Guest Comic Annotations – T Campbell
So at the time, we were up to our eyeballs in Guilded Age Kickstarter preparations. Phil was increasingly upset with me for how long I was taking to get back on emails. I was still managing both Fans and Penny and Aggie in addition to the GA work and having a tough time motivating myself on the business end (you can only lose money for so many years before you stop wanting to deal with it altogether).
It was a good time for us to take a bit of a break on the comics-production side of things. Too bad we didn’t!
Partly due to my worries about losing readers right before the Kickstarter got under way, we kept our “guest week” to a single week when we really could’ve used two, and Phil and I each produced a “guest strip” of our own, turning our break into almost no break at all. This concept, adapted from the much better execution in Fans, is something I banged out at the last minute while Phil and I were at a convention. Some of the “Syr’Nj notes” are better than others, but I wish I’d spent a few more days revising this and maybe figuring out why Syr’Nj would be using this kind of format in the first place. Sure, she’s an inventor, but even so.
It’s only been in recent weeks that I knew there were creative troubles beyond a general “the kickstarter goals were overly ambitious and it resulted in a lot of stress for everyone on the creative side. I feel bad about all of that; I wish for everyone’s sake that things had turned out better… even if it’s likely there were different ideas on what “better” means.
Regardless, once again I’d like to thank you guys for everything; and I am very glad to have contributed to the project.
No problem, and don’t feel bad! It was complicated; some months were more troubled than others. But just by showing up and reading and letting us know you were reading, you guys made the good times better and the bad times easier.
I really appreciate how vulnerable you are in these annotations. You don’t shy away from the more difficult parts, but even in your honesty you grant your coworkers a dignity that escapes many who recount acrimony. It shows a deep inner strength and humility that I greatly respect.
:-)
I know this is a pretty old comic, but I noticed a couple of mistakes here and you seem like the kind of person who’d want to fix them for something like this. The first letters of 39 across spell “animil” instead of “animal”, and the excerpts in 4 down have the word “need” in it but not “needs”.