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I totally understand the apprehension to read long form serialized comics on the web, especially the way mine is presented. I'm taking a story that will undoubtedly tip the scales at several hundred pages once it's done and offering it at two pages a week. Yee. Ikes.
Really the only successful precedent in this kind of model (and the example that keeps me chugging) is Chris Ware. He serialized Jimmy Corrigan at a page a week in Chicago's New City paper. And that was nearly every page! Like, you'd open it up one week and you'd get a lovely drawing of a bird in a tree, while you could presumably be dying to find out what happens once Jimmy makes it to the hospital. Or whatever.
And Genre City: Plan B promises to have just as many lugubrious and slow moving sections. For example, the section (starting at Page 51, which I had just started to serialize when I got "THE CALL") has about four or five pages of one of my characters walking to work. Plus, dealing with four sets of protagonists means I've got to completely abandon interesting stories and characters in one scene for months at a time in order to get to the next scene involving someone else. It's like if they had shown Magnolia in the format in which Clone Wars was aired on the Cartoon Network.
The only thing in my favor, and it's now pretty much guaranteed, as I've got a good six month/50 page head start, is consistency in schedule. Right now, having just "aired" Page 2, I don't doubt that it's going to be very difficult to get people hooked on the series. That's why I've put a lot of thought and effort into the promotional images that show up on the MT page (which I really can't stop looking at, I love them so damn much). I highly doubt that many people will subscribe to Modern Tales just to read Genre City (unless they're related to me), but my readership on my own was so low that even having a comic of mid-tier popularity on a site whose traffic doesn't even come close to blockbusters like PVP, and that follows a subscription model, would still result in more of the most important thing: people reading my comic.
The key is really that I firmly believe that this is a fantastic fucking story and when it's finally done (hell, even when I finally collect the prologue which is now sure to happen by this time next year) it will lift whole houses off the ground. I'd love for people to get in on the ground floor and, naturally, I thrive on the responses of human beings. Barbelith-spawned readers like BigSunnyD, Flyboy, and Impulsivelad were instrumental in getting this project off the ground, and I wish I could give every one of the people who read Genre City from (or at least close to) the start a free subscription. Especially people, named above, who pimped the shit out of it.
It's an extraordinarily tough sell, especially in this distribution model and considering that I'm currently putting out work whose quality I surpassed easily in just a few months of concerted effort. Certainly not best foot forward. In a sense, this is all an elaborate promotional scheme so that when I do start publishing it, it will have generated some small measure of interest.
The fact that I now happen to get paid, and that my work is now in a legitimately professional setting, was an unexpected, and wholly welcome, bonus of serializing a very long story by a complete unknown with marginal but improving drawing skills on the internet. |
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