Archive for January 1st, 2010

2 items.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

by Colleen Doran on January 1st, 2010
Posted In: Blog, A Distant Soil Blog Posts, Blog, Colleen's Work, Culture, Comics, Culture, Comics, Image Comics

Thank all of you so very, very much for your incredible generosity and support.

This year is jam packed with great assignments and I am working on many things I can’t talk about or preview here. That part kind of sucks. I am busting to show you some of my new stuff!

Over the last few years, I admit I was pretty down about the prospects of being able to continue A Distant Soil because of the very modest income on the project. As much as I love it, it’s incredibly expensive and draining.

However, bringing A Distant Soil to the web has made a huge difference. The new readers astonish me. There’s a lot of people out there! And the extraordinarily loyal, long-time readers have been my rock all these years and kept me going through some very lean times.

I now have no doubts I will be able to bring this book home. While I won’t be able to work on it full time for some months, I am proceeding with plans to clear the deck after my next two GN projects are completed in the coming months. This week, I am finishing off a conceptual art job, so there’s another few extra hours in the week.

I truly and deeply appreciate your coming to the official site to read the book. I can’t make any income on my work when people pirate the project, and at the official site, we have the support of advertisers. Yesterday alone we had 16,000 page views. That’s amazing!

And I know I get cranky sometimes, and I can’t answer all the mail, but this solitary, monkish cartoonist existence is brightened by your kind and encouraging notes. Today I got this one:

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!!!!!

I read the first hardcover volume my freshman year of high school four years ago! I’ve been looking and hunting and I NEVER thought to look online! OMG i’m such an idiot!!! I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m gonna tell my school librarians to tell people about this site so they can read it if they liked the graphic novel! OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG

Lynn

That made my day.

Happy New Year.

└ Tags: , ,
1 Comment

01/01/2010

by Colleen Doran on January 1st, 2010
Posted In: A Distant Soil Webcomic
01/01/2010

First and foremost, my sincere appreciation to Robert Pincombe for his noble sacrifice of dollars on the altar of A Distant Soil.

Robert popped us a donation after reading VERY BAD PUBLISHERS, which I continually flog, not just for my benefit but for yours. If you consider getting into the art and entertainment profession (any area, including webcomics,) I really wish you would take the time to read about my experiences. The posts start off a bit slow, but I go into detail about contract scams and other publishing pitfalls.

And in other happy news, the restoration process is a lot speedier now that I have learned to use the polygonal lasso tool. As of yesterday.

By the way, a question for the grammarians out there, because I never had two editors on the print edition who could seem to agree. And when I finally do a super duper definitive edition, I would love to have clean copy.

A word balloon is comic book language for quote. Many editors use double quotes when quoting inside a word balloon. Except if a quote is within a quote, that should be single quotation marks, right? Or not?

And what about titles? Should I just bold them or use quotes? As you see, Brent makes a really lame crack in panel one, and I am at sea as to how to properly do the quote deed.

And I can say Brent’s dialogue is lame, because I wrote it. Man, what a dopey line.

Thoughts? About the grammar, I mean. OK, if you want to comment about Brent’s lame quote, that’s OK, too.

└ Tags: , ,
14 Comments