Annotated 24-6
I think this page or the next one was the last page we got fully scripted before the Kickstarter launched. It did pretty well right out of the gate.
You’d think that validation would make things easier on Phil and me, especially Phil. In the long run, I think it would, but fundraising brings a lot of different emotions, all fighting for space in your head. Even if things go well, “Ahhh, now to just relax and let the funds roll in” doesn’t get much time to settle before “Should I have set our goals HIGHER? How much has my modesty cost us?” pipes up, followed by “The flow of pledged dollars is slowing. Should it be slowing? Okay, yes, some slowing is normal but IS THIS NORMAL SLOWING or IS IT SLOWING TOO FAST?” and then there’s “ARE THESE STRETCH GOALS I HAVE IN MIND TOO EASY OR IMPOSSIBLE, I DON’T KNOW ANY MORE, MONEY AND LABOR ARE MERE CONCEPTS AND NO LONGER QUANTIFIABLE.”
To some degree, these anxieties brought me and Phil a bit closer, but because he was always our “face of sales” and the Kickstarter’s actual dev, the pressure on him was always going to be greater.
Can I just say how much I *love* the art in this one? Panel 2 is just so good, and panel 4 makes Sundar’s anguish feel real as hell. The art is normally great, but this one got hit right out of the park!
Thank you!
Kickstarters have always been a conflicting subject to me. One of those things I feel I either completely misunderstood or merely evolved from their original idea, like “Beta Testing” in games, which started as a “development phase with tons of bugs and testing, please help us” and turned to be “early access, pay us a lot and you play a bit early, but this is the release build”.
Crowdfunding I always thought to be merely a way to offset or eliminate the production cost. A zero cost production for full profit at sale. Possibly being able to potentially provide a lower sale price since, hey, don’t gotta cover initial cost. QUITE a deal if you ask me, specially risk-less if you aren’t even paying for the initial creation of the product. But as time passes it seems to me like instead the bulk of the profit itself is supposed be done out of the funding itself, what with stretch goals and whatnot, as if the end product wasn’t gonna get sold afterwards anyways.
I understand, however, that finding a clientele specifically for comics must be extremely hard, specially when the product is offered for free online… How DO online comics even start to make a profit? I highly doubt those one or two banners ever scratch the cost of production of these things.
Guy just get into porn, it has to be so much easier to sell. This is giving me a headache.
I’m just old enough to have grappled with a pre-web model for independent comics, and those publication costs are real killers, even at the small-business level. Whether or not you were paying an artist, you had to do better than 95% of what was on the market even to be in the blue. The web and apps are at least better in the short term, because distribution costs are suddenly trivial. Promotion has grown more and more challenging, but our basic plan was solid: produce the comic for long enough to get a loyal audience, then ask that loyal audience to pay for it in a collected form.
It worked well enough! It didn’t succeed so hard that we could ever quit our other jobs, but it paid for enough that we could finish it on our own terms. That’s a lot more than a lot of other people get. No regrets.
Good to hear! I’m still hoping that someday GA will be noticed by somebody in the right place with the right connections and it gets optioned for a Netflix series or similar. I really think the story is good enough for it!
I must insists on how much this chapter introduction moved me. I work in the mental health domain and quite a few times guilded age helped me find the right words about about difficult issues… either for me or my patients. Brunhilde here is dying, but with a few words she’s also changing Sundar’s world.
Well put. It can be a terrible burden to have the last words of someone be a lesson, it makes you feel like you wasted all the other times you spoke with someone, like there was so much more that could be said. But it’s also one of those burdens you never want to let go of, its a little flame keeping your connection to that person alive. That flame can illuminate things you would never have been able to see before, and it can keep you warm when the rest of the world turns cold. But it can also burn you if you cling to it too tightly, and blind you if you focus on it, instead of what it reveals.
I think Sundar ran the risk of that with Fightopia, if he’d kept fighting for it and hurt Byron or others, he would have clung so tightly to Brunhilde’s message that it became destructive and distorted. That he was brought to reason shows that he won’t let his grief blind him.
Such a sweet Mama Bear.
I always considered this page kinda….unecessary. Like…you know when in movies the guys is just waiting to say the last words before dying? And then, after that, he still has another last speech? This is this page. The last speech after the last words. Kinda annoying. Like Deadpool dying in Deadpool 2, but that was on purpose.
Still, it HAS great art.
And so close to mother’s day…