Thoughts and Questions for the Future

Okay, time to talk shop. Like, for real. It’s no secret that I’ve done a pretty miserable job running my Patreon for the past… well, EVER. Just look at that list of stuff you’re supposed to be getting: a new, exclusive Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom comic every week, special blogs related to both those, MORE weekly comics based on anime that higher-level patrons get to choose, extra Far Out There comics that those same patrons get to help write, all SORTS of good stuff! And what have you been getting? A single page of Conventional Wisdom a month, plus one of those weird Far Out There character soundtracks. That is WAY less than what you were promised for you money.

And here’s the thing: a big part of the problem is that the original promise was just too big. As I’ve said in and on lately, I burned myself out something FIERCE trying to keep up the old Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom update schedules AND all that Patreon stuff. At peak busy levels, I was having to crank out at LEAST seven pages of comics a week, sometimes as much as twelve. You can see why I’m using current events as an excuse to take a vacation from all that… but I still need to have SOMETHING to sow the people actually paying me money, and it needs to be more than what’s coming out now. I just need to work out what that “more” is, and obviously I want ya’ll to be privy to that thought process.

So let’s back up and take a closer look at those things that haven’t been happening and work out why. The most obvious thing is the blog posts. Quite rankly, I just ran out of ideas. The reason the Far Out There character soundtracks are the only blogs coming out right now is because I’m just a bit ol’ music geek who’d be making weird playlists anyway. Otherwise, I just haven’t been able to think of anything… or at least nothing that works in “big block of text” format. After all, they don’t call me “The Big Block of Text Guy,” I draw comics.

And speaking of comics, why are the only ones coming out the ones I was already writing on top of regular Conventional Wisdom updates? Where are all the Far Out There things and anime comics? Again, the simple answer is just that doing them all at once was too much, and I wound up too burned out to do ANY of them. But when it comes to bringing any of them back, or introducing anything NEW, I need to be more careful about not overworking myself again. On the one hand, that’s especially dangerous right now, since I don’t have the regular update schedule going to remind me of how much time I have to work on extracurricular projects. I don’t wanna start ten new things right now, then have them all grind to a halt when I start updating the REGULAR comics again. But at the same time, that very freedom makes this the BEST time to experiment with new projects or bringing back old ones, and possibly have a new routine already worked out by the time I have to start writing Far Out There and traveling to conventions again. It's just a mater of deciding WHAT.

Probably the easiest thing would be bringing back that Far Out There side comic staring Jenna, because I really do have a whole pile of rough drafts that have been sitting in a folder for ages. I’d just been reluctant to commit myself to working on them again for fear of it eating into my time for the other stuff… that’s ALSO on hiatus right now. So really, there’s not much of an excuse. In fact, it’d probably be a good idea to have SOME kind of regular Far Out There comics being made while the main comic is still on hiatus. Those random holiday pages can only keep my in practice so much, right?

And then there’s the OTHER Far Out There comics I was doing for Patreon, the Mad Libs. If you didn’t see the description, or just forgot, the idea was that I’d send out a little plot summary with several key words left blank, so that $5+ patrons could fill them in with whatever. Then I’d take the filled in version and draw actual comics out of whatever the results were. It was a… flawed concept, or at least my execution of it was. The summaries I sent out were a bit to vague, and I didn’t have a clear enough idea of what the comics would look like planned out ahead of time. As a result, the comics I drew based on the results kept getting longer and more elaborate, demanding waaay more time and energy than I’d originally anticipated. So, kind of the microcosm of this Patreon in general, huh? Ironically, after a while I DID figure out a way to rein the Mad Libs in: actually writing whole rough drafts for the comics with certain parts of panels left blank, then writing the Mad Lib summary based on those rough drafts. The idea what that this would keep be grounded to the established pages instead of spiraling off into some overly-ambitious other thing… but I never really had a chance to see if it’d work. By the time I had this little brainstorm, the patron numbers had long since started dropping, and nobody even responded when I sent the Mad Lib out. So, yeah, my enthusiasm for that idea has been kind of squashed ever since.

And then there’s the Weekly Anime Comics, or Monthly Anime Comics, as the case wound up being by the end. I think this was probably the most popular offering of all when I first started the Patreon, you donate $5 or more, you get to nominate a show for me to watch and draw comics about. But again, I didn’t really think it through well enough, and the execution was a bit of a mess. The queue system of patrons’ requests was a bit of a mess, especially since I also couldn’t anticipate how long I’d be working on any given show. Some people had to wait MONTHS for their choice to finally reach the top of the queue, only for me to run out of ideas after just a few pages. Kind of a rip-off, right? And that’s assuming I actually DID do a new comic every week, which was the bigger problem. “Weekly Anime Comics” were almost NEVER just a week apart, and it wasn’t just a time management thing, either. Quite frankly, I just didn’t anticipate how much anime was out there that I had NO interest in. It’s a real struggle to squeeze entertaining comics out of a show that I’d never have watched if somebody wasn’t literally paying me. That’s just not a good head space to be in if you’re trying to be creative. The harder these comics got to do, the longer they took, and the less they were worth people’s hard-earned money.

So here we are. One way or another, “Weekly Anime Comics” aren’t going to be a thing anymore, I’m just not sure what the best move to replace it will be. After all, I kind of AM doing a weekly anime comic, it’s all that Digimon stuff I’ve been posting everywhere. So I’ve clearly still got it in me, if the show’s something I’m interested in. One possibility is to replace requests with a voting system, where I put out a list of shows that’s exclusively stuff I’m excited about and patrons just pick from that. Of course, the problem THERE is that most of the stuff I’m interesting in is 30 years old and/or really obscure, so there’s no telling if anyone would care enough to vote at all. That was the other problem with Weekly Anime Comics, it felt like everyone was anxious to get comics about THEIR show, but didn’t give a crap about anyone else’s picks. I think part of the reason the Digimon comics are going over so well is because people are actually watching the show the same time as me, but it’s VERY rare for that to happen right now. If I go asking people to donate for the privilege of reading comics about some show they’ve never even heard of, would they even care? I dunno.

And that’s just the stuff I was doing regularly in the past, I haven’t even gotten into all the OTHER ideas for Patreon stuff. I did a new chapter of Becky & Gilb that one time, so maybe I could make working on more of those a regular Patreon thing? Or maybe that OTHER comic, Point Me At The Sky? Or heck, we were just talking about Digimon, maybe I could finally pull the trigger on that idea for a fan comic I keep teasing? Or maybe something not strictly comic-related at all? I mentioned earlier that part of the reason I struggle to come up with blog ideas is that I don’t really think in “blog” terms most of the time, I’m too visually minded. So what about videos? I’ve mentioned in the past that it might be interesting to try the whole review/video essay thing, with drawings of cartoon me as the on screen talent. I’ll probably never have as much “free time” to try and learn a whole new medium as I do right now, so would anyone be interested in that? Or is there something else that I’m totally not seeing? What would YOU be most interested in getting out of your couple of bucks a month? The floor’s open, so if you know of something all the cool kids are doing that I’m totally not thinking of, comment away! I can’t promise any of it will happen, but at this point it can’t hurt to throw a few ideas out. I mean, SOMETHING’S gotta change around here…