Woking as an Indie Comic Artist

Hopefully as you know Rage #4 is out now at indyplanet.com you can order the issue by mail and or download it for only 99 cents!

Already progress is being made on Rage 4.5. It's an intro story for Rage #5 (which will be my biggest issue to date, possibly a two-parter!) 

Check out a short vid of it on my home YouTube page here:

I’m setting a new standard of drawing rate which is a minimum of 1 panel a day which with my schedule turns out to 1 page a day. That’s about 4 pages a month, a good steady start, but looking at increasing that to 2 pages a week ideally which I’ll probably be at for a while. I’m someone with a thirty hour week job so it’s possible.

It’s the inking that will be the trick. How can I accelerate the inking process if it takes me one week to ink a page? That IS the question. I could hand off the pages to someone else to ink but I would have to pay them a decent fee. Will the comic sell enough to make up for that cost? Hmm…

Even though inking is a bit easier then drawing it’s still time consuming. I could shoot for inking 2-3 panels a day. It’s tough when comics aren’t your main job. A lot is asked of independent creators and this is all without color! 

How to make it our main PAYING job so we can do it more efficiently? That is something that I’m trying really hard to figure out. In the words of the great Dennis Miller, I don’t want to go on a rant here but I could go on about how artists are screwed from getting paid efficiently like other professions unless you’re in the top 3%. This is something that I must change because I was meant to do it. Born to draw, make art and comics so I should be able to make a living at it and so should a lot of struggling artists!

It’s time to be the change and go all in.

Here's the link to Rage #4 out now! Order it for mail or download!

https://www.indyplanet.com/rage-4

Rage #4 and Local Comic Conventions

Progress has been made with Rage #4 and I am ordering some comics for the local conventions.

Excited to get back onto the Indy comic book route since ‘The 19’ overtook the world conciousness unfortunately. Prayers to the victims of the terrible virus and prayers to the lives ruined in wake of it. The time to strike back is now. Now that the dust has cleared it’s time to kick the tires and light the fires and get some issues among the general public! I hope to sell off my remaining back issues and perhaps order new ones.

 

Also, in the works is a 10-Second Cartooning workbook for beginners. It will get the fires lit on drawing basics and get you practicing and sketching week by week building a the grand skill of drawing and cartooning. I’m in the process of putting the book together and getting them ready for the convention circuit as well. It’ll be great to get out among the people and talk again, maybe do some more drawings.

Also, drawing Rage 4.5 was slightly frustrating at first with the first page but the more I pushed through the more it formed into shape. It’s detailed oriented and I integrated the title into the background.i

You can check out some of it here: https://youtube.com/shorts/49TO1FXGP9I?feature=share

So yeah, I did 4 thumbnails as usual per page but I had to finally pull the trigger in one of them. The second page is proving to be trickier with the layout but that’s for the next blog entry.

Rage #4 Release!

Great, great news! Finally, after about two years. I’m very pleased to inform you that it’s here the next new issue of Rage!…Rage #4 is now on sale at Indyplanet! It took some time to get this one out because all of the back and forths Ka-Blam with the black contrast.

All of it looked good and dark on my screen but after submitting them they came off too light-gray in test printings. After some more money, some Ka-blam help and mistakes I was finally able to get the blacks to 100%.

It is a late release, but better late than never!

So the lesson to learn here is when you’re doing indie comics especially black and white, don’t trust your computer screen at all when if comes to the black percentages, just because everything looks dark enough doesn’t mean the book is going to print out that way.

Also, there’s more. I plan to release an additional ‘special’ silent version as well later in the year.

Soon you will hear my customized advertising on it in my podcast soon so listen to The Ham Palace podcast on Itunes and Podbean at hambo.podbean.com. Thank you all so much for staying interested enough to read these occasional blogs and being along the journey.

Go check it out the issue at Indyplanet.com!

Here’s the link: www.indyplanet.com/rage-4

It’s taken me longer then I’d care to admit but it is done and available to order or download along with Rage issues 1-3!