I was listening to Robert Kirkman on Wordballoon this morning on my way to work.
It was an interview from about a year ago in which Kirkman talks about his writing process, his comics, and comics in general.

One young fan asks for advice on making comics and “breaking in”. In his response, Kirkman essentially describes my Rapid City project and says “don’t do that”.
His point is that by writing and writing and writing, you essentially bury yourself under and unpublishable mound of material.
And he is right. No publisher is going to agree to take a risk on a project which is hundreds of pages long. Not from an unknown, unproven, talent.

Instead, Kirkman advises that you find an artist and make comics. This is the best way to show that you can make comics.

He makes a good point, but I do not completely agree.
With this approach, you will learn how to make a comic book, but not how to make comics.
It is like trying to learn how to be a good husband by going on lots of dates.
You can be Mr. Right all night. Super attentive, romantic, sensitive, and funny, but what are you like the next day? And the next day? And all the next days after that?

You can find an artist and develop a one-shot project that you are both really excited about… but what about the next one? And the next one? You learn to work with giddy enthusiasm, but not with drudgery.*

My goal with this project is not to develop a pitchable project. My goal is to develop the much sought-after ability to reliably produce comics month after month. If some of this eventually sees publication, that is fine with me, but that is not the intended purpose.

This is not a pitch.

This is not a way to sell the idea of Rapid City. Rather, Rapid City is a tool with which I can demonstrate my skill and dedication.

Hopefully, there is an editor out there who needs someone who can reliably produce a comic book script on time. And, hopefullier, he is now googling the phrase “someone who can reliably produce a comic book script” and comes across this and sees that I can do what he needs done.

And beyond all that, in all honesty, the fun of doing this and the pride at knowing that I can do it is more than enough to call it a success.

*Beyond that point, the dating/marriage metaphor really breaks down, unless you take it to mean that I am symbolically “married” to this project.

The script for the tenth issue of the superhero comic book, Rapid City, has now been posted.

Panel 2. Sidekick on the ground. He has knocked over one of those black waste barrels and several pump hoses have come out of their cradles. He is gesturing to one of the hoses, or holding one up, as an example,

SIDEKICK

Careful? Doesn’t look like you’re too…

Panel 3. Kinetic has grabbed Sidekick by his jacket and is swinging him in a high arc.

SIDEKICK

careful!

Panel 4. Kinetic completes the high arc by slamming Sidekick hard into the ground. Monkey is leaping clear of the impact and bits of gravel are spraying up.

Panel 5. Kinetic gripping his bandaged abdomen in pain and grimacing. Sidekick is climbing to his feet again

KINETIC

Damn.

SIDEKICK

What was the point of…. Oh!

SIDEKICK

Are you ok?

Panel 5. Shot of Monkey looking over at the slightly larger crowd.

MONKEY

Sidekick, this isn’t working.

Read and discuss this issue of Rapid City, plus all of the ones leading up to it, for free here.

I completed issue 10 earlier today.
Now to ship it off to my editor!

That is me, so the shipping is very quick and inexpensive.
I just ran spell check, but now I need to run through and look for any obvious mistake… like the one that my buddy Mike pointed out is still in issue 1….. and then it will be ready to post.

So, again, quite possibly tonight.

Also, if you are reading this…. mention it somewhere. Tweet about it, mention on Facebook that you were looking at this comic, mention it in your blog…. however you communicate.. just let people know that you have been checking out Rapid City.

Thanks

I have one more page to do, and I know what will be on it. So, barring unforeseen complications, I should get this one done on time.

I have been going over it and editing as I go, so there won’t be too much time spent on touch-ups. There is a really good chance that I will get issue 10 posted tonight.

Right on time.

The script for the ninth issue of the superhero comic book, Rapid City, has now been posted.

Read and discuss it here.

Panel 1 Large panel of Coil stepping in to the apartment. The wires from his hand that unlocked the door are retracting back to his glove. He is being as intentionally non-threatening as he can be in this situation.

COIL

It’s ok. I’m a friend. I’m… I was a friend of Hourglass.

COIL

We need to talk.

Panel 2 Kinetic and Coil in the panel as Coil closes the door behind him.

COIL

You go by Kinetic, right?

KINETIC

Yeah.

COIL

It’s nice to meet you. I’m called Coil. I wish this had been under better circumstances, but it is what it is.

Panel 3 Close on Coil’s foot as he steps among some small pieces on the broken phone.

COIL

This kind of thing happens from time to time. And when it does, we need to sort it out. Figure out what happened.

Yesterday, Bekah and I went to the most recent iteration of The Boston Comic Con.

A few years ago, Wizard World held a con in Boston. It was a big affair, like all of their conventions are. Since that stopped, this has been the biggest thing to happen in comics in the North East.

Everyone was talking about the fact that there was a line wrapped around the building all day on Saturday. That is pretty cool. That is a good sign for the economy as whole, the comics economy in particular, and the local comics economy in the very particular.

These shows are getting better and better, bigger and bigger.

My main concern, though, was how to go about marketing myself. I am a writer without a book. And the months and months of scripts that I do have are in script form. Common wisdom says that no one reads scripts. I am not sure if that’s true…..but it seems true enough that I decided to just focus on networking.

To that end, I did meet a lot of cool comics people.
As this whole project is meta-fictional in nature, I will be honest up front about the function of this post. This is not simply reporting what happened, this is part of networking. These links will bring folks to and from my site. Though these mentions are self serving, my opinions are sincere. So, in teh order that I grab them off of my “contacts” pile.

HBComics was there with their issues of Lazerman and a new superhero title called Vindication. It is great to see that these guys are still cranking out the books.

Bekah bought a few comic books from Diego Chaves at the Vigilante Journals table. The books were slick looking and well colored and the guys at the table seemed to be having a good time.

Talk about niche marketing….. Chaotic Kiss bills itself as “transgender manga”. Almost every single person who sees this will walk past, as I did, with a politely interested “that’s not for me”. But that tiny sliver of the population who stops and says “That’s for me!” are sure to be fans for life.

I talked for a while with Mark Slater of Natural Line Studio. He had a lot of nice looking art and seemed to have a very balanced out look on the industry in general. He told a few breaking-in stories which I don’t doubt for a second.

We talked with Ben Thompson for a while about his work and the current project he was working on. The project seems terrific and he is clearly being under-marketed. He is exactly the kind of artist who can benefit from a studio umbrella. He was doing fine, and was willing to talk about himself and his work, but it is a shame that it isn’t enough in comics to simply be good at what you do. You also have to be good at telling people that you are good at what you do.

The guys at Comic Coma had some good ideas about networking. I like good ideas, so I’m going to check back in and see what comes of it. If it works, the end result will be more good comics out there. Nothing wrong with that.

Cara Judd, who seems to go by Cheshyredrops online, has some nice looking art hat does not really suit my personal tastes. She has a business card, which implies that she is in the business of art, but she makes two mistakes with it. The first is that the web page listed on her card has nothing but a “coming soon” banner. This leads to her second mistake which is relying on her deviant art page. Artists seem to love Deviant Art, but to outsiders, it is very user-unfriendly. It is hard to navigate and offers little in terms of “current projects” or sales. But, until the personal page is complete, Deviant Art is all we have.

On the other hand, Sara Richard uses her site to market herself very well. Her style looks cool and I would like to see what she could do with sequential pages.

I am planning on going to the Boston Comic Con tomorrow.

Folks twittering from the line outside and the show floor this morning reported that it was very crowded. Not considering at all how this relates to me or how I will approach the con, this is great news. This show has been growing and growing for the past few years. A door-busting turn-out like this says that it isn’t going to stop for a while yet. This is good news for lots of reasons, but mostly because the people who run this show have always been very friendly to small press and artists alley.

The question here is, how do you sell yourself as a writer? Everyone knows that no one reads scripts. Could be, though, that no one has read scripts in the past because they have not been presented in an appealingly readable fashion. Could be. Do I know what that appealingly readable fashion is? No I do not. Could it have something to do with iPads and Kindles? There might be something to that.

Dig deeper into that question above. How do you sell yourself? Well, what are you selling? Is it the opportunity to publish something that I have written? Or is it my ability to get writing done?

The point of maintaining my monthly script deadline has been to learn how to do it, and to show potential employers an publishers that I can do it. That ability is observable here in on the web from month to month. But how does one convey months and months of punctuality in a 5 minute conversation? That one I really don’t know.

I have some ideas, but I have a feeling, a lot is going to depend on feeling out each individual situation, and responding to those specific needs.

I just wrote the scene where the mysterious character finally reveals what has been up this whole time.
I think it works pretty well.
If it reads the way it feels like it will, then the reveal will be the last step in a long series of “what is up with her?” moments.

I dropped hints, but I did not dodge or forcefully prolong the situation

Actually, it isn’t much of a mystery. In fact, if the reader knows that he is reading some kind of mystery, and is thus on the look out for clues…. then it will be fairly obvious.

Anyway, I am pretty happy with it so far. Now I need to handle the aftermath of the big reveal.

In the real world, I tried out a thing called Five Sprockets. It is project managing software and a social networking web site built into one service. It is geared (no pun intended) toward film and TV people and their comic script format does not seem as useful as Celtx.

The social networking and idea managing tools are not quite as functional as they should be. For example, the section where you are supposed to be searching for potential collaborators or crew members is still built as though you were searching for someone to date.

Following a project from pre-production all the way through post-production is far too nuanced and complicated to be handled by anything but specifically constructed software. Five Sprockets seems like it was built completely from existing parts applied to new uses.

I will give it another look once it is out of its Beta phase.

Josh

This project is a bit of a writing experiment for me. I have mentioned this a few times, but I don’t want to make you dig through my old posts. Essentially, I am seeing if I can post a new script every single month, just as though it were on a monthly publishing schedule.

It is a thing that I am shaping and developing as I go That is part of the experiment.

Part of this means that once something is out there, it’s out there. Once a book is on the shelves, it is too late to edit it. This is why the creators of regular, periodical, comic books wind up doing “ret-cons”. A book is in a rush to get to market and something is published which does not 100% synch with something which is planned later. Things don’t match. So, some alteration is made in a future story which references and corrects that mistake.

“He was acting so strange because he was a clone!”

OK, so in preparing to write the next issue I was reading over all my previous issues and I found something which does not synch up. And the issues have already been published on my web page. There is a story mistake already “out there”.

If I am to be true to the idea that this is simulating actual publication, then I am stuck with it and I have to roll with that and make adjustments in future stories which will reference and correct that mistake.

On the other hand…..

This project is also functioning as my online portfolio. This is a display of my work. Therefore I want it to be as polished as possible.

To me, this latter consideration outweighs the “artistic integrity” of staying true to the experiment.

I have made the decision that I will go back and make alterations in order to make these the best possible comic book scripts.

In the interest of experimental and artistic honesty, though, I have decided to keep the original drafts posted somewhere on this site. I think that it is a good idea to ensure that these scripts are the highest possible quality, but I also think it would be somewhat dishonest to present them as though they simply arrived in that polished state with no revision.

Hopefully, I will learn from the stress of these “time travel” revisions and require fewer and fewer of them as I progress.

This is big, but I can’t quite explain how.

I have been using Celtx to write my scripts. It is a really great program and makes the whole writing process much easier…..after small learning curve. The rigid format has forced me to tighten up my scripting style a lot. There is no doubt that I have benefited from it.

Celtx also provides a service through which they auto-publish your work to their Project Central web site. This is a really easy way to publish, but it is also very limiting. I don’t know tech stuff about coding and all of that, which is why it took me so long to figure this out. So, I can’t explain exactly why, but it is similar to the way that itunes turns all of your media files into itunes files. I could publish my scripts through Celtx Project Central, but it was almost impossible to do anything else with them.

Now, with a series of simple installs, I can turn my scripts straight into PDF files which I can then do whatever I want with. Print, email, sell…whatever. Plus, all of the scripts are now “in house”. Meaning that when you go to read a script, you are no longer being sent to another web site. This also solves the formatting problem that I was having with Internet Explorer.

The Celtx program is a very powerful way to create scripts….now I feel like that power has been liberated.