused yet? Yeah, riddle me this. Was the Zombie Ranch TPB published on August 8th? August 15th? August 22nd? August 31st? None of the above? Hell, I purchased the ISBN way back in June, but all that does is reserve a number until I populated it with publication information, which I couldn’t finalize until the book was actually ready for print. And then, hey, it takes a few days before the information you enter is accessible on a database search.

Professional publishing houses probably have the kinks of all this worked out, but then again maybe now I know why most copyright notices in books only list a year.

Anyhow, in the end it’s all worked out. I think. We should soon have the Zombie Ranch trade registered and duly ensconced in the hallowed archives of the Library of Congress, which is kind of cool to think about. We have a searchable ISBN, and international distribution on Amazon even if and when our Kickstarter print run runs out. Makes me feel like a real boy, you know?

I also mailed off a copy of the trade to the Small Press application jury for San Diego Comic-Con next year. We’ll see if they agree.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talked about the concept of “closure” in relation to comics reading, which is more or less the idea of the audience filling in the blanks (or gutters) between drawn panels in order to complete the action. It reminds me of when I dabbled in doing simple Flash animations way back in the day where you’d draw a ball hanging in mid-air, then draw it partially squashed on the ground a little ways away, and then rounded in the air again a little further than that, and then you’d use a function to tell the program to make a bunch of the in-between pictures in order to complete the animation of the ball bouncing.

Comics leave the bouncing of the ball to your mind, and in a sense it’s the job of the writer/artist to program you properly so that you fill the in-betweens in a meaningful fashion. Related to this is the idea of allowing the spaces to exist, such as Sara Ryan discusses in her post on getting a robot to make a sandwich and how that applies to comics writing.

If you haven’t ever heard of the robot making a sandwich thing (and don’t want to check out her blog), the gist is an old thinkpiece where you’re supposed to instruct a robot to make you a sandwich. This robot has no AI to speak of and no knowledge other than that you provide to it, so the command “Make me a sandwich” is not going to work. Even going step-by-step through the whole process, people tend to omit certain things they take for granted, like how you would spread mayonnaise with the knife. Also did you tell it what type of knife, and where the knife is, and which end of the knife to use? As you’re probably getting the idea, the situation is a teaching tool for beginning programmers and the like on how you need to list out all necessary steps for an operation to run correctly and not assume anything is just “common knowledge” or “common sense”.

Now in her blog Ryan is using this to bring up the pitfall of newbie comics writers trying to show more than one action in the same panel. Your artist will understandably want to throttle you if your panel description were to say “Bill gets a knife out of the drawer, dips it in the mayonnaise and begins spreading it on his sandwich”.  Similarly she talks about the pitfall of having a character display two wildly different emotions in the same panel, although that’s a case where we have deliberately cheated in the past, to what I think is fun effect. It’s good to know the rules, but following them all the time without exception can get pretty boring.

Anyhow, I don’t intend to retread her ground, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that humans aren’t robots and the successful comics creator is going to take full advantage of not having to show and explain every little step. Instead, it’s all about picking out the most important moment from an imagined series of them. I seem to recall McCloud using the example of someone getting into a car, and offering up several possibilities of showing them approaching the car, getting out their keys, opening the lock, opening the door, etc. etc. until they finally drive away. Even in a motion picture this sequence has the potential to be excrucriatingly irrelevant to the story, but McCloud aptly displays the insane waste of space it becomes in comics form (unless your story is all about mundane minutiae, I suppose).

So assuming the panel needs to be there at all, which moment is most important to the story? If the person forgot or lost their keys, the artist might best be served capturing them at the moment they are standing at the car door, fumbling in their pocket or purse. If it’s all about transition between areas, capture them as they’re climbing behind the wheel. The audience will fill in the rest, but they’ll have that “snapshot” to mold their perceptions around.

And for that matter, consider the matter of dialogue. If you took a comics image as a literal representation of life, people would be holding the same facial expressions and body poses for entire lengthy speeches. In the last panel of this page, Chuck is not leaned in towards the camera, frozen in place, for the all those words. How would he even enunciate properly without moving his mouth? The sandwich robot would not understand this, but a person hears Chuck’s voice in their head and imagines his mouth moving and his eyebrows waggling conspiratorially. What’s more, that little miracle happens without us even much thinking about it. We’re just wired that way, the same way we see people as excited and happy when we tell them we have a present for them rather than what they happen to look like in a freeze frame of that reaction.

Oh, the perils of the pause button. I mean, this is technically a legitimate moment of their reaction, something that literally happens and is gone again in the blink of an eye — but in a comic you’d be well advised to stay away from choosing it unless you want the audience molding their closure around “Holy crap is she stoned?”

You can’t and shouldn’t show the entire making of the sandwich. But choose wisely.

Last week I blew off steam ranting about some of the behind-the-scenes work involved in getting a webcomic from digital to print, particularly in terms of how different printers have their different requirements. But although I love to wallow in words, some of you out there are probably more visual learners (my wife would be one of those, naturally). So let’s use this time together to showcase one of the pages that had to go through the most tweaking during the process. On this site the original exists as page 10 if you’d like to reference that. The first thing I did when we hit our Kickstarter goal was a pass through to update the lettering, like so (click to enlarge):

Now, for whatever reason lost to the mists of time, this particular page had a physical printing size that was slightly over 7 inches by 10 inches at its 300 DPI base resolution. Our intended size for the trade paperback was 6.75 x 10.25, which meant that as is the image was a bit shorter and wider than needed.

But “as is” is a rarity, because now we got the specifications from our Kickstarter printer, and he wanted a quarter inch of bleed all the way around, with the “safe area” a quarter inch in from that. That meant we had to extend our canvas to 7.25 x 10.75, which left empty space unless we resized the art.

The white border is an addition so you can see the edges more clearly, and red and green lines have been added by me so you can see where the trim and safe areas are. The goal is to get all your most important “live elements”, like text, in the safe area or very close to. Meanwhile anything outside the red lines is getting cut, which meant the art in the last panel should extend to the end of the page, or at worst there would be a very small black line, which I was okay with and told our printer so, and he was willing to work with that. Awesome. But we’ll come back to this later.

You’ll also notice another pass on some of the page features, like ditching the “blur” on the zombie shriek which I didn’t feel would look good in print, and altering the balloon stem for “OORH?” to be a more organic curve.

This page also represents a revision done after figuring out how much space we should allow for a central “gutter” in a 200 page book, since we’d never done a project like this before. So when we got our first proof back we decided that we would see about adjusting the pages to give another quarter inch of space on the interior sides. This page being a left-hand page, that meant moving things in on the right, though that wasn’t as big a change here as it was for some others. All good. The above was the final approved file sent off in the packet, and by design is off-center compared to what you’d see in the digital PDF.

But since we also were having an eye out towards future distribution (not to mention getting a discount on our ISBN purchase), I then took the exact same packet and uploaded it to Create Space. Actually no, that’s not quite accurate. First I had to tweak the canvas of 196 interior pages to fit Create Space’s guidelines, where the bleed trim was 0.125″ on the outer edges. The safe area was still a quarter inch in from that, and the interior just needed a straight up half inch, so it was pretty close to what I already had. A little bit of trimming, and off went the file! And it got rejected. Not enough bleed. Not enough margin.

Okay, fine, I admit I’d been a bit laissez-faire in my first pass, so I went back and tried to shift the pages to fit their template as best as I could. And was rejected again. This was the point I called them up and tried to just see if I could do some sort of “I know what I’m doing” override. No dice. But the lady I talked to did at least clue me in to the fact that if Create Space sees so much as a sliver of black or white as a border in the trim area, they reject the page (and thus the file). Which means if you have any pages such as this one where art goes to the edge, you’ve got trouble, especially if it wasn’t designed to go the edge on all sides. I may have been able to tell our independent printer that a bit of white or black ending up on the edges was fine, but now I was dealing with an impersonal monolith, with Policies and Procedures and Requirements. Full stop.

So this became a serious pickle of a page. Enlarging the art would be the easiest solution, but getting it big enough so that the bottom reached the page edge could lead to a rejection for text being outside the safe area (for all I knew they included sound effects in their definition of “text”). I could cheat and just resize it a little bit to cover the sides and then move it down since the black on top was easy to extend, but that ended up looking weird and imbalanced.

In the end I decided to shrink the page down so that everything fit within Create Space’s safe margins, and centered the image as best I could.

The good news is this sort of decision was a rarity, and about as crazy as it got in terms of having to reformat the content — so I’m still confident the Create Space version should represent the story to great satisfaction. But yeah, there’s a visual illustration of some of the pains in the keester I’ve been going through lo these past few months. If you decide to go down the same road in the future, be prepared!

“You will.”

No, I’m not Batman. I’m just a man involved in self-publishing, in the final stages of creating a 200 page trade paperback edition of Zombie Ranch after our successful Kickstarter, and man oh man am I sick of bleeding right now.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about — first off, I am not in danger of imminent exsanguination. Secondly, I am envious of your ignorance. Thirdly, let me explain, since if you plan to self-publish your comic using any method other than your own home printer, then sooner or later you are going to deal with this.

See, even if your pages are already friendly to, say, the standard comic book dimensions of 6.625 inches wide by 10.25 inches tall (and don’t ask me how those weird numbers ended up being the standard considering it’s a nice round 16.83 x 26.04 cm in metric terms), you can’t just slap your webcomic into a PDF of that size and send it off to Lulu or whatnot.

It’s bleed time. Here’s the wiki article if you want, but simply put, bleed is extra space you’re adding around the “canvas” of your comic above and beyond that 6.625 x 10.25, because part of the printing process is chopping a certain amount off the edges.

But wait, there’s more! Different printers require different bleeds, you see, so the files you formatted when you were printing individual issues with Company X are now going to need adjustment before printing the trade collection with Company Y. For that matter, if you then go to Company Z to print the second edition of that trade, you may very well once again have to meet their particular bleed requirements. You might even run into a situation where Company X got new printing equipment since the year before, so the same company now needs reformatted files.

This is why it’s really, really crucial to have a folder full of your originals at 300 DPI resolution, whether scanned or digitally created. Some printers might let you get away with just making your canvas a little bigger and adding say, a black border around your art. Others will reject you if there’s so much as a smidge of that kind of thing, because even if you don’t care if a bit of black might show up in the final printing due to machine inaccuracies, they won’t allow it. You either need to shrink your art down so that there’s a big enough border to meet their interior margin requirements, or blow up your art so that it extends to the edges of the new dimensions on all sides. This is also why it’s helpful in our case that the originals for our files are multi-layered Photoshop creations where, for instance, we can resize or reposition certain elements like word balloons and text if necessary. Otherwise sometimes you get situations where you need to make your art bigger to fill the bleed, but now some important parts are outside the safe areas and might cause your printer to balk all over again.

Oh yeah, there’s also safe areas to be cognizant of. I’ve become distressingly intimate with the guideline functions of Photoshop in the last few months just to keep all this straight. Some pages are easy. Some are torturous. Some, Dawn actually had to go back and draw extended art for in order to for the proportions to remain correct during resizing.

Now I do want to say that our Kickstarter printer, a small operation I can talk to readily and who understands our needs and wants, has been a joy to work with. But we’re also trying to get distribution through Amazon Create Space, who are both extremely picky and extremely unwilling to accommodate any deviations from their templates, and there is nothing more fun than combing back through 196 interior pages in order to nudge them a fraction of an inch to the left or right, then resubmitting only to have the bundle rejected again. I’m still going back and forth with them, even as our primary printer is already greenlit for the final run.

But I digress. This is just more or less the agonizing necessities of the business, and I guess bleed is there to join with our sweat and tears. Plus it could always be worse — we have our high-res, layered originals, they’re mostly proportioned well for standard print sizes… and most of all I’m really, really glad that I don’t have to deal with a two-page splash.

You know, Anton Chekhov actually considered some of his plays comedies, which is something to this day is hard for me to wrap my brain around. I’ve actually been in a production of The Seagull, the “comedy” where the rifle introduced in the second act is the same one the main character shoots himself with in the third. And speaking of Chekhov’s guns…

Last week I touched on the very inexact (yet crucial) goal of having character actions and, especially, reactions, fit the situations they face in a way that reinforces their identities for the audience. Now one thing I didn’t bring up is that one of the easiest ways to create comedy is subverting expectations along such lines; for instance, the character of Chumley the troll in Robert Aspirin’s Myth Adventures series seems stereotypically large, mean, and ugly, until he privately reveals it’s all an act and he’s really a quite cultured chap who enjoys nothing more than a good read and a spot of tea. Even in a more dramatic story it’s not a sin to throw in a surprise here and there, because people really are surprising creatures. How many times have you given, received, or witnessed an exclamation of, “I didn’t know you could do/liked to do that!”? Comedic writing plays such revelations out for laughs, though the really stellar examples don’t just use it for a single joke but will actually incorporate it into the character after the initial shock, to where later on it seems only natural.

Put more simply, the macho (American) football linebacker who is discovered to be moonlighting as a ballet dancer is an unexpected twist. Okay, arguably that’s an old one that’s played out by now, especially since there really are macho football players who do ballet. But bear with me, because despite all the good points brought up about the benefits of ballet, showing a bunch of big burly guys wearing tutus with their football jerseys is obviously staged for the funny. And funny it is, at least in my view. Yet I find myself appreciating a comedy show like 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation which may seem like they’re just going for a cheap laugh, but then 15 episodes later may have that football player suddenly hold forth on the story behind Swan Lake and how it applies to the current crisis, reminding those of us who were paying attention that yes, he was established as having that background in ballet. It’s related to the concept of the Brick Joke, and it’s a strangely satisfying reward for loyalty even (or perhaps especially) in the midst of the absurd, because it also functions as a character moment.

Something to ponder, even if you’re not writing with humorous intent. A lot of the basic building blocks remain the same.

Sir Isaac Newton’s famous laws of motion dictate, amongst other observations, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is why rockets work as they do, burning fuel that is focused to “push” in one direction and by doing so propel it in the other. It’s why guns have recoil. There are other factors like mass and inertia that can alter the final result–such as a big gun with a low-powered bullet being much easier to control than say, the finger-busting buck of a derringer magnum–but in the end it’s all pretty much mathematical and predictable.

I’m not a mathematician or physicist, though, I’m a writer, and writers deal in the peculiar alchemy of human behavior. I use the term alchemy instead of, say, psychology, because I think by and large we’re operating on instinct and what “feels right” rather than any predictive formal models. Also I don’t have to throw my hat into the long-standing fray where some mathematicians and physicists will derisively refer to fields like psychology as “soft sciences“, or even argue they’re not scientific disciplines at all. I don’t have time for that argument, I have stories to tell; and while there are certain guidelines and expectations of what makes a good story, there is no infallible, repeatable equation for crafting one.

For one thing, human behavior tends to involve a lot of unequal actions and reactions. It’s one thing to predict than moving a 300 pound man will take more effort, all other things being equivalent, than moving a man weighing half of that. It’s quite another to predict how they’ll react as human beings to you pushing them. Given identical triplets of the same weight, one might try to ignore you shoving them, one might pointedly ask what you think you’re doing, and one might stab you in the eye with a knife. Which one of these reactions is equal to the action?

Crafting a good story and good characters depends a lot on figuring out an answer to that impossible question. Well, impossible from a scientific standpoint, anyhow. Writers can cheat to an extent, because we get access to both sides of the equation; we get to script both the action and reaction. The alchemical magic comes, I think, in making it have the appearance of some science behind it, or at least some reasoned thought. How would character A respond to a stranger intentionally shoving them? There are any number of answers to this question, but with that character as a starting point, the field of acceptable answers starts to narrow down, and by acceptable I more or less mean that the average audience member would see this play out and respond, “Well of course he stabbed that guy in the eye for shoving him; that’s what Franky does.” Conversely, Frank of Zombie Ranch is not going to stab a man just for shoving him. If he did, the average audience member would be justified in reacting with, “What the hell is going on?”. Unless I as the creator have a good explanation (which should at some point be shared since it flies so far outside the norm), I just screwed up my alchemy and took people out of my story. I showed the wires. I, in point of metaphorical fact, broke the spell.

So even though you might be playing with nothing truly scientific in the course of fiction writing, be wary: the ingredients and reagents of your trade are still both powerful and volatile. Handle ’em with care.

Oh, man. If you’re a webcomic author who has been cruising the social media in the last few days, chances are you’ve come across a volatile posting or reposting by a friend or someone in the business you follow warning of an impending apocalypse along the lines of “In three days Congress is going to flush your copyright down the toilet!”

The hubbub is over the Orphan Works Act. Which isn’t actually an Act. It’s not even close to being considered as an addendum or repeal of current copyright law, much less being a looming Armageddon requiring immediate and drastic action. Yet that didn’t stop some inflammatory posts from well-known people that fanned the flames of panic.

I understand. Creative artists tend to be busy people, and for that matter people who would rather be thinking about their stories and art projects than the complications of the business side, so when someone they trust (or who at least seems to know what they’re talking about) starts shouting that the sky is falling and it’s ALMOST TOO LATE, it’s far easier to take up the cry than take a breath and have a cautious look outside first.

As you might be getting, things weren’t quite as dire as first presented. You can read up at a couple links here, which also include links to the actual report from the U.S. copyright office and some of the hyperbolic posts and videos that started the whole mess.

http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/orphan-works-copyright-law-controversy-dont-panic/

http://graphicpolicy.com/2015/07/20/dont-believe-the-hyperbole-theres-no-orphan-works-law-before-congress/

I myself found it odd when the “news” first blared across my feed because not a week beforehand I had attended not just one but three different panels at San Diego Comic-Con discussing IP law,  and not one of the professional lawyers on those panels had brought up any impending catastrophic changes along the lines of an invalidation of copyright law As We Know It. You would think that would be important to them since a large part of their livelihoods kind of hinge on it. Not a peep, which is even more odd when you consider the proposal in question has been published since early June, making it unlikely they wouldn’t have heard of it by early July.

Well, yeah, for one thing it’s just a proposal with absolutely no legal weight to it. Brainstorming. Asking for commentary, good or ill. It’s like your buddy saying out loud, “Wouldn’t it be cool if they made grocery stores donate all their just expired food instead of throwing it out?” and then looking around at the rest of you to see if anyone wants to chime in on the idea.

Confusion might have arisen because the text of the report resembles earlier attempts at revisions to copyright law in the case of orphan works. Orphan works are basically those creative works where the author or other copyright holder(s) cannot be found, leading to a difficult decision for people or companies wanting to make use of them, especially in for-profit enterprises: go ahead, and risk an expensive lawsuit if and when the copyright holder turns up later on? Or forego the use entirely because of that risk? The revisions are trying to address this conundrum by limiting the liability of parties who make use of such an orphan after a “good faith”, reasonable search for the owner has turned up nothing.

Now, the sticking point here — if such a revision were ever to find itself actual law — would be defining what constitutes evidence of reasonable good faith, should the artist of Illustration X suddenly turn up after his 10 year self-exile to a desert island with evidence that he owns the copyright and he sues seeking damages for infringement. I’m not an expert, but a good portion of the text seems devoted to establishing things that ought to be done at minimum for good faith liability protection to apply, for example checking with the copyright office, searching online databases, etc. To run with the orphan analogy, the court wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) accept a defense of “Hey, I found this kid wandering the street by herself and I shouted for her parents but nobody came, so I took her home with me.” You’d need to show you checked with the police, etc. etc. Similarly, the stuff I’m reading as written is no carte blanche to ignore copyrights.

But again, it’s just in a brainstorming stage at this point. Is it good to keep abreast of changes in copyright doctrine and other legal issues as an independent publisher? Sure, absolutely. That’s why I went to those panels I mentioned. For example, if you want to talk dilution of copyrights, there’s already a situation out there that I don’t hear a lot of peers talking about, which goes by the moniker of “transformative doctrine“. According to a law professor at one of my Comic-Con legal panels, transformative use has become the number one defense in the majority of cases dealing with copyright infringement in the United States, probably because cases like this got decided in favor of the defendant. Or this one (first ruled for plaintiff, then defendant on appeal). Suddenly all that fan art being sold in Artist’s Alley might not be as cut-and-dried illegal after all, eh? I mean, that’s not even copying and pasting someone else’s photographs, touching them up a tad and selling them for thousands of dollars like Prince did.

In any case, what’s not so good is panic, and especially panic that stresses out a class of people (creative artists) who really don’t need any more stress in their lives. So deep breaths, folks. The orphanage isn’t on fire just yet.

If you’re unfamiliar with the folktale of “The Little Dutch Boy”, here’s a summary courtesy of the Encyclopedia Mythica:

Dutch legend has it that there was once a small boy who upon passing a dyke on his way to school noticed a slight leak as the sea trickled in through a small hole. Knowing that he would be in trouble if he were to be late for school, the boy pocked[sic] his finger into the hole and so stemmed the flow of water. Some time later a passerby saw him and went to get help. This came in the form of other men who were able to effect repairs on the dyke and seal up the leak.

According to the footnote this is not an actual Dutch legend, instead originating from 19th Century America. The moral? “This story is told to children to teach them that if they act quickly and in time, even they with their limited strength and resources can avert disasters.”

This story also long predates the Internet. This past week, San Diego Comic-Con happened, and there were a couple of bootleg recordings of exclusive trailer footage that leaked out onto the web, causing a small uproar of controversy as the studios involved expressed their “disappointment” at the breach of trust. Now, Comic-Con does make a point of asking people to please turn off all recording devices at the panels as per the wishes of these studios generously providing exclusive looks to Comic-Con attendees. The overhanging threat always stated is that the studios will stop bringing their footage to the show, and there were dark rumblings of just that from Warner and Fox in the wake of the leaks.

And really, I could have cared less, because I haven’t set foot near Hall H (where these bigtime presentations usually happen) in years. You could tell me Christina Hendricks is providing a personal lapdance to everyone who gets in and I’d still be weighing whether that was worth waiting in line for hours at a convention where there are a thousand other things to be doing. But I will say this: the studios, and tut-tut articles like the one that appeared on Wired, are thinking in terms of 19th Century fairy tales rather than the realities of the 21st Century. Displaying your footage in any kind of public setting of the size Comic-Con’s Hall H represents is not a dam you can police, sticking your fingers into any cracks that appear, there’s just too many cracks and not enough fingers. Are the people bootlegging these videos heroes? I wouldn’t go that far; but they exist, and every year high-quality recording devices get smaller and more unobtrusive, and there’s a lot of anonymity to be had in a darkened auditorium stuffed with 6,500 people. That video can be uploaded and shared a thousand times over before the panel even ends. A single boy might plug a leak, but now we’re talking a (sometimes literal) torrent.

I have heard that this sort of thing hurts because it breaks the marketing plans of studios or releases footage to the general public before it’s “ready”, but the Suicide Squad trailer looks awfully slick for something considered not ready for prime time. That trailer, by the way, now released officially by WB not a day after they swore they would never release it because the sacred covenant of Comic-Con had been breached. If your marketing isn’t taking the possibility of a leak into account, then you’re not paying attention to current events.

It’s 2015. You can’t stop it. Hell, we’ve had several cases where footage didn’t even need a massive public showing to end up ripped and spread all over the web, like the Batman v Superman trailer back in Spring. It’s gotten commonplace enough people accuse studios of doing it intentionally because the air of naughtiness helps it “go viral”. In a world like that, studios talking down at their audiences like disappointed parents doesn’t really help, does it? I find it especially ironic that Fox is upset about the Deadpool trailer leaking, when the Deadpool movie wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the test footage that leaked out last year.

“Will the person who leaked the Deadpool test footage please stand up? Ryan Reynolds really wants to kiss you. “And not just a little kiss,” he purrs. “But full on the mouth, sloppy, with tongue, for two straight ­minutes on live television — without commercial interruption. And then I’ll buy you dinner at Red Lobster, at least, and dessert.””

Deadpool was, by all accounts, well, “dead” prior to that leak, after Fox execs balked at the same footage that energized fans all around the world when they got hold of it. They couldn’t see any way such a movie would work. We couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t already in our eyeballs, and the acclaim and demands that erupted were what enabled the green light.

But hey, if the studios want to pull the plug and stop showing exclusive videos in Hall H, or even pull out from Hall H altogether, that’s their decision. My own reaction as I posted on Facebook when the news was breaking? “I look forward to the bluff being called. If it’s not a bluff then I look forward to Hall H pulling back from the insanity it’s become.”

I’ve got no real dog (or Dutch Boy) in this fight, but I’ll be interested to see the outcome of the flooding.

So look, believe it or not, Dawn and I are not saints. We have had our instances of playing it loose with the rules when it comes to conventions; for example, some have it in their exhibitor rules that rolling any sort of cart through the lobby of the given convention center is prohibited, and after suffering through the slings and arrows of the loading dock a couple of times because of that, and once trying to arrange a three person system where two people stood on each side with handtrucks while the third awkwardly carried boxes and bins between, we were given the advice by veteran peers of, “You don’t have that much stuff, just do it”. So we do, and in practice no one seems to care. Security and staff in fact often hold the doors open for us, and sometimes there’s even a temporary path laid out in tape and cardboard, and we just put our heads down and we’re in and out in a handful of seconds with not so much as a scuff left on the carpets. I like to call it our “go until someone says ‘no'” policy, and thankfully it works because loading dock areas are a pain in the ass when you’re a smaller vendor.

Now you might ask, how can I justify this bending (if not outright breaking) of regulations, especially when I’ve gone ballistic in the past over others overstepping their bounds? It’s a matter of degrees. It’s a matter of who it harms, and how much narcissistic hubris is involved. Rolling a small cart of booth stuff through a convention lobby before it opens to the public arguably fits the Wiccan conceit of “An it harm none…”, perhaps even representing a boon since there’s one less car clogging up the loading area. Now, were we a bigger operation or were that convention lobby already packed with people, it would start to get more iffy. Now there’s a chance of (literally) stepping on (or rolling on) toes. Now we’ve got a whole work crew trekking lumber through the front doors and the union would justifiably be calling foul. That kind of thing happening is likely why the rule is on paper to begin with, because some asshole abused common sense and went beyond all bounds of empathy and reason.

Which is as good a segue as any to this week’s subject of controversy, one Arthur Suydam, best known as a cover artist for the short-lived Marvel Zombies series. It began with the Bleeding Cool site sniffing out trouble a-brewin’ on the Montreal Comic Con twitter feed.

You can read the full article by clicking here, but basically Suydam was accused by Jim Zub of taking it upon himself to “rearrange” the convention layout by gifting himself three adjoining tables to his own, removing the artists there in order to fit his display.

“He just shows up early, sets up his gargantuan booth and takes down the signage for the people next to him. No regard for anyone else…The shows don’t stop him so he just continues his ego-fueled awfulness year after year.”

I remember Arthur Suydam, I’ve seen him at the Long Beach cons with a similarly large set-up, but I guess like most everyone I assumed he’d negotiated for it. Maybe he did? But from the amount of people that started coming out of the woodwork with horror stories, it began to sound like Arthur Suydam, or at very least his operation, had a history of shady practices, making the statement issued by his publicist in response and laying the blame squarely on convention organizers seem disingenuous. In this case it wasn’t even unknowns that Suydam displaced but well-known artists like Francis Manapul, the man responsible for illustrating the Flash comic that I spent a whole blog gushing over a single page of. Had I gone by the convention program I would have ambled to Manapul’s assigned space only to find it taken over and Manapul nowhere in sight, since the convention’s solution was to give him another random table elsewhere on the floor. But it shouldn’t matter how big or small a name is being displaced under these circumstances; it just isn’t right.

Is it in Suydam’s contract that he always gets four tables, and if the convention fails to provide that the onus (and blame) is upon them? Again, the claims that this is repeated behavior are enough to make you question why–if it is clearly in his contract–these table grabs keep happening. Also there was this gem in the comments section of CBR’s report on the situation:

“I was contacted by Renee to book Arthur for our local comic con. Originally she said he requires 4 booths. I told her that was not possible. We negotiated it down to 2 booths on an end cap. I drew up a contract and had him sign it. He also agreed to do an exclusive piece of art for us to use for the events guide, flyers, and posters. A few weeks after getting the signed contract, Renee emailed and told me Alamo City Con booked him without his knowledge and had already purchased his airline tickets (I don’t believe a convention would buy tickets without confirming an artist’s attendance). She basically told me he felt obligated to go since they already put money out for him. It didn’t seem to matter to her/him that I had a signed contract with him. I had to scramble, but I ended up with a much better artist. I was gonna keep it to myself and chalk it up as just one of the problems of putting on a convention until I read about Arthur’s boorish behavior in Montreal. I think everyone should know his unprofessional actions aren’t reserved solely for fellow artists. His word/signature is worthless.”

“Renee” in this case refers to Renee Witterstaetter, Suydam’s publicist. Suydam has a posse, you see, and it’s their job to promote Arthur Suydam. They do it well. Perhaps too well, if this backlash is any indication, and yet I suppose they give him a sense of plausible deniability. You see, the thing I find most personally baffling about all of this hubbub is that in the course of it it came out that the publicity stills of signing lines that were being sent out to conventions to prove Suydam’s status as a “#1 draw in comics” were photoshopped to appear far bigger than they were. Exhibit A is already in the articles above, but here it is in case you didn’t click on those:

The response from Suydam’s posse on this was that “no photos have been doctored in any way, as can be attested to by anyone that has seen Arthur at any show. To suggest otherwise is rather laughable.”

Right? I can’t imagine ANY artist going so far as to photoshop their lines to appear like more of a big shot so they could get special treatment by conventions. I mean that would just, indeed, be both laughable and pathetic. Summarily occupying your neighbors’ tables is already pretty narcissistic, but that would just be beyond belief, particularly if you weren’t even smart enough to use your own private photos instead of public photos that someone could actually find and post–

Oh goddammit. God-freakin-dammit. What do you have to say about that, Art?

An interesting topic came up on a webcomic group the other day, which was all about fictional character names and how creators decide on them. The person who started the topic admitted that it was something that didn’t come easily to them, to the point where it could derail their writing while they sat and stewed for a half hour or more, without success, while the new person they’d just introduced remained frustratingly undesignated. How did the rest of us do it?

Well, I don’t know about the rest of us, but coming up with character names is rarely something I’ve had trouble with, at least where Zombie Ranch is concerned. I feel like it’s paradoxically harder and more complicated the further away you get from our own world, even if you’re just cramming random syllables together like Star Wars does. Fantasy genres will often steal actual names from semi-obscure, exotic-sounding languages, like various permutations of Gaelic, and you can probably blame Tolkien for starting that trend. Lovecraft sometimes pulled names for his Elder Gods from legends but otherwise just tended to go for stuff that sounded nasty, guttural, and primal (the proper pronunciation of “Cthulhu” is said to be unachievable by a human throat).

And that’s actually one of my main criteria — I tend to go for names that I feel have a touch of onomatopoeia to them, that give you an image of what the character is like before you even hear anything else about them. Darth Vader, for example, does not sound like someone you’d want looking after your kids. Likewise with Voldemort. Galadriel does not immediately bring to mind a stuffy accountant the way Irwin does. When these sorts of associations are subverted it’s usually for comic effect: “Irwin, slayer of men, master of the four horizons!”, or “Lucretia Darkmoon, V.P. of Finance”. Terry Pratchett was very fond of such discontinuities, when he wasn’t steadfastly playing it straight with descriptive names like “Mustrum Ridcully” and “Moist Von Lipwig”.

As an interesting bit of trivia, in my first script outline Susannah Zane was originally known by the arguably more pedestrian “Jodi Mills”. Dawn wrinkled her nose at that and wanted it changed, so I went back to the drawing board (well, writing board) to come up with something else. I am glad now I did for several reasons, not the least of which was the debut a year or two later of the tough, no-nonsense Sheriff Jody Mills as a semi-regular recurring character on the TV show Supernatural. But beyond that, Susannah Zane just had a certain flair to it more befitting a heroine of the Old West, or Weird New West as the case might be. Susannah was a name that for me evoked folk songs and prairies, and Zane, well — that had a deep connection to the genre all its own.

Plus the name just rolled off the tongue, even when shortened to the more practical “Suzie Zane”. I’m a great believer in having character names that roll off the tongue, that have a nice meter to them. One of my pet peeves with The Walking Dead was Kirkman’s decision to name his lead character “Rick Grimes”, which is a little torturous to grate out in full. Sure, such traffic accidents of names are the norm in real life, but I find them jarring in fiction. Maybe you disagree. Point is, it’s another bit I use to come up with names that I find satisfying, relatively quickly — “Indiana Jones” scans better and sounds far cooler than “Indiana Oliver”. And “Wild Will” Nguyen has his name because the pronunciation of Nguyen sounds a lot like “win” to English-speaking ears, thus serving both alliteration and ego.

Finally I mentioned before how Susannah Zane’s name contains references both subtle and not so subtle that I feel evocative of her character and the Western genre. That’s not limited to her, I’ll often peruse histories of the Old West looking for interesting names that might fit the bill for a character, which is easier than it sounds these days with the magic of Google. “McCarty” was the family name of Billy the Kid. The “Hays” in Frank Hays comes from a known Texas Ranger of the period. The Safe Zone media personality “Iphigenia Langhorne” is a combination of a Brisco County Jr. reference and the pre-marriage name of historical socialite Lady Astor. I’m not too proud to draw from more recent sources, either, such as Chuck’s middle name coming courtesy of a certain used car salesman whose wacky commercials I grew up watching.

Honestly with all the wealth of stuff churning away in my head or readily accessible with a quick keyword search, it’s hard for me not to come up with character names in a relatively short time. If I ever do have trouble, though, I’ll plug in a placeholder and keep writing, then come back and think it over later. It may even be better to do so once you’ve spent some time introducing the character to the story first, after you’ve gotten some more idea of how they behave in the “live” environment.

Maybe I’m not the best guy to speak on the subject since I seem to have comparatively little problem with it, but I hope some of the rambling above helps if you happen to be one of the folks that do.

What would you say is the most effective armor in fiction? Power armor? Magical barriers? Superman’s invulnerable skin?

Nah. It’s Plot Armor. The invisible, intangible protection awarded to characters and things that functions mainly by virtue of their importance to the story, rather than any particular logical reason within the story itself. Sometimes it makes sense that Indiana Jones survives a particular bit of danger. Sometimes you have to just not think about him getting dragged under a speeding truck and not showing so much as scuffmarks on his trousers as a result. You don’t think too hard about how he survives traveling from the coast of Africa to somewhere in Indonesia on the outside of a German submarine. He’s the hero. Heck, his name is in most of the movie titles (or all of them, now that Raiders of the Lost Ark is marketed as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark). Being the hero hath it’s privileges, including the occasional bout of invulnerability because the writer says so.

Now, although this comic is not titled Susannah Zane and the Zombie Ranch, I do recall a reader once mentioning that they never felt particularly roused by any scene putting our intrepid young ranch owner in danger, because she benefited from Plot Armor. As the main protagonist, she’d obviously pull through whatever perils were occurring, so there was nothing being killed in such scenes except time.

As a writer there’s not much to say in response to that, unless perhaps you’re a Joss Whedon or George R. R. Martin who takes a perverse delight in killing off characters the audience doesn’t expect will be killed. Oh, you don’t get concerned because obviously I won’t do anything to such a beloved or important member of my cast? We’ll see about THAT, buddy! Gonna shake your preconceptions of narrative arc and hero’s journeys right up!

Mind you, the “anyone can die” school brings its own set of problems, such as, for instance, Dawn having to abandon the Song of Ice and Fire books after the third or so as the characters she kept investing her care in kept meeting dire ends. Yes, the Red Wedding is a shocking scene, but at what cost? By the time we get to the end of the fifth book, the betrayal and murder of yet another major protagonist becomes almost an exercise in nihilism that had me wondering if there might be better stories to spend my time following. It didn’t help that much of A Dance With Dragons felt to me like GRRM was casting about randomly looking for directions to take his tale, as if the sacrifice of so many of his protagonists had left him as unanchored as his audience.

As noted above, the TV Tropes version of Plot Armor is specifically about a major character being able to survive things they really shouldn’t, but it’s more useful to me to discuss it as a wider definition. The idea that the invulnerability to death or lasting harm of a main protagonist somehow makes for boring or predictable fiction seems flawed, just based on observable evidence that the “anyone can die” type of story — outside of certain genres like horror — has always seemed to be more of the exception than the norm. That’s why Whedon and Martin can shock us, after all — by subverting the expectation. What was most interesting to me about the reader comment I mentioned is that it represents a valid viewpoint, but a viewpoint you really don’t hear expressed much. Most of us (myself included) seem to be just fine with biting our nails in suspense as Indy is running for his life through a series of deadly traps. I turn around and concoct scenes of my own putting Suzie in mortal peril and the comments section more often than not has at least one reader on the edge of their seat as they wait for the next installment. It doesn’t matter that we’re 99.99% sure they’ll make it out of the situation intact — as long as we have any care for the character in the first place, that remaining 0.01% is enough to grip our attention.

Perhaps it’s in a sense like the experience of a roller coaster. I don’t know the exact accident statistics on a well-maintained roller coaster. This site claims your chances of a fatal experience are 1 in 300 million, and regardless I would guess most people don’t go on roller coasters on the off chance that an accident happens. Instead they go to get an adrenalin rush thrill high of danger while remaining in a controlled and (mostly) safe environment. The plot armor surrounding a character could serve a similar function, allowing us to gasp and worry as Flash Gordon dangles over a cliff, but having the reassurance deep down that he’ll be fine. Does it take away the thrill of a roller coaster to know that it’s astronomically unlikely you won’t walk away from it when it’s over?

The “anyone can die” model seeks to emulate the randomness and senselessness that death and suffering in our real world all too often exhibit; and while its effects can be powerful gut punches delivered to an audience seeking the safe thrill high of following their heroes, there’s no denying that it can leave behind a certain feeling of being cheated once the shock wears off. On those occasions that heroes die, they’re expected to die in meaningful ways, ways befitting their elevated place in the narrative. Otherwise, it’s the roller coaster flying off the track, the violation of an unspoken standard contract between reader and author. Best to make sure the results are worth it, and it’s not just a cheap shock tactic to be followed by an ultimately hollow aftermath where both author and audience find themselves lost. Plot Armor for your protagonist(s) might be one of the oldest storytelling tricks in the book, but because of that very weight of centuries of tradition and audience satisfaction, it’s something to strip away only with the utmost of care.

The heading I chose here is perhaps more dramatic than this article warrants, but as an addendum to my Kickstarter posts I wanted to bring up something else that aspiring project creators out there may not be aware of. It was a bit of a surprise to me, although looking back, it really shouldn’t have been. There’s money at stake in these campaigns, not to mention people’s dreams; and whenever those two things intersect, you’re going to get a certain amount of shady activity.

My first taste was getting messages sent to me through Kickstarter’s messaging system within mere moments of launching the campaign, the kind of reaction time that all but screams “bot”. An example:

Hi, let me first of all wish you all the best with your campaign!

If you are looking for marketing support (at any stage) to help you to get more visibility, social media marketing, press release writing + press coverage, online ads and more, it will be our pleasure to discuss the opportunity.

Ps if you are interested in more information, make sure to include your e-mail address so we can get in touch directly. Happy to review the campaign and get you the necessary information to get started.

Slightly slower on the draw was this one sent after midnight, from a gentleman whose account is now marked as deleted. Fancy that.

Back in 2011 I wrote about how we as human beings are obsessed with stories about the way we End, i.e. apocalypses of various flavors, and particularly how those flavors have evolved over the decades in modern pop culture media as the nature of our fears shifted. I have a thought still in my mind that the most commercially successful, or at least unforgettable tales of apocalypse are the ones that resonate with the time period they are released in. In a sense the best ones even represent a snapshot of that time period in general, even if their particular subject matter seems on the surface to be outlandish and nothing you could really be expected to take seriously. Basic physics precludes the idea of ants becoming the size of school buses, but that didn’t stop THEM! from touching a nerve, because the THEY of THEM! was a result of atomic radiation. I believe that origin is very important. The giant ants would have seemed far more ridiculous to the audience of the time, for example, were they discovered to have been the product of a vengeful voodoo curse.

That’s a weird thing to state, but that’s the nature of science fiction and horror where you bend or break certain laws of reality as we know them, but if you don’t ground the story somehow it won’t elicit the appropriate visceral reaction from the audience. Tapping into the apocalyptic zeitgeist, by accident or design, can help with that. Just as a rough hypothesis, I think the post-WWII breakdown in the United States goes something like this:

1950s/1960s: Communism / Radiation / Space Invasion

1970s: Government Conspiracy / Street Crime

1980s: Nuclear War / Robots / Toxic Waste

1990s: Hackers / Genetic Engineering

2000s: Plague / Terrorism

Now I’m sure this could be picked apart. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) could be seen as at least as much of an anti-Communist parable as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was, but on the other hand fears of Communism arguably made a resurgence in the early to mid-80s, just as fears of an invasion from space (whether by aliens or asteroids) had a bit of a resurgence in the ’90s. A movie like Alien got in touch with more primal fears, though the conspiracy element of being betrayed by those in power was certainly there as well.

And where, you might ask, do zombies fit in? Well, they keep being reimagined, don’t you think? In Night of the Living Dead the implied culprit was a crashed (and irradiated!) space probe. Dawn of the Dead doesn’t really concern itself with causation, but the outlaw biker gang certainly ties into ’70s zeitgeist. Return of the Living Dead puts the blame squarely on toxic waste, while the Resident Evil games are on the balance between genetic engineering and plague, with the 2002 film missing the Y2K mark but still throwing in a wacked out computer on top of everything. Finally the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Days Later kick off our current zombie situation of plague combined with being struck quickly and without warning in your own backyard.

What’s next? Well, much as I hate to say it, I think The Day After Tomorrow was a film on the leading edge of the zeitgeist for the 2010’s. It might have still been a little early to really register, a fate which I don’t think there’s any argument for with Waterworld in the mid-90s. The U.S. economy was humming along in 1995, gas was 99 cents a gallon, and Waterworld looked completely ridiculous. By 2004 The Day After Tomorrow is a little bit more on people’s minds what with Al Gore banging the drum on climate change, but it still seems more laughable than anything.

Now it’s 2015. Last year, Snowpiercer was on a lot of minds. This year Mad Max: Fury Road won’t let go of people’s imaginations (including mine), a movie filmed several years ago but releasing to general audiences right on the heels of things like California’s “one year left” drought scare and the Nestlé chairman’s declaration that people don’t have a right to water. Both of these news items were quickly downplayed as misinterpretations, but the fact they took hold so quickly and spread so far is telling. I believe that whether we give voice to it or not, we are starting to get really, really concerned with what we might have done to the planet’s environment, and what the consequences are going to be. Call it the Droughtpocalypse or even just more generally a Climatepocalpyse, but this is now becoming our vision of The End. Where in the 80s Interstellar‘s crisis necessitating a new world would have been all about nukes, now it’s all about our crops dying off. The term “cli fi” has even been coined to specifically denote science fiction dealing with catastrophic climate change.

It’s a thing. And I’m postulating it will be the Next Big Thing, at least in terms of apocalypse fiction. Where will the zombies fit into that? I’m not quite sure yet, but they’ve proven a rather adaptable monster through all the previous eras. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, I’m sure they’ll (uh, uh) find a way…

A certain Princess of Alderaan once told her captors, “The more you tighten your grip… the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Then her home planet got blown up. But I digress. The point I perhaps want to get at here is that no matter how much you think you are prepared for your Kickstarter attempt, no matter how many successful or failed attempts you study, no matter how many peers who have been down the road before you that you query… you’re going to get surprised by some things.

For example, Kickstarter is very up front about the bite it’s going to take out of your funding if you reach your goal. No matter what, 5% of the money you raise is going to be shaved off the top as their cut for providing the platform, and in addition to that they indicate around an additional 3% to 5% will be collected for credit card processing fees. It wasn’t until towards the end of the campaign that I realized that elsewhere on their very site was a much more comprehensive breakdown.

It’s harder to find, and I suppose that’s not so weird when you consider that there are two variables that need to solidify into fixed totals, i.e. the number of pledges received and their individual amounts. You won’t know either of those for sure until the campaign is over, and even then you may not know for a while depending on how many collection issues there are.

Collection issues? Yes. What you may not realize and what your backers may not realize is that even though they make pledges and commit their credit card information, none of that is actually processed until the campaign is over. Kickstarter doesn’t check validity until that time, either, so for instance if you accidentally entered one of your old, expired credit cards on a pledge, it will seem to be accepted, only to bounce after the closing bell tolls. Same for if you were fine on your credit limit when you pledged on the first day, but a month later you don’t have enough room. In these cases the invalid pledges are flagged on the backer report and automated emails are supposedly sent out to the backers in question, who have a week to address whatever issue caused the bounce before Kickstarter discards the pledge. Be aware of this.

Also be aware that when Kickstarter warns that it may be up to 14 days after close of the campaign before funds are transferred to you, they mean it. In our case we had some invalid pledges but all of them got corrected before the 7 day deadline was up. It still took the full 14 days before Kickstarter released the money, which in fact was right to the minute on a Sunday evening, meaning it was most likely not the result of any person being involved. That’s a two week delay, plus whatever time it takes for your bank to verify the transfer, and I don’t remember reading any Kickstarter guides that mention this fact. If you’ve got some money or credit to work with you could start your purchases before that point, but there’s where it would really help to know exactly how much you’ll have to work with, right? Well, happily I can report that as soon as all pledges were verified I used that breakdown guide I linked above and the total I came up with was indeed what we ended up getting. Still, if you don’t have any extra money to spare, you should factor in those extra two weeks to any fulfillment that requires you to make purchase orders.

I remember prior to the campaign asking some peers who’d done Kickstarters how much I should be worried about declined pledges and factoring them into calculations, and they answered they hadn’t ever really had problems. This turned out to be the case for us as well, but it also turns out I had perhaps asked the wrong question. I should have asked about cancellations.

No one I talked to or looked up prior to the Kickstarter had anything to say about cancellations. Perhaps that was just a research failure on my part, since after the fact I managed to dig up some articles. As it was, I was unprepared for it to happen. It wasn’t the last minute, it wasn’t the result of a recent update, it wasn’t anything I could really figure out, but suddenly in the third week of the campaign, over the course of a few days about four separate people pulled their pledges. When they do so, you lose track of them, so unless you were in contact with them beforehand you no longer have a way to get in touch. That’s probably intentional on Kickstarter’s part to prevent people from being harassed, but it can leave you a tad fretful as a project runner. For this is the quirkiest bit: when a backer cancels a pledge they’re asked to give their reasons why, but those reasons are only sent to Kickstarter, never to the project runner — not even in a vague sense.

That means your backer could have spent entire paragraphs apologizing and stating their life reasons on why they had to cancel and that it’s nothing personal, and all you’ll ever know is that they left. And on their end, they might not be aware you never got to read why. You’ll also perhaps wonder, as I did, how many pullouts might be considered ‘normal’ for a project since you hadn’t heard anyone talking about it at all. The answer, if you’re curious, appears to be around 5%. We ended up with four cancellations during the course of the campaign, one of whom actually ended up renewing before it was over, so that was well within the margins. If you know what those margins are. One of the others later got in touch with me through the Zombie Ranch site to let me know he ended up with some unexpected financial issues. The other two, I’ll probably never know.

It’s just something that happens, so be prepared. Pledges can be freely made, canceled, altered up or down, or remade for most of the campaign, with one exception: if canceling your pledge would take the project below it’s minimum goal, it cannot be done in the last 24 hours of the campaign without contacting Kickstarter customer service to explain the special circumstances. Obviously that’s to prevent someone ruining the entire project’s funding by a last-minute pullout, which otherwise would potentially be a very effective dick move. Still, as far as I know there’s no such limits on if the pledge won’t kill the minimum goal, which means to keep in mind that any of your stretch goals are vulnerable.

It’s customary to mark off stretch goals as they’re reached in the course of the campaign, with much congratulations and thanks. It’s possible, however, that cancellations or invalid pledges after the fact could leave you without the money you actually needed to enact them. We had no last-minute cancellations, but at the end of the campaign we only met our stretch goal with $15 to spare, and then we ended up with those three invalid pledges I talked about earlier. Had all of those pledges been dropped, we would have lost enough money that we would have had to backtrack and announce that the stretch wasn’t met after all, which would have been both disappointing and embarrassing.

How can you account for that? Well, the scary thing is you really can’t. You won’t know how many cancellations you get until the campaign is over, and you won’t know how many pledges get dropped for payment issues until up to a week after. So I suppose you just have to have a certain measure of faith, or better yet a significant buffer in your calculations. When facing the unknown, it helps.

Okay, I know I promised myself I’d be making more posts about the Kickstarter experience while it’s still fresh in mind, but I feel this is more urgent. A public service message, even.

If you haven’t yet gotten out to a theater to see Mad Max: Fury Road, go. Go before you miss the opportunity.

I rarely feel the need to see movies on first release anymore, even big budget spectaculars. I’m old and don’t have a lot of disposable income, and can wait until a flick comes around on cable or Netflix or such and just watch at home. Even the thought of a new entry in the Mad Max pantheon, a franchise that is arguably one of the largest looming influences of all modern post-apocalyptic fiction, much less cinema, wasn’t enough to get my blood stirring overmuch. Even knowing it was being helmed and directed by its original overseer, George Miller, met with mixed feelings in my soul. I’d been hurt on that score before.

I remember still being dubious on watching a first trailer and hearing rumors of those twin demons bedeviling modern blockbusters: over-reliance on CGI and a PG-13 rating. It wasn’t until the second trailer released at the end of March that I began to dare to hope. Somewhere along the line as well, both the CGI and PG-13 rumors were dispelled. As a huge fan of the sort of grandiose, imaginative insanity George Miller injected into his earlier visits to Max’s world, I had already decided at that point I was in. Then the positive reviews began rolling in, and they haven’t stopped, even from sources you wouldn’t expect. I suppose one of the best ways to illustrate how widespread the appeal of the film is would be to direct you to the fact that this is a film receiving glowing, in-depth praise from both Chud.com and The New Yorker.

I am here to tell you it deserves every precious, precious drop of that praise. I am here to tell you that, even though between March 31st and my first viewing last week I consumed just about every piece of preview and behind-the-scenes footage I could get my hands on (and there was a lot), even though I devoured the early reviews, I still found myself shocked, surprised, and thrilled beyond my wildest expectations. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t stop thinking about it, talking about it, even analyzing it. Yes, analyzing a film where a mutant in a red onesie is bungee strapped to a giant truck made of speakers, shredding on a guitar which is also a flamethrower. This is what George Miller’s peculiar alchemy did to me back in the day, and this is what he’s done again. This is a movie that sears itself onto your ears and eyeballs, but also spikes deep into your brain, even if you may not realize it right away.

There is so much out there already about what an unexpectedly positive piece the film is in terms of its women characters, I won’t mention it again here, except to say that I’ve convinced my mild-mannered mom to go see it with me this Friday. I don’t know how she’ll react, honestly, but hey, at least one woman of her age has given a thumbs up. For an ‘R’ rated movie it’s actually quite tame, and I think it was more just for the convenience of George Miller not wanting an often clueless and frustratingly arbitrary MPAA board dictating to him what he could and couldn’t do.

My dad didn’t need any convincing, he just had to hear “car chase”… but honestly, it’s so much more than that, and that’s why I’m also in for a second go. Even twice won’t likely be enough, but it might at least tide me over until the Blu-Ray release.

If there’s any movie to gleefully throw money at in 2015, it’s this one. It delivers. If you find it didn’t deliver, see the previous sentence. Just see.

P.S. the flamethrower guitar in the movie is a real thing that works. So are every last one of the insane vehicles. What a lovely day.

Before diving into this week’s thoughts I wanted to follow up from last week and report that the second volume of Molly Danger did, indeed, fail to reach its funding goal. When all was said and done Jamal Igle was able to raise nearly $22000, a figure I can only dream of accomplishing, but it fell far short of the necessary $50000 for the project. Igle has posted his post-mortem where, just like I reported with Zoe of The Last Cowboy, he allows that his base goal turned out to be too ambitious. He plans to re-launch the project with a leaner, meaner campaign on June 1st.

Again, this is one big benefit of Kickstarter, so long as you have the gumption to face it: if you fail, no money changes hands and you can just try again. If Igle had instead done this campaign on Indiegogo, he would have gotten that $22000 (minus whatever cut Indiegogo takes), but that’s less than half of his minimum estimate, and then he’s got backers expecting delivery of a product and rewards he might well have to dig into his own pockets to afford.

Now if you don’t mind the possibility doing that, Indiegogo might certainly be your better choice, especially since I did mention last week that any crowdfunding attempt is going to eat up time and energy. With a non-Kickstarter model, you’ll get at least something out of that effort, and certainly don’t need to worry about the heartbreak of coming close to your goal only to fizzle at the last moment. Kicktraq.com tries to help those projects out with a specific listing section so they get brought up in front of potentially interested eyeballs, but it doesn’t always work.

Which brings us to promotion. There’s a lot of advice out there on this topic, from people probably better qualified to speak on it than me, but I guess I can talk to you from the perspective of someone who doesn’t consider himself any damn good at it and yet still succeeded. One thing I ran into was that over a year ago I had helped out a crowdfund for a certain webcomic listing site, one of the rewards of which was being able to get a couple of free advertising days . I had used one, but was jealously hoarding the other until our Kickstarter was underway — only to discover that the site had all but gone under in the meantime and there was no longer a mechanism for getting the word out. Oof.

So yeah, a lot of advice will tell you to pre-seed your campaign’s promotion as early as possible, but beware the quixotic realities of the Internet. One or more of your chosen promotional paths may no longer be there when you need it.

Depending on Kickstarter itself  for promotion seems iffy at best. The standard “curve” for campaigns you’ll hear tell of is a rush of activity early on, then a dry spell, and then another rush at the end, and I think part of this phenomenon is that the beginning and end of your campaigns are the only times you’re guaranteed to be easily visible at the top of one of Kickstarter’s discovery lists: ‘Newest’ and ‘End Date’, respectively. I don’t know how Kickstarter’s default sorting of ‘Magic’ works, but it sure never liked us. If you’re lucky enough to become a Staff Pick, that can help, but unless you have an existing fan on Kickstarter’s staff it’s hard to count on that, plus it’s still no guarantee of success. No, the Catch-22 of Kickstarter’s default sorting system seems to be that the most popular projects with the most money pledged, i.e. the ones that least need the promotional help, are the ones that will be most visible to new prospective backers.

So what can the rest of us do? Well, there’s reaching out to appropriate websites to try to get a feature article or at least a press release printed that could raise awareness of your project, but to be brutally honest it doesn’t seem like something which will magically propel your project into the stratosphere unless you really go viral. And despite the best efforts of professional marketing teams trying to follow the directives of clueless executives, no one has a sure-fire method of making something go viral. We managed a featured interview on Bleeding Cool, which is one of the biggest comics sites on the Internet, but I didn’t see any big uptick in visits or pledges because of that. There wasn’t even all that much referral traffic to this site that I could tell — maybe half a dozen, trickling off into nothingness after our article left the front page.

You may therefore feel like you’re doing a lot of work for very little return; fortunately, if you happen to be a fellow webcomicker, you are more than likely used to this feeling and prepared to carry on in spite of it. This is what I did, along with shamelessly feeding on my own. Friends, family, acquaintances, and whatever fanbase you have willing to open their wallets are all fair game during a crowdfunding drive. I quite literally spent several days going through my entire list of Facebook friends sending personalized messages to nearly everyone on it, along with a convenient link to the project. Those that didn’t have Facebook got an email or text. I tried not to be spammy, which is why I took the effort to personalize every communication rather than doing a generic blast. I talked the campaign up at every party or gathering I happened to go to. Hell, I even told one of our waiters about it after conversation turned towards comic conventions.

It was exhausting. I am not a natural at this. And yet every time I felt like it was pointless and I should just give up, another pledge would come in as a result. People I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years were responding with, “You have a comic? Cool!” and offering up money, as well as helping spread the word to their own friends.

Many more never pledged or never even responded, but at least they knew. I had taken a lesson to heart from our very beginnings, where we printed up a limited run of sneak preview minicomics for our first convention, and though we started out selling them, by Sunday we were just giving them away. Then for the next month or so I suffered through friends and colleagues going, “Hey, do you have any left I could buy off you?” I didn’t. I had given away dozens of them to people who probably put them in the trash without much of a glance, because I had taken the silence of those close to me as disinterest.

Never again. I bugged the crap out of everyone I could. If they couldn’t or didn’t want to pledge, fine, but I at least would have minimized the situation of May 11 rolling around and someone I knew telling me, “You had a Kickstarter? Oh, man, I totally would have been in!”

Now is this a sustainable model in the long run? Probably not, but at least for your first go-round with a modest audience, I think you’re best off not depending entirely on the kindness of strangers, even if the dividing line between ‘acquaintance’ and ‘stranger’ is pretty thin. Hell, Jason Brubaker talks about how he was emailing friends of his wife who had sent him invites for their dog’s birthday party he never went to. Even if you’re naturally someone like me who doesn’t want to be pushy and bothersome, committing yourself to a period of more-or-less shameless self-promotion and putting yourself out there with personalized communication seems like a must. Or at least the biggest help.

As of Sunday evening, our first ever Kickstarter project closed out to new pledges, and was more successful than we could have hoped! Now to that statement I would say we went into things with a cautious pessimism, despite all our preparation; when your business model is based around giving away your product for free, can you ever really tell how many people would be willing to open their wallets once you start asking for money? That’s why we went with Kickstarter over another crowdfunding service like Indiegogo. Kickstarter is all-or-nothing, where if you don’t meet your goal everyone walks away with no money changing hands and no obligations. Indiegogo lets you keep the money pledged even if it’s just a few dollars, but what were we going to do with a few extra dollars? It certainly wouldn’t be enough to fund a printing run of the trade paperback collection that was the whole point, what with our own budget being tight. Partial funding would just leave everyone disappointed and angry.

Even though the campaign is finished, the project is far from over, since we now have to make good on our promises. But statistics say fewer than half of Kickstarter projects even get this far, much less reach 168% of their funding goal. We done good. And for any of you out there who might head down the same road in the future, I plan to spend the next few weeks laying down some thoughts and observations. Here’s the first:

Set a realistic funding goal.

I looked at a lot of projects prior to and during our run, and I think this is the #1 reason why projects fail, even if they seem to be doing everything else right. For example, I had my eye on the campaign for The Last Cowboy, which was another webcomic attempting to fund a first trade volume. It looked gorgeous. The pitch was comprehensible. The reward tiers seemed tasty. It got a coveted ‘Staff Pick’ status from Kickstarter so it showed up a lot on lists, and was even the featured project a couple of times. Yet in the end it only achieved about 32% of its funding goal.

What happened? Well, she apparently had a problem partway through the campaign where her main webcomic site went down, which certainly isn’t good, but I’m not convinced that was a huge effect on pledging. I’m just basing that on my own stats where even though we had links to this site on the Kickstarter, it seemed like hardly anyone followed them here. People already knew what we were doing, or didn’t care and just pledged based on what was immediately presented to them on the campaign page. No, I believe it boils down to one simple difference: Dawn and I were asking for $2200 as a goal, while she was asking for $10,100. Zoe, the creator and project author, managed to get 95 people to pledge $3216 on her first outing, which is pretty great! But it wasn’t nearly enough.

Now does this mean you should set a goal less than what you need? Hell no. I said ‘set a realistic goal’, not ‘bankrupt yourself’. Zoe already posted a post-mortem update where she’s done her own analysis of what happened, and she can repackage things and re-launch a new campaign just as soon as she’s ready, because again the nice thing about failure on Kickstarter is that everyone can walk away with no consequences but disappointment. In this case Zoe is recognizing that trying for a 1000 copy hardcover print run right off the bat was too ambitious, and makes better sense as a potential stretch goal than the all-or-nothing goal. As an independent creator she was absolutely right to price the campaign as high as she did so as to cover lots of things project creators can forget to account for–such as shipping costs and Kickstarter processing fees–we did the same, just on a much smaller base project scope. It was a modest scope, but we achieved it.

Tim Buckley can set a $150,000 project goal and has already more than doubled it, but that’s Tim Buckley– so even though it’s his first project on Kickstarter, he happens to be the creator of one of the most popular webcomics out there with a fanbase of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. On the other hand, despite being a well-known professional comic artist and getting coverage for his Kickstarter on some big news sites, Jamal Igle so far seems to be struggling to raise the $50,000 he wants to publish his second volume of Molly Danger. It could still happen, but the first volume had a lower goal and barely broke the 50k mark. It also had almost four times the backers that the new one currently does with just 5 days to go. Like I said, a lot could change in those last five days but he’s got to be sweating a bit.

But getting back to Last Cowboy, another factor I think may have worked against it was setting a goal so high without necessarily having the reward tiers to get there. Every reward above the $40 pledge level was severely limited, and in the best case scenario of all the slots being taken totals up to $3100. That left $7000 needing to be covered by all the people pledging at $40 or less, and unless you’re pretty sure you can move over 150 books as pre-orders, that’s some rough odds just getting to the finish line, much less a stretch goal. So I’d say make sure whatever reward tiers you’re offering are capable of carrying your campaign to where it needs to go. Needless to say I don’t advocate insanity with this. All our reward tiers above the $100 level were limited because they potentially required Dawn to have to make full-color sketches, including commissions, and we carefully considered a best (or possibly worst) case scenario where she had to provide all of them within a few months’ time, just in case we proved more popular than we expected. We did take the calculated risk of leaving the t-shirt and ‘get yourself drawn in the comic’ tiers unlimited, which turned out to be a good decision at this stage in the game, since the response was reasonable and really helped our bottom line.

Why do all this work? Haven’t I kept repeating how failure on a Kickstarter means almost nothing? Well, perhaps there’s a lie there. Failure always carries a bit of a sting, and a well-crafted and run project will take a lot of time and energy out of you. So at the end, it’s nice to have something more to show for it than just a lesson learned.

More next week!

This era we live in has produced some fantastic television, not to mention some fantastic comic book adaptations brought to that small screen. In fact I sometimes feel the only downside is that there’s just too much out there to possibly watch, even with the aid of on-demand services.

Thus it was with mixed feelings that I figuratively walked away from iZombie after viewing two episodes. Happy that I don’t feel the need to add it to the already crowded list of series to keep up on and/or binge; sad for the same reason.

Full disclosure: I have not read the comic. I have heard sources say that the TV series is a very loose adaptation, perhaps to the point only the names of certain characters are the same, and so I will only comment on the show. There is an idea I keep in my head regarding effective zombie stories, which is that they are about the people (this was as opposed to a vampire story, which is primarily about the vampire). Now the blog entry where I brought that up showed an example of a zombie story which broke that rule to my delight. Similarly, Warm Bodies was able to overcome my initial skepticism. So I guess it’s ultimately more of a guideline, but in iZombie I found my limit. It’s a similar reaction to the one I had with the Roswell TV series back in the day, which is that if you’re going to base a show around the existence of zombies or aliens or other things with an established mythology, don’t just give me pretty people with superpowers and angst. That’s called X-Men. Or worse, Twilight.

Now the line between monster and superhero is often a blurred one, sometimes to very interesting effect, but… okay, let’s just get to the bottom line here, which is that by the end of Episode 2 I felt iZombie could easily just be called Psychic Superhero CSI. It’s a “case of the week” police procedural at heart, but not a very good or smart one, and the zombie elements just don’t click beyond some surface elements like brain-eating. The pilot showed some promise by showing the lead character go out of control under stress towards the end and have to wrestle herself back to humanity–though even then, that seems to me more of a vampire schtick–but I can tell you the exact moment the second episode lost me, and that was when the same lead character was able to turn her “zombie rage” on and off like a faucet, just long enough to overpower and knock out a guy getting sexually aggressive.

No no. There need to be consequences to giving in to your vampi– err, zombie rage. Otherwise you’re just a superhero, no matter how many dead brains you scavenge from the John and Jane Does on your medical examiner’s table. The psychic part, by the way, comes from our hero getting compartmentalized access to the recent memories of the deceased by way of her nom-noms, allowing her (with the help of a wisecracking detective) to solve their murders in time for the end of the episode. So I guess there’s that, although even that part makes me sad because now if there’s ever a Chew adaptation in development it will seem derivative.

Am I a bad person for giving up so soon? Perhaps. I could even be being hypocritical by dismissing it under such brief circumstances. Perhaps there will be a betterment of things down the road, although the introduction of the Evil Mutan– err, Evil Zombie isn’t what I mean. Perhaps iZombie is simply a victim of there being too many other awesome alternatives out there, but for now I’m not feeling any compelling reason to follow it week to week. Maybe when the season’s over and it makes its way onto Netflix, Right now I’m just not seeing anything I haven’t seen done before, and better, under different guises… but I’ll wait and see if it manages to shamble its way to a more brainy path.