It's been awhile....

The past year has been an interesting one. I've been blessed to be busy with a variety of comic assignments and commissions; the flip side is that I haven't had much time to devote to Sore Thumb Press.

That should change in the near future.

With the reality that Kickstarter is now available to Canada, I can seriously consider acquiring financing to complete one or more of my concepts. My wife and I feel that Ninja Baby is very close, and would be a great book to finally complete; I'm also mulling a Jo Nemo 80 page giant, a homage to the comic books I loved as a kid.

The thought of finally publishing comic books that have bounced around my noggin for decades is incredibly appealing and exciting. Considering how The Big Two have strayed from all-ages material in their main super-hero lines (catering to a dwindling, cynical, aging fan base of which I was once a part of) encourages me to push forward with mine.

The main challenge is time management and organization; once my pitch is ready, I'll keep my fingers crossed that we get attention. I should spend December preparing my video and making concrete decisions on my publishing goals short term as well as long.

I hope you will all join me for the ride!

Colorist found!

Right after our last post, we found our perfect colorist: Dustin Evans. He did an amazing job on the sample pages we gave him, following our directions while adding an individual twist. It feels wonderful to have a certain amount of the graphic novel inked and colored; the finish line is slightly nearer.

The next step will be securing funding in order to complete the book. As well, I have another story to plot and draw, to fill out the page number we've decided to go with. 

Not enough hours in a day!

Colorist search results

Our recent attempt at finding a colorist for Ninja Baby has been an eye-opening experience. It's very cool to see all of the talented folk around the world interested in working for us. Some digital painters showed absolutely incredible samples; that being said, despite carefully scrutinizing all emails/portfolios, the perfect 'fit' for our project just wasn't there.

It's difficult to quantify exactly what we were hoping to see; we just know that the right candidate would've jumped out at us.Ninja Baby (and all STP properties) are our 'babies' of sorts, and handing them off to someone new is a daunting challenge that requires much deliberation.

We've decided to take a temporary step back; our goal remains to have a certain number pf pages colored so that the images might spruce up an IndieGoGo pitch. Once that step is accomplished and funding is in hand, we're tremendously excited to move our concepts forward toward publication.

Please check back often for news about Sore Thumb Press!

Revising the format of the older artwork has allowed me to tweak the storytelling. I didn't notice as much when inking the first time how much information was crammed into a given page. By allowing panels to 'breathe', the story actually flows better. Having reformatted the very first Ninja Baby story, we arrive at 16 pages. I'll be reformatting the second story as time permits.

Looking forward to this book being completed! We've plotted the third story that will be in the book, I'm excited by what's in store....
 

Incremental forward progress

My wife's input has been invaluable; her comments have allowed us to steer our publishing venture in exciting directions, and I'm grateful for that.

We've discussed the format for our first book, based on printing cost; she also brought up the point that a certain book size is popular, and it got us rethinking the pages I'd already inked. With rescanning and reformatting, we can package Ninja Baby as a 'manga digest', which will allow the artwork to breathe better, and appeal to our target demographic.

I'm thrilled by this direction, and will start tweaking the finished artwork. As a bonus, it'll be easier to achieve a certain number of pages, without necessarily creating much new artwork. 

I'm looking forward to having our first book ready to sell!

A New Year, ripe with promise

It depresses me a bit how I haven't spent much time on our small press endeavor over the last few months. Focusing on paying work remains a priority, and I look forward to the day when I can place all my attention on our 'baby'.

Discussing things with my partner in crime, it seems that a decent sized 'graphic novel' is the way to go. That would be easier to sell than a comic book, especially considering that the market for kid's comics seems so dead (which is itself depressing considering how comic books were a powerful entertainment phenomenon in the past). Deciding to target young readers hungry for graphic novels just makes sense.

The trick is figuring out the size of the book. 100 pages seems daunting; even 80 pages (a size which appeals to me on account of the Silver Age 80 page giants I love to collect) is a lot of pages to fill. I think 64 pages might be the answer, a decent amount of material for the print format we're looking at.

Currently I have 24 inked pages of Ninja Baby; expanding the book as described above will involve some work, but the end result should be exciting and inspiring. Just gotta get cracking on it, which fits in with my resolution to sharpen my focus in 2013.