October 16, 2006
When I finally did the finishing touches on the final page of my second Doris Danger 16-page adventure, I realized it had been a month since I’d sat down to draw. Every page I draw, I try to write the date on it, any day I spend time working on it. (Sometimes I’m lazy about it, but I do my best). So all my pages have a row of dates written on them, showing when I worked on that particular page, and therefore it historicizes each page, and gives me an idea how many days each page took me. Of course, “how many days” can be misleading, because I might get two or three pages done if it’s a Saturday, for example, and if nothing else is going on. Whereas, I might not get any work done on a Monday through Thursday.
But like I say, it gives me a rough idea. And sure enough, the latest page I had worked on had a month gap from the next time I sat down to write a new date on it. I hadn’t worked on any other pages, so that was a month I didn’t do any drawing.
But I was pretty busy that whole time.
Of course, first of all, I had my son, who I call a two-hands baby, because you need to hold him with both hands and keep him in a continual up-and-down motion, if you don’t want him to cry. You do this until he gets exhausted and falls asleep, and then you put him down, and either he wakes immediately up and you start over again, or he stays asleep and you have maybe an hour to try and get other things done.
For over a week, the reason I didn’t get any drawing done is that I got hold of some cheap, relatively simple-to-operate, but really powerful music recording equipment (Cubase), and I’ve started recording songs I’ve been performing in my band for years, that we never went into a studio to record. My band, Weird Harold, has been around for I think eleven years now, and we’ve only got finished recordings of five songs. Early on, maybe ten years ago, we did a three song demo. Twice, we said we were going to record an album. One of those times, we started five songs and finished two, and then our bassist moved to L.A. The second time, we started recording seven songs, and our bassist had a baby and three full time jobs, and he didn’t have free time any more, and we lost him as our bassist. So now, as Weird Harold is down to a guitar-drums duo, and our interest is fading fast, I’m sensing my mortality and wanting to record a part of my history, and get these songs recorded, even if it’s cheap, home-made studio versions.
I was feeling pretty disappointed that I spent so much money and time sending out preview Xerox copies of my Dr. DeBunko book, and it didn’t generate any additional sales. I didn’t think it generated any additional press, but as time goes on, I see more reviews popping up here and there, so I’m thinking I will do it all again, but I’ll wait for the bigger, important projects.
The big score was the podcast at Skepticality.com of my Dr. DeBunko comic, thanks in whole to Lene Taylor at ireadcomics. I believe it got about an extra thousand visitors to my website, and I made about a dozen orders of my books, which wound up getting me a little shy of $300 extra cash. At first glimpse, I think, wow, that’s pretty great. But then I think this. That’s only a dozen people who made all those orders. Under the most unrealistic assumptions, where all of them realized my work is the most fantastic they’ve ever seen, and all of them decided they’ll just order whatever I write from now on, even though they’re all skeptics and were only interested because my character is Dr. DeBunko: Debunker of the supernatural… And even if they all kept informed of all my next projects and made sure to rush down to their local shop and order the current book – assuming all that happened, which it obviously won’t – my next book’s distributor numbers will go up by twelve, which will make it a whopping 230 instead of 218, and the comic will still be cancelled, because those numbers are so pathetic they’re eight hundred dollars under the benchmark I’m required to maintain.
On top of this, the sales in question cost me probably a hundred fifty or so to print them, and then I offer free shipping at my website, and that probably eats up close to another fifty or so bucks. And then there’s the packing materials I sent it all in, the fees Paypal charges, which are a higher percentage for tiny little $4 books bought one at a time. And then there’s the literally hours of my time it took to get the orders sorted, collected, securely packed and wrapped, addressed, sealed, and then driven over to the post office. Add in the line of the post office. So it makes me wonder, How can this be worth all this? How!!?
And of course, the answer is, if anyone out there hasn’t heard of me, and they pick up something I’ve done and enjoy just a little bit of it, it’s worth it. Small steps. A step at a time.
So all that took a lot of time this last month. Besides that, I spent a lot of time trying to get my website together. I did this before the podcast, because I knew a lot of people would visit the website, and I wanted to be ready. When my first Tabloia comic came out in 2004, featuring Dr. DeBunko, and the Skeptics Society said they would include me in one of their mailers, I was not prepared. I had an extra thousand hits to my website, and I had nothing to sell, and so I made no money, and everyone forgot about me by the time they got up from their computer, and wouldn’t have known how to order a comic from a comics shop anyways, because the distribution system is so different from what they (skeptics) would be used to. I didn’t want that to happen this time, so I was trying to get as many fun and cool little items up at the site as possible, and I made sure there was as much as I could sell there as I had to sell. I even listed my “convention-only” Dr. DeBunko mini-comics and Ojo and “Dead by Dawn’ comics, and 11”x17” giant-monster prints.
I had two surprises. The first was that someone ordered all five of my Doris Danger giant-monster prints. The reason this surprised me is that I assumed everyone who bought stuff learned about me from the Skeptics podcast, and I didn’t imagine a skeptic would want Kirby-style pictures of giant monsters.
The second thing that surprised me was that no one bought a Dr. DeBunko t-shirt. For some reason, I thought for sure that there would be a skeptic out there who would want to wear a t-shirt that says “Dr. DeBunko wants you to join the Skeptics Society. Visit www.skeptic.com today!” But no one did that.