Some bits of news for you to spread the word about:
- Grafic is now also available at Comic Quest. It's forty-eight pages of lovely work by student creators, as well as exclusive new artwork by Arnold Arre, Gerry Alanguilan, and Carlo Vergara. Comics for people who don't read comics, a steal at sixty bucks.
- Eyes peeled for Grafic: A Tribute to the Muses, a special format ashcan with all new content, to be given away during International Free Comic Book Day on May 3. (Participating stores include CCHQ in Katipunan and Comic Quest Megamall.)
::posted by Elbert::
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
What makes an anthology work?
brainfarting aloud
Humor me now as I go on at length about comix and, well, mostly comix.
Now that Grafic is out, I can look at the next comic project that I'm doing. There's no rush; I want the stuff to look as good as can be and time should be taken to think all this through. Obviously I can't afford production quality as snazzy as the Alamat books and Culture Crash, but if I have material that I feel is worthy enough to be published, I might as well put out a package worthy enough to contain it. Otherwise there's just no point to doing it.
The traditional method for Independents-on-a-Budget has been to photocopy their books and sell them at a price point that returns a marginal to zero profit. But, you know, it gets the work out there. The method though is quite labor-intensive and expensive, which is most likely why the New Media Method - I'm just coining phrases here - becomes a more attractive option. It's relatively free, and the chances of reaching a wider audience base is much higher. The promotions are mostly hassle-free as well - send it out to a few search engines, e-mail the link to all your friends and mailing lists, and the bean counter is bound to move a few units. Not much by way of peddling to people you meet on the streets.
But there's simply nothing like having something you can hold in your hands. Plus, you know, it's easy to post something on the internet, it's already pretty much a tried and tested method. I need a challenge. I need a stretch.
When I set out to distribute my 24 Hour Comic Project, I didn't want to just go the internet route, because I know that there are few people with the patience to read anything off a computer monitor. At thirty pages which people on dial-up connections will have to wait a bit for it to download, eyestrain inevitably sets in. On the other hand, as I said it's expensive and labor- and time-intensive to reproduce by photocopy. So I went for a middle ground of some sort, a multimedia CD-ROM that you can hold in your hands, a digital comic book taking on a tangible form as opposed to remaining ethereal and abstract data on silicon. At the very least the tedium of waiting for images to download would be eliminated, if not the eyestrain. I learned something else from the exercise too: that a lot of people are more willing to assign some sort of monetary value on something they can actually touch, hold, fondle.
(On another note, it gladdens me to no end, that half-consciously, my decision to go this route has sparked a small trend of some sort. Two people who've gotten a hold of my CD have sent me their own comics CD, and at least one other person I know has adopted my payment system of read-now-pay-later-what-you-think-it's-worth. I wonder: is this a first in the comics history of the country, this thing I did? Boy, will that be something.)
standards of measure
The number of local indie comics has increased in recent years, to the point where what once would be considered underground or alternative has almost become mainstream. Most of them are photocopies on bond paper, folded in half and stapled and sold, and this is what I'm trying to avoid. Because obviously I can't afford the sleek production quality of Atlas and Mango Comics or Culture Crash and Kestrel (which may be considered an independent as well, but production quality is at a point high enough that I can bunch them together with the others). So this is what I'm measuring myself against. The independents. The ashcans. The photocopied's.
Something has to be done to rise above the pack, to distinguish the product from all the other black and white powdered Selex comics on the shelves. Not just the indies, come to think of it, but something that makes it a bit different from the mainstream offerings as well. At the same time, they shouldn't just be different for the sake of being different. It has to fit the project; it has to be just right.
I mean, obviously, I couldn't publish the comic magazine Grafic as a multimedia CD. Well, I could, but the org members for whom I was brainfarting the whole thing would probably have killed me for doing so. Even if they didn't, the novelty of a comic CD would've already worn out on me if I did it twice in a row, on such short intervals - two months -between the projects.
There's goals to consider too. Grafic, meant to impress the academic community and persuade them to rally for our cause, would have to assume that most of the members of the academic community especially the ones who have enough weight and leverage to get us to a better position of spreading our comics activism programs in the university, did not know anything about computers. A book would have to be the way to go.
(I should also note that the cover was in a large part influenced by the goal, of impressing, attracting a largely non-comics reading audience. Hence, a cover design that cribbed more from books rather than comics magazines, and an orange spot color that was a decision made out of equal parts the abovementioned reason and economics. Spot color was cheaper, and orange just screamed "Look at me!" Besides, no one wanted to go with my idea of using hot pink.)
content development
So. The projects. There's Train Boy, which I'm prepping for il piazzo, one of the more prolific members of the org. Its a collection of short comics stories, the strongest of which is the titular Train Boy, a ten page excursion into philosophy, life, and the big cosmic picture. I'm considering playing with the format a bit, perhaps printing it in a quarter of the size of a bond paper, a big thing in a small package sort of thing. We'll see; friends have pointed out to me that people tend to have a treshold of sorts when it comes to shelling out money and a quarter of the size of a bond paper may be too small. But I dunno. We'll see.
What I'm more worried about at this point is Sansinukob. Sansinukob is a pet project of mine, my own thing, which means unlike Train Boy, the org won't be paying for it. So apart from the question of where to get money for it, I have to ask, what's the best, cheapest way of getting it done?
And even before that, I have to ask myself what Sansinukob will be in the first place. I pretty much am dead set about the idea that it'll be an anthology of graphic histories, comics relating anecdotes from periods in Philippine history. But that's still not narrowing my options much; at this point, I've already filled up three hundred-leave notebooks with notes and sketches, and I haven't even started any actual work for it. Do I, at least for this outing, pick one anecdote from each of the major periods to give people a broad chronological view of what I'm trying to do? Or, can I just concentrate on, say, the Spanish period and tell stories from there?
the gameplan
One other thing: is the idea that there's just one author enough to justify a seemingly haphazard collection of works? I'm thinking Train Boy may strike people as an odd duck, as it puts together a pretty serious story like Train Boy side-by-side with a laugh-out-loud strip like Biyo Biyo. Should there be a theme then that unifies the content, or is the author's name enough of a unifying element? Then again, you probably would have to be some name to be able to pull it off.
(What about if there are multiple authors? What will make those sorts of anthologies work?)
I'm also thinking about language. I'm writing Sansinukob stories, some of them in English and some in Tagalog. I'm wondering if I can pull off collecting both languages under one cover, or if that will be too jarring for some readers. Although I've been told repeatedly never to underestimate the audience, there's still this part of me that wonders that maybe some people aren't that adept at Tagalog, or that they'll find it baduy. The snob in me will say that those who don't get Tagalog still have some other stories in English to read, and those find it baduy can, well, can just fucking ignore my product for all I care.
So now there's funding Sansinukob to consider.And this is what I've been thinking for quite some time now, so stop me if I stop making sense, so I can think of something else:
I'm thinking alternatives to corporate sponsorship. I know I have a small base of family, friends, and people who are already familiar with my work. And those who don't know my work I can put up a web site with previews of Sansinukob for. The idea being I print out a number of tickets and sell them to these people; the tickets they keep and use to claim their copy of the comic book when it comes out. The money from the tickets will help subsidize publication costs, the logic being if people are willing to buy tickets for a concert performance they've yet to see, why wouldn't they buy tickets for a book they've yet to read? Of course, people will argue that people already have an idea of what to expect from the performing musician from the albums and radio airplay. And I know that. Which is why I'm thinking of putting up a web site with previews of what will be on Sansinukob. So that they would know what to expect. And if I start selling them coupons now, I probably will have enough to have it released in one form or another by end of the year.
Ha. Sounds like a plan.
::posted by Elbert::