THE INTRO
Hoo-boy, do I have a lot of things I could talk about this month. First, I guess I should announce that American Chop Suey, the graphic novel created by myself and artist Ed Bickford, was NOT released last month as it was originally solicited. Ed and I found out about this a week before the planned release date (also notably, we did NOT learn it from the publisher that presumably knew the entire time that the book would not release). I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I will save them for a future newsletter after I’ve had some time to sit with the information.
Instead, I’d rather talk about Kickstarter. I have a new comic book launching on Kickstarter on October 16th called HamletMania. It is created by myself and artist Greg McCrary and, simply put, it’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet by way of Dragonball Z and Scud: the Disposable Assassin (if you can imagine such a thing). Take a gander at the preview pages and please follow this link to the Kickstarter pre-launch page to be notified when the campaign goes live. I promise you won’t want to miss it.
THE BODY – Running a Kickstarter
HamletMania is not my first Kickstarter. I have run several small, but successful Kickstarter campaigns over the last ten years. All of them had modest goals, the intent of which was not to make money or even fund the production of the book but rather just get enough money to cover printing costs for a few hundred copies of the book.
In that way, I funded the printing costs of Zero’s Heroes volumes 1 & 2, The Uncontrollable Wreck-Lass, and The Amoral Stingray graphic novel. All of those books were between 120 and 170ish pages long and were fully illustrated before the crowdfunding campaigns even began. The funding goals were all around $2k and as I said before, was just the money we needed to cover printing and shipping costs for a couple hundred “print on demand” (I’ll explain the difference between Print on Demand and Offset printing later). If I had tried to raise enough money to cover the production costs of the books (aka, the money needed to pay artists to draw the darn things) I would have had to raise a minimum of $10k, and although I think I and my fellow artists make some pretty good books, I am aware that I am not popular (or social media savvy) enough to raise that kind of money.
In August of 2023 I embarked on my most ambitious Kickstarter campaign to date. I wanted to fund the complete production of a brand new issue of The Amoral Stingray.
I had a great art team lined up for the new issue. Penciler and Inker Chris McJunkin (a regular collaborator of mine) was returning, along with colorist Paul Little, to illustrate an all new 22 page story about my character, The Amoral Stingray.
I had previously produced four issues of The Amoral Stingray out of pocket between 2015 and 2020. It was very expensive and I had trouble finding distribution for the book. I pitched it to a few publishers, but nobody picked it up. Despite that, I went ahead and produced the entire thing because it’s a story that I really like and has the potential to grow. I printed the first three issues and sold them on my website and at comic conventions. By the time the fourth issue was finished, I decided to skip printing single issues and just move straight to the collected edition. In 2020, with the help of 69 backers (nice), I raised enough money to print a couple hundred copies of the book.
Chris and I unsuccessfully tried to Kickstarter the fifth issue of Amoral Stingray the very next year in 2021. This campaign failed for a number of reasons. The biggest reason, from my perspective, was that we didn’t run a lot of promotion for the campaign. I was already planning the Uncontrollable Wreck-Lass campaign which was going to go live a few months later in the Fall of 2021. Chris and I found ourselves in an awkward position of either immediately running the Amoral Stingray 5 campaign in the summer of 2021 or waiting a year and running it sometime in 2022. We were impatient and decided to run it immediately, and as a result, we went into it a little unprepared. I have seen a lot of mediocre Kickstarter campaigns succeed, so were were hoping luck would be on our side and comic readers would magically find us. Spoiler alert, they didn’t.
Let that be a lesson to everyone interested in Kickstarting their book. You can’t just put the book on Kickstarter and expect people to give you money. You have to do a LOT of promotion if you want to make some real money at it. Often times, promotion means spending money ahead of time. At a certain point, you may question if it is worth spending between $1k-$2k just to take in $3k, but that’s just the way the game is played.
I took all the lessons of the failed 2021 Amoral Stingray Kickstarter and put them into effect for our second attempt for the 2023 Kickstarter for the same issue. First, we renamed the issue to the “New #1” so as not to deter new readers that didn’t want to jump in on issue 5. Second, we got a friend, Mark Welser, to do an amazing variant cover. The cover was an homage to the classic cover of Amazing Spider-man 129 (the first appearance of The Punisher).
I also printed up a preview version of the issue (called an Ashcan) and mailed them out to people (for free) in a few different Facebook comic book groups that I am a part of. I also handed them out to customers of the comic book store that I work at.
The other notable thing I did differently was to secure outside funding through advertising. The comic book store I work at placed an ad on the back cover, and prepaid for issues to sell in the store. I also sold ads to a restaurant that I had previously worked at, as well as a local coffee shop. For them, I created and illustrated advertisements for their business that appeared in The Amoral Stingray New #1 issue.
Some of these things, such as renumbering the issue and homage variant covers, are things that I complain about when I see them being done by other publishers, but I can’t deny that they were integral to the success of our campaign. Simply put, The Amoral Stingray New #1 Kickstarter would NOT have succeeded without all the annoying sales boosting tricks that Marvel and DC are forced to do every week.
All of that extra stuff was a LOT of work; work that had nothing to do with the actually creation of the comic book, itself, I should add.
Though, we did succeed and the book is currently printed (and available for purchase at Fantasy Books & Games in Fairview Heights, IL or at secondthoughtcomcis.com), we did not succeed by much. A lot of work goes into running a Kickstarter campaign that only breaks even. In a future newsletter, I plan on doing a full financial break down of that campaign, just so people can see exactly how much money and effort goes into producing a single issue of a comic book, but I don’t have time for that this month.
All of this is really to say...YOU SHOULD BACK HAMLETMANIA on Kickstarter right now! The prelaunch page is up and running! Just follow this link!
ANNOUNCEMENTS – My New Comics and Convention Appearances
HAMLETMANIA KICKSTARTER! As I said earlier, Greg McCrary and I are Kickstarting our new comic, HamletMania. It is an exciting and action packed version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, reimagined as aliens and robots competing in an intergalactic wrestling league. It is the tragic story of betrayal, death, and love, as young Prince Hamlet seeks to regain the Heavyweight Championship belt from his deceased father’s ex-tag team partner, Claudius. It’s going to be a wild comic and I think wrestling and comic fans will love it. The campaign launches on October 16th! Be there!
AUTOGRAPHICAL 3! I am still working on Autographical 3, but it has taken a back seat to the HamletMania Kickstarter. I really planned to have it finished by now, and it is frustrating that it has taken so long, particularly because I think it’s going to be my best looking issue (thanks in large part to my wonderful wife’s beautiful inking over my sloppy pencils). But there are only so many hours in the day and we all have to work within our means. Included here is a one-page comic that appeared in Autographical 2. It shows, roughly, what my day to day schedule looks like (in case you want any extra perspective in the time managing skills of an indie comic creator).
SLICE! I will not be at the St. Louis Independent Comic Expo on October 26th this year, but HamletMania artist and co-creator Greg McCrary will be! He will have a HamletMania preview book, too! If you’re in the St. Louis area, you should definitely check it out!
BOOK CLUB
Since it’s October, I feel like I should recommend a spooky book. I don’t read a lot of horror comics, but there are some really great ones out there. My favorite horror book of the year is probably Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath. This comic series released monthly over the summer and wrapped up just in time to get it’s trade paperback released in October.
The elevator pitch to this series is VERY simple. It’s (the TV show) Dexter meets (Richard Scarry’s) Busy Town. Horvath’s lush watercolor art has the outward look of a charming children’s storybook, but that just covers up the dark and bloody story within.
The story is set in the cozy little county town of Woodbrook. An adorable brown bear named Samantha Strong is one of the well known and well liked members of Woodbrook, and she also happens to be a serial killer. She has rules that she meticulously follows in order to maintain her secret life as a killer, most notably, that she never kills anyone in her hometown. She always travels to a nearby city to perform her misdeeds, where they will be more likely to go unnoticed.
Sam’s whole life is thrown upside down when members of Woodbrook start getting murdered. The entire community is turned inside out as citizens begin to distrust and suspect each other of the serial killings. Sam realizes that she has to find the murderer before her own, unrelated murders get discovered!
As I said, I liked this comic a lot, and it has been one of the most popular and best selling comics this year at Fantasy Books & Games. I definitely think this is a comic that is carried by the art. The story is solid, but it is in service of the striking art which juxtaposes sweet and colorful character designs with ghoulish and grisly murder scenes.
This is a book that definitely works best as a comic book. Honestly, without the talking animal character designs, I think it would be a rather bland and uninspired rip-off of Dexter. I won’t spoil the story here, but there are a few moments where I would have liked a little more character development with Sam and her inner turmoil of being a serial killer while also being a valued member of Woodbrook. I hesitate to say that the series could have maybe used a few more issues to really play around with it, but at that point the premise may have worn thin overstayed it’s welcom (see a lot of Jeff Lemire’s comics for examples of what I’m talking about).
As it is, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody sees is a tight six issue story that makes for a standard 132 page graphic novel. If you are looking for something quirky and uniquely spooky to read this season, I highly recommend it!
-Aaron
October 2024