cwisnia

EDITOR’S EXCUSES: FANS! Thus begins a series of diary entries which we want to stress are harmless, completely made-up fictions! We’ve employed such literary techniques as farce, parody, humor, exaggeration, and good clean fun, for mere purposes of fantastical entertainment!

See, we’ve created a “fictitious government organization”, to play the role of a “bad guy,” to give our diary entries a sense of drama and tension and excitement! How could a “real” government agency possibly be so despicable as the one you will see revealed before you??! Let’s call this fictitious agency the DSRS (“dip shit something-or-other service”) that is LOOSELY based on a government agency that is in actuality a bunch of loveable, fantastic, intelligent, hard-working and fair people whose work is essential to America! Enjoy! -Rob Oder! Editor-in-Chief!

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION!

Wow, fans, it’s interesting to look back at this entry, as it presaged (our own artistic hack) Chris Wisnia’s most desperate, most insulting and humiliating, most horrible events of his life: the intense “inspection of how Chris spent money as a comics creator” by the DSRS, which Chris battled for almost two years! He learned more as the battle raged, but here, so innocent, so naive, he sounds almost hopeful and encouraging! Take heed! Don’t fall victim to his naive encouragement! If you ever find yourself pitted against this vicious, maniacally evil organization, GET A LAWYER! -Rob!

Diary entry: February 1, 2007

I was worried, as usual, about taxes this year. It’s always stressful knowing it will take so much time aside to work on adding up all my receipts for dvd and comic book purchases, and I always dread it.

I’ve got a program to help me. I enter in dates and store names and costs, and then I have to choose if each expense falls into “office supplies” or “travel” or “meals” or “rent” or “professional fees” or “printing,” or whatever else it falls into.

I made less money this year as a comics artist, because half of my income was thanks to an enormous “Ojo” royalty check, and another quarter was thanks to my initial “Ojo” page-rate payments. So Sam Kieth’s “Ojo,” which he was kind enough to allow me draw for, provided three-quarters of my “comics artist income.”

So all things considered, when you look at it that way, I feel like I actually did okay.

The problem is, my payments to all my idols for pin-ups ended up wiping out two-thirds of that income, and then my printing fees for the three comics and two trade paperbacks I published cost about double what I actually made.

So I guess I’m no damn businessman…

To me, it makes sense to spend these kinds of monies on something I can put into my projects and which will enrich and provide opportunities for greater sales. I need books to sell books, and if the books have big-name artists in them, they should be more likely to sell. But naturally these kind of crazy-assed stupid numbers worry me, come “inspection of how Chris spent money as a comics creator” time. This will be my third year taking a SERIOUS loss with my “business,” and I read that the DSRS only allows you to have two out of five years worth of losses. That means, by the book, you aren’t ALLOWED a third year of losses. So I guess that could mean I’m pretty seriously screwed.

HOWEVER, I learned that the main thing the DSRS is concerned about is that it is a legitimate business, and not just a clown who wants to buy a bunch of comics, and is calling this hobby his “business.” So earlier in the year, I sat down and read the DSRS’s and made a list of all the reasons I feel I am a legitimate business. Here it is, potential comics creators, in case you have any run-ins with the DSRS, and think any of these excuses can help you too:

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Don’t use this list, or this reasoning, as a guideline, fans! GET A LAWYER! It was literally the ONLY thing that stopped the DSRS from bullying, harassing, lying, and intimidating our artistic hack, Chris, even though they were in the wrong and Chris was in the right! As you will see in the following entries, our artistic hack, Chris, went through a year and a half of HELL with the DSRS, using the methods he chose to employ, and a lot of it was a complete waste of time, if he had only known to get a lawyer from the start! Although the DSRS guidelines list many of the items below as determinations regarding “professional vs. hobby,” Chris’s “inspector regarding how Chris spent money as a comics creator” wasn’t interested in any facts or documentation! He was only interested in telling Chris that Chris owed money that was in fact not owed at all! … UNTIL Chris hired a very expensive lawyer! And now, here’s Chris’s useless list, which he naively and uselessly compiled while making this diary entry! -Rob!]

A. Professional Training: I have a degree in art from UC Davis.

B. Time. I spend every available hour of my mornings (I work afternoons and evenings) writing, drawing, or scanning and preparing on computer my comics. Each page takes an average of one full day (6-8 hours) to letter, pencil, and ink. Books contain 32 pages.

Each time a book comes out, I package and send copies to reviewers and editors. This takes at least a day to get addresses together, prepare envelopes, write personal notes to each editor/reviewer, and get to the mail.

C. I have tried a number of techniques for selling books and formats of books, and am still trying to learn what processes work best.

1.    I tried advertising, which only minimally affected my sales numbers, but not enough to pay for the advertising.

2.    I tried books signings, which only made money from friends.

3.    I sell comics online, which generates business on occasion, based on reviews or mentions I get from various sources. I am learning which sources are most powerful in helping me generate additional sales.

4.    I regularly send out emails to fans, reviewers, and stores, to keep them aware of what work I am releasing or working on.

5.    I belong to and post regularly at a number of online comics-communities.

6.    Comic book conventions have been the best way to spread word of my product. People are there to buy comics, and usually say they haven’t heard of my book but enjoy it. In addition, stores and store owners, reviewers, publishing companies, editors, and other professionals who may become publishers or editors themselves one day, always attend, and I continue to make contacts every con we go to.

D. My activity is conducted in a businesslike manner. I keep active book records, and have hired or included the works of top professionals in the field on the pages of my publications.

E. I was able to get work-for-hire from one of the industry’s big celebrities, Sam Kieth.

F. I am working a minimum of hours at my “day job” (roughly half-time), so that I can make enough to get by until my comics career picks up. This gives me much needed time to devote to producing comics.

G. Even if I am losing money now, I am thinking in the long-term, building an inventory of my products, so that as my name catches on in the field, I will be ready to sell back-issues of my work to new fans.

What do you think, DSRS? Do I have a case for being a professional, and it just happens I’ve had bad sales luck for three years, and wouldn’t be surprised if the sales trends continue? If you have any doubts, feel free to give me a call, and we can set up a meeting to discuss it (That’s called an “inspection of how Chris spent money as a comics creator”).

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The DSRS thought little of this list! Admittedly, a lot of it was legally irrelevant and overexpostulatory, but even the relevant facts, such as Chris’s education, time commitments, convention commitments, and sales of product were ignored by Chris’s “inspector of how Chris spent money as a comics creator” … UNTIL CHRIS GOT A LAWYER! -Rob!]

Figuring out all the calculations for my annual forms, and getting everything entered went pretty smoothly and quickly this year (aside from me not understanding my program as usual, and adding up my profits by hand – since the program says I made a negative number for my gross profits), and I was able to pound out all the number crunching in under two weeks! For some reason I always think it’s going to be months and months (and I think it used to take me that long). It’s nice to be done and know I can jump into more Dick Hammer drawing.

Once I have all the numbers added up, my dad helps me with the forms. This year, the form-doing only took about three hours. It seems like it’s getting easier and easier, as we do basically the same entries each time. There have been times it felt like it took all day.

This year, as usual, the comics business did so poorly, that return is going to help make a nice down-payment on a house!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: You see what we mean, fans? What a kidder Chris is about a house down-payment! He makes it sound as if he’s not really legitimately working his ass off trying to succeed as a comics creator, and just goofing around ringing up a bill, so that he can dishonestly or unfairly snatch up free money that he doesn’t really deserve! But in fact, as the DSRS later had to admit, it was not only all money owed him, due to overpayments made by Chris throughout the year! Even more amazing, he would be owed remarkably MORE! But he would have to go through hell and the cost of a lawyer to see the money he was owed, and the year-and-a-half of HELL he suffered for it made him question whether he should just stop making art and give up his dreams! Thanks, DSRS, for doing everything you could to ruin your honest, hard-working American citizens’ aspirations and hopes, and encouraging them to be nobodies who despise themselves, their work, and their lives! And Chris had no conception of ANY of this yet, as evidenced by this innocent and light-hearted diary entry! CATCH FUTURE DIARY ENTRIES of Chris vs. the despicable DSRS … coming soon! – Rob!]

diary entry: March 19th, 2007
to cover December 17, 2006 through March 19, 2007

I had begun drawing the pages for DICK HAMMER: THE DAILIES, on November 30 2006, and was able to get eleven pages completed by January 17, 2007 (one page being the “cover image”). One entry was a “double page spread” which I entered as a two-date entry when I posted them online (listed as pages 4-5). I then broke one of the nine pages into two, making it two entries (pages one and two). And finally, I decided one panel should be zoomed into, to make a separate, second entry (panels 12-13). So those eleven pages became fourteen days worth of entries.

I had no web experience, so I told my web helper that I wanted him to set up for me a page where I could just post each new image myself, as I finished them. I didn’t want to have a “click here for next page.” I liked the idea of just scrolling down, down, down, as the story continues.

That said, I still wanted the images lain out so that you could basically look at (and hopefully enjoy, sit back and appreciate) one entry at a time, and then scroll down to the next one when you were done taking in the previous one. The idea with this project was to give each day’s entry a feel that it is its own self-contained little story, with a beginning and end. But that it adds to and builds up the overall story.

It took my web helper a few months to establish that set-up for me, so by the time I had begun posting the images, I was theoretically a couple months ahead of schedule. I planned to post one image every week. I liked that I had made this lead time for myself, because it’s always safer to give yourself a cushion. The other thing though, is that I planned to bite into my cushion a little, and post a number of images all at once, to help get the story started in advance. The first images are just cityscapes, so I thought I should post a lot of these at once, rather than make readers wait an entire week before showing them the next cityscape with absolutely no advancement of story. I “back-posted” the dates, to give readers the feeling some poor suckers might have had to have checked in every week to see basically nothing. It was a gag.

I wrote a long text intro (as I am prone to do with any of my projects), and then posted the first six entries, and voila! The web comic had begun!

I formally announced the release of my web comic by sending out a mailer to the mailing list I’ve slowly been collecting at conventions. This list also includes a lot of stores, and anyone who has been kind enough to take time to review my work. Then I went to a couple message boards to announce the web comic, and I also posted a bulletin at myspace. Lastly, I sent a personal email to Scott McCloud, who I consider the guru of web comics.

After that, all that was left was to check my emails every few hours to see if anyone had written me to say how much they enjoy it. I’m still waiting on that last part, and beginning to check a little less frequently (now three months into posts).

The pacing of the comic is pretty slow, so I’m thinking after the story has actually run for a little while (What I mean here is not that a bunch of posts are up, but that posts are up that actually convey a bit of the story), I’ll need to send some new hype out.

I was afraid some people might look at it, and then go, “Maybe I’ll check back in a month. And one of my friends confided that this is how he felt about it. Hopefully, it will gain interest as the story actually proceeds.

I just finished posting the introduction sequence, and added a new text sequence featuring the No-Good, Dirty, Stinking Back-Stabbing Rats. I had this idea from reading reprints of old 1950’s comics. As Al Feldstein told me (and I later read further confirmation from a Stan Lee introduction to a hardcover collection of Kirby’s giant monster comics), comics used to get a significant delivery discount from the post office, so long as they contained two pages of solid text. For this reason, all the old comics had these stupid-ass text-only “features,” that no one ever read. And the publishers knew no one read them, so they didn’t care who wrote them, and probably didn’t even bother to proof-read them.

So I was looking at these text features, and actually reading some of them, and thinking, I’ve got to put a text feature in some of my comics. And I sat on it for a while, and tried to come up with a feature that would be fun as a “text only.”

A few years ago, I had bought some old radio programs of “The Shadow” on Cd, and I enjoyed them enough to buy a number of other radio programs. Recently, I had hopped into my car, and the local college radio station was playing a radio show, and I listened for a minute and realized it was a Dashiell Hammett “Sam Spade” adventure, and it got me all excited, to the point I wished I didn’t have to get out of my car.

And then the next time I happened upon an old text piece in a comic, it hit me. I should do a film noir radio show as a text piece, to give a little break between chapters, in my Dick Hammer web comic. The whole point of radio shows is that you’re hearing all this stuff. You hear footprints, and a knock on a door, and a door open, and you can’t see any of it. So I thought, What if I do a a radio show, which is dependent on sound, but you can’t actually hear any of it, you have to read it instead? Portraying sound just through text. Will readers be able to “hear” the show? Find out . . . only in Dick Hammer: The Dailies!

I started thinking of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and Michael Madsen’s torture and “ear” scene.” I wanted to try and invoke violent, disturbing imagery like that, just as an experiment. To see if I could make “listeners” (readers) squirm, without “seeing” or “hearing” anything.

The final element to the Dick Hammer web comic was deciding I wanted to title every chapter with a real pulp fiction title. I realized I didn’t care if the title had anything to do with the chapter, or even with the story. I just wanted some melodramatic titles.

I was reading James Bond novels and realizing Ian Fleming titled all his chapters, and I was thinking, I never title any chapters. I never even think to title chapters. That might be fun.

Also I had just finished reading an anthology of Cornell Woolrich short stories, and all the titles were so vibrant and corny and fun. So one day, I sat down in my living room with a pen and piece of paper, and jotting any stupid-ass phrase that came to mind, jotted down I’m guessing sixty or so ideas that I’ll be able to pick from, each time a new chapter comes up.

Even with all my advance work to keep on my “once a week” deadline, I’ve managed to get behind schedule. I didn’t even realize I was behind, but last week, as I posted the latest contribution, I realized my previous contribution was ten days earlier. That’s no good. And what’s especially no good is that I’m down to my last entry that I have finished in advance, and it needs to be posted this week. That means this week, I will have officially dried out my two month lead-time, and will have to make sure to publish one post a week. Wish me luck, fans.

Wow, fans! One hundred fifty diary entries! This entry marks the beginning of our own artistic hack Chris Wisnia’s decent in madness! Not literally – figuratively! This marks the beginning of his hardships as a father trying to create comics, the family stresses and difficulties, and his bitter battle with the evil criminal organization known as the Internal Revenue Service! And more! So stay tuned over the weeks for more excitement! -Rob Oder, Editor-in-Chief!

diary entry: January 6th, 2007

At San Diego, I spoke with a few fellow self-publishers about how I would like to try and hit a couple decent conventions before the end of the year, because I knew I’d be putting out a Dr. DeBunko collection, and two Doris Danger 16-pagers. I wound up hitting the Portland show, because it was so convenient to have relatives I could stay with. That got me discussing future con plans with my wife.

Elizabeth and I began realizing we have a number of friends in a number of cities, and all these cities have good comic conventions. We have two sets of friends in Atlanta, a friend and another friend’s family in Chicago, my cousin in Portland, a fellow comic self-publisher’s family in Seattle, tons of friends in Los Angeles. And our friends just keep spreading into new areas.

Also, Elizabeth pointed out, if we’re going to fly to cons, now is the time, because when Oscar turns two, the airlines won’t let him sit on our lap, and we’ll have to buy him his own seat. So we thought, if our airfare is less, and we can have a place to stay for these conventions, it could make the conventions theoretically not such a loss. It’s a smart business decision! Visit our friends, not pay for hotels, not pay for an additional airline ticket, write off the trip as business . . . So many good reasons to go visit friends! * (see important note below, employees of the Internal Revenue Service! -Rob!)

Upon this realization, we started looking for conventions we would like to go to this year, and next thing we knew, we had booked every other week from the end of February all the way through March. What were we thinking? And of course the bummer is, there are still a few cons we would have liked to have gone to, but we knew it was already way too much scheduling. We began dreading it more and more, as soon as I sent in the applications.

In the past, we’ve done usually five or six conventions a year, with two or more of them being very local (an hour drive away, and a stay either with my sister or one of my many close friends in the bay area). That’s basically two fairly far away places a year, and then the big, expensive San Diego trek. So this year, with seven cons on the calendar, and at least two more as yet unconfirmed but on our mental schedule, AND with a one year old terror to accompany us (my great, great son), it should be a hell of a year.

And then things would even get worse. (Writing now, in 2010) This would be the beginning of our worst, hardest times we’d faced.

* NOTE TO THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE: When Chris speaks about visiting friends and then writing off the trip … he’s actually using literary techniques such as “overstatement”, “embellishment” and “hyperbole”! He’s using “artistic license” to make for an entertaining, fictional, farcical exaggeration! You can rest assured that his every real-life business venture is, in actuality, wholly professional and legit! -Rob!