This is crossposted with my newsletter
Hello all! I hope you are safe and healthy.
This month I’ve been playing catch up on things that fell to the wayside because of the pandemic. I’m also figuring out what to do since all the cons are canceled for the year. Well, not all of them just yet but San Diego Comic Con was canceled. So I think it’s just a matter of time until ECCC’s rescheduled date and all the August cons are canceled. Then probably the September ones too. So I’m rethinking what to do with the rest of the year.
I mentioned last month that I was planning to kickstarter Murky Water (next The City Between book) in September. But I’m debating on if that is a good idea. Partly because I got a lot on my plate. Right now I have:
- 3 different Cautionary Fable books in various stages of editing
- some freelance editing jobs for Iron Circus Comics
- I’m starting drawing You are the Chosen One
- I need to color and letter a book I’m doing with my pal Jose Pimienta called Stars Hide Your Fire
- I’m drawing Murky Water
- Cleaning up a pitch package to send to publishers for an untitled sci fi book
- Several commissions like this one.
The idea was to do Murky Water first so I would have a new book in 2021. But with all the 2020 cons canceled, that means most shows never saw The Dead Deception. It is probably safe to skip having a new book in 2021. Also, when I started The City Between, I was doing two experiments business wise. Basically, all of them have been print only first, then gone up online. The idea was if someone was impatient for an update they could buy the book or PDF. It mostly worked, but I think at the expense of my patreon. I handicapped one of the easier patreon rewards a webcomic can do, reading pages early. Anyone who was only backing to get pages early, probably just bought the book. That, plus it being safe to not have a new book, and my workload being kinda heavy means now is a good time to switch back to web first. But I’ll decide closer to the end of the year.
But speaking of Jose Pimienta and our book Stars Hide Your Fire, him and I have decided to start streaming weekly on twitch. We will be around Wednesday at noon PST. We did our first two already. The first is mostly a sound test and isn’t much to share, but the second I’m drawing the commission I showed part of above while Jose and I talk about tv, anime, and musicals. Twitch is set to save them for about two weeks before they get deleted. If people really like them, we’ll start saving them to Youtube.
One of the things we talked about is Love Never Dies. It’s a musical and a sequel to Phantom of the Opera. Each weekend Andrew Llyod Webber is posting a different one of his musicals free on youtube for just the weekend. Last weekend was Love Never Dies. The plot is the Phantom survived and escaped the mob at the end of Phantom. He started a very successful freak show on Coney Island. Now it’s 10 years later and the Phantom wants to show Christine how cool and awesome he is now and that she should have stayed with him. It is kinda a trainwreck. And was written right after Andrew Llyod Webber got divorced from the actress who originally played Christine in Phantom. I watched it in sync with a few friends while we were all in a discord chat. It was the quarantine version of getting drunk and watching a bad movie together.
After watching that very bad musical, I decided to watch a musical I heard was good. That is The Death Note Musical. This is a musical I had already heard the soundtrack to because my good friend Molly told me about it a few years ago. I recently learned it’s on youtube. The Death Note musical has a fun development backstory. Molly told me about it because I rather like the Jekyll and Hyde Musical. The composer of the Jekyll and Hyde musical was hired to write a Death Note Musical even though he didn’t speak Japanese and didn’t know anything about Death Note. So he wrote the whole musical in English, recorded a concept album, then sent that to Japan to be translated into Japanese before it was performed. Anyway, both the concept album and the musical are on youtube. The above picture is a shot to show off how they show people’s lifespans on stage. An effect I thought was cool.
Other than watching a bunch of musicals, I’ve been relistening to the audiobooks of the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. If you are unfamiliar, October Daye is a half-fairy detective who works on fairy crimes. It’s got an awesome cast of characters and puts a lot of thought into how folklore would interact/clash with the modern world. I highly recommend this series as well as anything written by Seanan McGuire.
That about sums up my month. I want to end by once again thanking everything for backing my Patreon right now. With cons continuously getting canceled money has been tight, but I’m doing okay mostly because of your support and orders in the store.