Art Showcase

My gig with "Burned Toast Production" was fun but not really profitable. I had rent to pay and since Jason already had too many pages from me in reserve, I decided to create my own website, my own comic. 

"A rose within the stars" was a fun epic story about a girl getting pulled from earth by a cosmic entity who fell for her and ended up on a space ship in the middle of rebellion.

The plan was to alternate books for "M.A.D." and books for "Rose". So I borrowed a little bit of $$ from my mother to start my own business.

Thing started great, I hired a colorist for the comic (the guy quickly turned pro),  hired my roommate as my webmaster and designed my first website. But quickly derailed... Mostly around payments.

Credit card providers are notoriously difficult to deal with when it comes to NSFW stuff. At first, everything was fine. I opened the website. The site had a great start and I got my first customers.

But as soon as I had to be paid, The credit card provider told me that they could not send me money since they were an american company and I was a Canadian artist ( EDIT: I just remembered that at first I went for a canadian credit card provider... but since despite me using a canadian website company, the server was on US sole, I needed to use a US credit card provider). Their solution was apparently simple, they told me all I had to do was open a us company. So I did. 

I hired an expert, opened a company in the Delaware and tried again... A few weeks later the payment provider decided that NSFW stuff wasn't for them (despite me finding them on other xxx website) so I went with a new one, who told me that despite having a company in the Delaware I need a physical address in the us. Anyway the story gets fuzzy from there, I barely remember this time of my life... But I got stringed along and ended up with a US company, a PO Box on us sole, a website that had lost all it's momentum, a server to pay for, two employees, no way to be paid, and 20 000$ in debts. I was depressed, I was getting seriously fat form never leaving home ( no money, all my time used was used to try and fix this), so I decided to cut my loss, and closed the whole thing.

Not the best time in my life.  I stopped drawing for a little while, became an orderly ( which I loved ) and decided to comeback home ( I had moved to another city at the time). That move ended up with me calling a friend who offered me my 2nd tv gig (one that worked). I won't tell that story, since I doubt that companies associated with children programming would appreciate being associated with a NSFW page :P but I became a web designer and artist working for tv. For about 5 or 6 years I became the guy in MTL if you wanted some illustration for a child TV show and my web design where all over the place associated with the biggest names in Quebec. That was fun ^^

Anyway... I'm enjoying that little stroll down memory lines, but I think I've reached the end of that particular period in my career.

I'll find something else to showcase next week :P
See you all soon!
Alx