Rainy Road Warrior Newsletter
August 2, 2023
F my what?!
I did launch a campaign on the new website called Fund My Comic on July 13th. So far, only 2 people have backed the campaign and, honestly, that’s more than I expected. It seems like a lot of this crowd is from IGG, which, for whatever reason, has always treated me like I was a leper. At any rate, I’m just going to leave it running to use it as a storefront and maybe pull it down if I run another campaign on Kickstarter for another project.
Here is the direct link for those that might be interested.
Glimmer of Hope
I belong to a local cartoonist group that usually meets once a month. “You’re not a cartoonist, you fraud!”, you might say. And you’d be right… but also preemptively aggressive, for some reason.
I joined the group with the hope of hooking up with a collaborator (or two or three) that I could work with on future projects. As I stated before, I’m tapped-out financially and can no longer pre-fund production of books with the hope of recovering that money through crowdfunding. That just hasn’t worked.
The only path forward now is to find a collaborator who will share creative rights with me 50/50 and put in the work with the hope of being financially rewarded somewhere down the road or someone that can work for a low up-front fee then make the bulk up through crowdfunding (or sales) later.
With that in mind, I sent out a message to this group and it turns out that the guy who runs the group has a nephew who might be interested. So the group met up last night and I had a chat with the nephew and he showed me some of his work. The bad news was that his samples only consisted of character pinups. The good news is that they were pretty good.
I’ll be sending him an outline of my plan for Book of Legend #2 and the new characters that will appear in it. Hopefully, in the next newsletter I’ll have some good news to report.
Shane Came Back!
When I left for China 15 years ago, it was with the idea that I’d live out my days there. So, before I left, I got rid of all my personal belongings except for my laptop, my PSP, a suitcase full of clothes and my toolbox, which was shipped to Hong Kong via ocean freight. Most everything else I threw in the dumpster. Except for 2 longboxes of comics.
I had been collecting comics from the late-70’s through the mid-90’s and still had 2 longboxes of my most prized issues. I didn’t want to just throw them away and I couldn’t find anyone to sell them to before I left the USA. So, I decided to gift them to my nephew, who was only a year old at the time, and leave them with my sister.
Well, as I’ve said before, things rarely work out for me as planned, so I ended up back in the good ol’ US of A and discovered that my sister had kept my comic collection basically untouched — my nephew had never developed any interest in them.
I thought about asking for them back but that seemed very dishonorable. I was hoping that she might take it upon herself to offer them back since they were just rotting away in her closet but that never happened in the subsequent 8 years.
To make a long story short, my sister recently told me that she would soon be moving to a new house and wanted to get rid of some clutter — toys and whatnot that my nephew had grown out of — and wanted to know if my kids would want some things. Since we were also all going to meet up for a multi-family vacation, she offered to bring the items with her.
I realized that this might be my last opportunity to get my comic collection back — not out of greed, but to ensure that they weren’t “wasted” and with the idea that they might provide my family a greatly needed financial windfall. So, I took my shot and asked her and she said, “Sure. No problem.” And thus…
I’ve been going through the collection, cataloging everything, rebagging the most valuable issues and researching how to clean comics because I might slab a few. It’s strange having them back. It’s quite the trip down memory lane, to say the least!
Until next time!
~Michael T Gonzalez
