Audio version -
John Ward’s substack:
Transcript:
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Yeah.
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Thanks for taking a bit of time to have a chit-chat with me.
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No calm.
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Comics on Substack.
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I've been thinking about comics on Substack,
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and my direction of thinking about this,
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and I can't help it,
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is I always think about the form.
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So, like, what works, what doesn't work, and what reads well, and how do you...
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Like the creative side, I guess.
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I'm sure you do that too,
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but there's also a whole...
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Not a business side,
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but maybe a distribution side or something like that.
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How do you grow a comic or make money from it?
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That's not like a...
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I don't have a natural tendency to be thinking about that.
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I'm thinking about story possibilities and what would be the best way to tell a
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story in a comic on Substack.
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So I figured I'd ask you to help me think about that,
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kind of be more holistic about how we think about comics on Substack.
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The whole comics on Substack, the way it started...
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Wasn't there like a few years ago where Substack was saying,
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like,
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we'll pay a whole bunch of comic people to come here and they were offering benefits?
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Do you remember that?
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Yeah, it was part of the Substack Pro, I think they called it.
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They recruited a bunch of professional comic writers and artists to create comics
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on Substack for a year.
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Unfortunately, no one really did that.
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You have three worlds and three moons.
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They did.
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Um...
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But pretty much everyone was doing classes on how to make comics.
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Scott Snyder, he still has a class.
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He teaches on it.
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And it's a good class.
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But you had Brian Michael Bendis and a bunch of people doing classes.
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No one was actually distributing comics through the email newsletter other than
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three worlds and three moons.
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And there was like one other group that I know I didn't subscribe to everybody,
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but the ones I subscribed to,
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it wasn't very many of them that were doing that.
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Um,
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And a lot of them have moved on since then.
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A few are still around, still publishing their newsletters.
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But I think that there is an opportunity for people to distribute comics through
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email newsletters.
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And it's funny you ask me about this because I'm not the best exemplar of this.
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I haven't published comics, but I do think about it a lot.
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My hesitation in doing it is,
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I want to be able to be sure that I'm able to keep up a regular routine because I
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don't want to start and leave people hanging.
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But if I ever do start publishing,
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then you'll know that I have a backlog and it'll be safe to follow me.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Well, that's okay.
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Well, that's already, you know, you've thought about it more than I have in that sense.
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I have thought about it.
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Like what you said,
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if it's on Substack,
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it feels like there's an expectation for there to be more of them,
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like more frequently.
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Yeah,
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because I just don't see...
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I might be wrong,
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but I just don't see people subscribing to a newsletter and just following the monthly...
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schedule that you would get from the american direct market yeah i can understand
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that point of view um i think that you have to consider that Substack is a different
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medium it's not like you're going to a store and buying a book um there are ways to
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lean into that but they bring a bunch of problems with it um because like
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The people I see who do actual art and tell stories through Substack are people who
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write like visual memoirs.
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They're doing like a comic book memoir.
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Not even a comic book.
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It's, I don't know, they're painting pictures and writing words on top.
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But it's not like word balloons.
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It's their thoughts.
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Single panel kind of thing.
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No, I wish I could remember her name.
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There's a woman who does this,
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and she's written several really beautiful,
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they're like watercolor.
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But she does like webcomics,
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I mean webtoons,
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where it's vertical scroll,
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and as you're reading,
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you progress through the story without having to think,
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oh,
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this is the next page.
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I'm going to start the top panel.
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Yeah.
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which it does make for great reading on Substack as you're reading it through your
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email and you're scrolling or on your phone.
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It's even better.
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Um,
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obviously,
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and you know,
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this,
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the problem with that is if you decide that you want to print it out,
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then you have to reformat the entire thing and you might have to do entirely redo
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several panels to make that work.
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Um,
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But as I've thought about comics on Saturday,
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I think there's a great opportunity here because there aren't a lot of comic book
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people here.
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growing number of web comics which i would lump in with us but um people who are
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making actual like comic book type stories not a lot so you you don't have a lot of
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competition um compare that with patreon where you have tons of people and it's
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more difficult to stand out um i think that
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There may be a business model where you make your focus on building a fan base on Substack.
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And you try to acquaint a bunch of people with your work by distributing it here,
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posting about it on notes.
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And it doesn't have to be a comic book or comic every time you post.
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You can do sketches or whatever or just write about what you're doing.
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But I do think that you want to give people a complete story when you post.
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And if you can't do that,
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then break up a page into,
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you know,
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like two posts per page,
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you know,
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where you cut it in half or something.
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Or spread it out throughout the week where you're doing a few panels.
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But you still want to deliver that this feels like a resolved storyline because
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leaving people hanging,
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it doesn't make for a good reading experience,
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I don't think.
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But you use Substack as your newsletter as a way of building up that fan base and
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staying in touch with them with the goal of eventually doing a Kickstarter for your
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print run and hopefully that's how you monetize it.
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I do think that there are opportunities where you could charge people on Substack,
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but I kind of want to say you want to keep the price low,
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as low as you can,
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$30,
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$50 a year,
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whatever the base price is.
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Because your goal with Substack is to build a crowd,
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and you want the barrier to entry to be low.
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I think that you should give people your comic for free, or at least most of it for free.
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Your paid tiers become like your superfans.
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These are people that you're sending like
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digital prints or a digital file that they can print out for as a poster or whatever.
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Maybe even do like a founder tier where you're going to send them like a sketchbook
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that you print off in your home printer or take to Kinko's or somewhere and have it printed.
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And you need to price accordingly to that because you don't want to be putting
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yourself on hold doing something like that but There are opportunities here for
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someone who's willing to think through how to structure it and how to make it make
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sense and be appealing to the reader so many times I see people who try to
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they're trying to think of how to build a paid subscriber list and everything
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they're coming up with appeals to other writers or appeals to artists and stuff.
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They're not thinking about the end user experience, the reader experience.
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So you have to put yourself in that mindset when you're thinking about things like that.
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Hmm.
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What do you think of the idea of doing a panel every day
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Because you were talking about having to reformat everything,
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but I think there's a way to avoid that.
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You would just have to be disciplined and stick to the same panel layout to your
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comic book that ends up being printed,
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right?
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so like watchmen is nine panel grid all the way through pretty much right there are
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certain things you can't do like you can't split up a scene over several panels
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that dave gibbons did but as long as each panel has its own thing there's a guy uh
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doing that he's he does a i think an
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eight or 12 panel thing.
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Yeah, he does a 12 panel strip every week.
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L.E.
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Mullen.
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His strip is Flight of the Condor.
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He's a guy from Uruguay.
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And what he does is every week he publishes three panels.
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by the end of the week you get your 12 panels and then he publishes the full strip
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and at that experiment i thought was interesting it's like why wouldn't you you
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know charge why wouldn't you do a panel every day because most comic artists are
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going to be able to do five panels a week right and by the end of the month you've
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got several pages right
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because then you're kind of feeding into that attention span,
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like,
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okay,
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give me something,
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give me something.
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But the trick, of course, is panel every day is not a story.
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So I'm just trying to think about how you get people kind of...
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Because when you go to a shop,
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you're expecting these are the comics for this month and you're kind of used to
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that's the way that they are,
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or you get a trade paperback or whatever.
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But when people go on the internet,
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if there's not something today,
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I kind of feel like maybe you're losing them.
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I might be thinking about it wrong, but that's kind of like what I'm thinking.
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How do you keep giving them something?
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Well, okay.
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If this guy's having success with that, then obviously his results prove that it works.
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For me, just thinking about it, and I haven't seen his comics, so I don't know.
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But if you think about,
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okay,
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panel one,
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your hero jumps into the room and you're establishing where he's at,
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what he looks like.
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That's your panel.
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That's all the reader gets.
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The next day, you show the villain that he's about to face off against.
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The next day, maybe somebody throws a punch.
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That's a lot of waiting or not a lot of story.
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Messes up the pacing.
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Yeah.
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And the other thing about having such a fixed format is that
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whenever you go to print it, how's that going to read?
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Because,
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I mean,
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yeah,
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they pulled it off with Watchmen,
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but we're not all Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore.
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So I'm not confident that I could pull that off as well as they did.
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Fair enough.
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But I think that maybe like
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if you take like a half page,
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you know,
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say you're,
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you got like five panels or four panels,
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say a half page,
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um,
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that's enough to give somebody a little bit of information and end with some type
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of cliffhanger.
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And then the next day you pay off that cliffhanger and hopefully set up the next one.
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Um,
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how that would read over the course of 22 pages in a book, you know, up, down, up, done.
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I'm not sure how well that would read.
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That's why I kind of think you want to do a completed story.
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One thing that actually I,
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I have started talking to a guy about doing a comic as an experiment,
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but what we're going to do is an eight page comic.
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so that's small enough to where you can actually complete it you know a decent
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amount of time um i you know could you do an eight page comic every week it depends
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on the page layout but it's possible um and if you gave yourself a little breathing
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room you might be able to pull it off um but that that might be an idea or even you
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know a four page comic
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you're not telling the greatest stories in the world.
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But if you look at like the old creepy magazines and,
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you know,
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all the horror magazines from that time,
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they were all little short stories or even modern,
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you know,
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ECs.
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That revival that they have going on were tales from the
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epitaphs from the abyss and stuff like that those are all little short stories put
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together in an anthology comic
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So yeah,
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if your goal is to write some superhero story about a specific character,
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you're not going to be making the next Spider-Man.
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But maybe you could tell four pages story about that character and then another
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four page story until you fill up a book.
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There are ways to do that so that it actually makes sense for the reader.
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So it's not...
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So it's presented as a cohesive whole,
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um,
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instead of a bunch of disjointed stories,
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you know,
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you could set it up that way.
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And basically anytime you have a narrator where they're telling the stories from
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this person's life,
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you've just now created a cohesive glue.
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That's going to stick it all together and make it make sense.
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Hmm.
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yeah yeah it just it really does feel like uh publishing to this platform it has
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demands on the form
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It can't just make a comic.
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I'm just going ahead and making my printed comic because I want to,
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and I'm still new at it,
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so I'm just not overthinking it.
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The thing is with panels that are larger than on the phone, the big panels don't have an effect.
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It's a pinch and squeeze, and it just doesn't make any sense to do that.
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I do wonder why, though...
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certain genre of comics seems to be kind of clicking on substack like you said the
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the memoir thing or i've seen those comics they're more like a um slice of life
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maybe you would call yeah i wonder what what it is about honestly you want to know
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what i think it is is they're actually doing it
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Instead of being like us right now,
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where we're just sitting around,
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well,
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you know,
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maybe this would work.
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Maybe that would work.
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Oh, well, here's the problem with that.
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You know, they're doing it and they're, they're trying stuff.
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They're seeing, oh, that worked.
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Oh, that failed miserably.
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And, oh, this, this is, this is clicking over here.
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And they're using that information to improve their delivery and it's resonating
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with their readers.
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So,
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and the thing I think too,
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that,
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you know,
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comic book artists and creators specifically,
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the thing that we all get hung up on is the idea that I've got to make this for print.
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I need to have a print book so I can do Kickstarter or whatever.
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And those guys aren't doing that.
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They're just saying, hey, here's my comic.
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I'm making it so it works best on Substack.
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Enjoy it.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I don't see how publishing it on Substack would stop you from printing it later.
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I mean,
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you can...
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It's just the formatting stuff,
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you know,
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because we all think about,
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you know,
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like the way traditional floppies are printed and how they're designed and laid out
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and all that,
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and doing the two-page spread and the page turns and all that.
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You can't do that on Substack.
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Yeah.
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And so... Yeah.
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It does sort of...
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point to how deficient we are in North America on the website, the American comics market.
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We just have not been on top of this
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adaptation to web, at least in the circles that I've run.
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But have they done anything different in Asia?
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I mean, if you look at Webtoons and those things, it's all optimized for vertical scrolls.
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They're not doing page flips and that stuff.
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yeah that's what i mean like they they've they've abandoned the whole idea oh i see
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what you're saying yeah it has to be a print thing that you because we've kind of
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gone the other way right like with if you're marvel unlimited or whatever it's just
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we made a comment for print and we're putting it on this screen if you want it
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here's 10 bucks a month or whatever and like no no really thought put into it see
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but i think that
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that could be the very opportunity.
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The thing that really makes somebody stand out is somebody who's willing to give up
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that idea of I'm going to print this one day,
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make it,
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this is purely digital.
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It's on sub stack.
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If you want to read it, that's where you go.
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Um,
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you throw me a few dollars a month or whatever,
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and you get all the access you want,
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but you know,
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leaning into that and cause you know,
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There's so much... It's the Wild West.
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You can do anything you want.
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You can try stuff.
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Throw it against the wall, see if it sticks.
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And if it doesn't, try something else.
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And there's a lot of opportunity there.
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And we're early.
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I mean,
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like I was saying earlier,
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this isn't like Patreon,
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where you're competing against a thousand other comic book creators.
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You're competing against, what, 60?
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100, maybe?
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I don't...
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I don't know.
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I mean,
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Substack,
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it's hard to quantify these things because so much of your visibility is determined
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by who you subscribe to and who you're following and stuff like that.
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And so I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that I've never met.
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And there may be entirely new comic book ecosystems out there that we haven't
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stumbled into yet.
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But they are getting better at recommending stuff,
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saying,
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hey,
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you might like to follow this person or showing you posts from people who share
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your interests.
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So I don't think that we're talking about thousands of people here.
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I think we're talking about tens of people, maybe hundreds at the most.
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Yeah.
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Yeah,
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and hopefully they do kind of get on top of the,
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what do you call it,
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the tabs or something?
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Like the topic?
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Categories, yeah.
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Most of what's in the comics tab has got nothing to do with comics.
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Hopefully with time they kind of refine that.
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Yeah, that's good.
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You're convincing me, really, to just put on Substack what I already have.
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I mean, I like it.
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I think it's cool.
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I think what's coming up is even cooler.
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So I may as well just put it out there and see what happens.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And later, if I want to print it out, I'll print it out.
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Yeah, like you say, the super fans who want to print copy, they can get a print copy.
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Yeah.
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Yeah,
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the model I've been doing so far is publishing the process of making the comic,
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and that gives me something every week
(00:22:41):
to give to people and people seem to like it you know i i put it to ambient music
(00:22:47):
and it's relaxing and i i do a voiceover to kind of give people an idea of the
(00:22:53):
creative process behind like making a drawing or whatever it's like i'm no master
(00:22:58):
at drawing or anything but
(00:23:00):
i am i'm better at drawing than someone who can't draw so it is interesting to them
(00:23:06):
right so that that's what i've been doing but i think i can continue doing that and
(00:23:12):
then at the end of x amount of time just publish here's what i've been working on
(00:23:17):
you've been following along here here it is kind of kind of thing
(00:23:22):
Yeah.
(00:23:24):
I mean, what do you have to lose?
(00:23:28):
It's not like you're going to ruin your career if you do something like that.
(00:23:35):
There's no comic career to ruin, really.
(00:23:37):
Yeah.
(00:23:40):
I'm just a guy.
(00:23:41):
That's smart.
(00:23:46):
So, we've got a few minutes left.
(00:23:50):
What comics have you been reading that you really like, that you think people should check out?
(00:23:55):
They don't have to be Substack comics, just comics.
(00:23:59):
I read a lot of horror comics.
(00:24:04):
Actually, let me look at my thing here.
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I mostly read...
(00:24:14):
digital comics, because I got tired of trying to find new places to store things.
(00:24:20):
Fair enough.
(00:24:20):
Let's say I just finished The Ultimate Spider-Man, where he's a middle-aged guy.
(00:24:27):
I read EC's Cruel Kingdom, Tales from the Abyss.
(00:24:35):
Cruel Universe.
(00:24:36):
Cruel Universe is called.
(00:24:38):
Yeah, they have another one.
(00:24:40):
Oh, they do?
(00:24:41):
Yeah.
(00:24:42):
Yeah.
(00:24:43):
Cruel Universe was their sci-fi.
(00:24:44):
They recently switched it on fantasy.
(00:24:47):
Horror.
(00:24:49):
But I've got just a bunch of books.
(00:24:56):
Yeah.
(00:24:58):
Nice.
(00:25:00):
Is that an iPad?
(00:25:04):
Yeah.
(00:25:05):
Nice.
(00:25:08):
But
(00:25:11):
There's a lot, I read a lot that way.
(00:25:14):
Yeah.
(00:25:15):
And I don't, I've kind of moved away from horror, from superhero books.
(00:25:23):
Every now and then I'll read a new one,
(00:25:25):
but a lot of times it just feels like the same stories I've read,
(00:25:29):
you know,
(00:25:30):
decades earlier.
(00:25:31):
And so that's why I switched to like horror comics because at least it feels new.
(00:25:36):
Yeah.
(00:25:38):
Yeah.
(00:25:39):
Fresh.
(00:25:41):
There's something that occurred to me.
(00:25:46):
What do you think are the... Because Diamond has declared the bankruptcy there.
(00:25:53):
Yeah.
(00:25:56):
What do you think of the idea of Substack taking over distribution for Diamond?
(00:26:03):
It's a pretty wild idea, I know, but...
(00:26:07):
yeah I mean they'd have to get into shipping and storage and it's not there it'd be
(00:26:12):
a nightmare yeah it's not their business at all yeah yeah but there is an
(00:26:17):
opportunity for an enterprising uh entity there to kind of do something with that
(00:26:25):
there's an opportunity there and it may even be an opportunity to make money but
(00:26:29):
you're gonna have to be very disciplined I mean Diamond had
(00:26:33):
up until recently they had a monopoly um and then marvel started going with penguin
(00:26:40):
ram random house in dc and went with luna um and that's the thing that they're
(00:26:47):
suffering from now is because they no longer have the monopoly so i mean you'd have
(00:26:51):
to be really disciplined with your money and um salaries and all that but
(00:26:58):
Someone might be able to make it work.
(00:27:02):
I am concerned about the long-term implications of being dependent on...
(00:27:12):
local comic book shops because you know I'm old enough to remember spinner racks in
(00:27:19):
grocery stores and gas stations and stuff like that and the first comic book I ever
(00:27:25):
got my grandma brought for me at a grocery store and
(00:27:31):
and so but they were places where kids would naturally be and they would bump into
(00:27:38):
comics and see it and want it and ask their parents for it or get their own money
(00:27:43):
and buy it and they no longer have that way now they have to someone has to take
(00:27:49):
them a lot of times out of the way to somewhere
(00:27:56):
you know, wherever the comic book shop is.
(00:27:59):
And,
(00:27:59):
um,
(00:28:00):
so they don't have that natural organic encounter with comic books the way they
(00:28:04):
used to.
(00:28:05):
No funnel.
(00:28:07):
Farming?
(00:28:08):
There's no funnel.
(00:28:10):
Yeah.
(00:28:11):
Just take them from all over and then funnel them into the distribution system.
(00:28:20):
Yeah.
(00:28:20):
The closest place that a lot of people have is somewhere like Barnes & Noble.
(00:28:26):
But even that, how many parents are taking their kids to those stores?
(00:28:30):
Yeah.
(00:28:33):
yeah the the newsstand is the internet now yeah so it's uh digital is definitely it
(00:28:41):
that's the way to go with uh with printed being kind of uh an ancillary product of
(00:28:48):
the digital thing uh that's that's the way i see it and and with diamond now
(00:28:57):
possibly out of the picture i think small press is gonna hurt pretty bad so it's it
(00:29:04):
this might be a big shift uh towards towards this might be the kick in the pants
(00:29:08):
that we needed to fix this digital thing yeah you never know yeah
(00:29:17):
Well, John, thank you very much for your time and your insight and your wisdom.
(00:29:22):
I appreciate that so much.
(00:29:25):
Thanks for having me on.
(00:29:26):
I saw you interviewed the Brothers Krenn.
(00:29:29):
I'm looking forward to watching that.
(00:29:30):
Yeah,
(00:29:31):
it will have come before you here,
(00:29:36):
but yeah,
(00:29:37):
maybe one week before or two weeks before,
(00:29:40):
something like that.
(00:29:41):
But yeah, it's a good one.
(00:29:44):
It's a good one, yeah.
(00:29:46):
Okay, I'm going to stop recording.
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