How I Recommend Working Toward Your First Graphic Novel Book Deal
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Rough Transcript:
Cloud Town Tuesday part 10 comic book author commentary
[00:00:00] Time lapse. Welcome to Cloud Town Tuesday. The day where I share a page from my graphic novel, Cloud Town, and, um, tell you about the process of making it. It's like a, um, editor's commentary on a DVD. Here it is. Let's go. Let's do it. So, this one is going to show you very little because I drew this This was part of the zine, this page.
Oh, cool. So I just go back and try to draw it cleaner. The first version was the version where my editor was like, Oh yeah, this is good, but can you send me finished pages? And so this is me trying to make it look more professional. Cloud Town was in a zine first? Yeah, I made two different Cloud Town zines.
Oh, really? Nice. And the second zine was my pitch. So like, the advice I was giving you about making like zine length things that could be pitches is like the advice I took and eventually got me a book deal. Cool. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. That's what I'm trying to do, put like one series inside of all of my zines that have a bunch of one pagers.
And then there's one that has like a few [00:01:00] pages that's an ongoing story. And then I could use that as like a pilot. Yeah. Like, uh, this one was 60 pages, which is too long. But I wanted to get to the point where they were in the robot. Um, because my previous pitches, I was having trouble --or the editors We're having trouble imagining where the story would go.
So I had to keep it simple enough that they could predict it, but not so simple that they would be bored by it. And like, oddly, that's a weird balance. I find it really frustrating that I have to make things less interesting. Well, to me, in order to, um, have an editor's faith that they can be good or can be sold.
Do you think the limitations have made you more creative with the project at any point? Sure, yeah. I think limitations can be good. And for me, I over imagine stuff. So, I would've, I could remake the same thing infinity times. [00:02:00] You could've been stuck on something for a while. Yeah, yeah. So, like, I, like, the way I'm redoing the Macho Valentine pitch now as a shonen manga, like, I could do the first chapter of Macho Valentine infinity different ways.
Yep. Um. So the moment someone gives me money and was like, no, do it this way, that's actually really helpful for me. Yeah, for sure. It gives you like one thing to focus on and then you can play with that one idea and external pressure to get it done. Yeah. Yeah. That. Alright, so that does help. This is the first page that shows up that's like actually story we're of the zines was any pages in the zine and the final book.
Yeah, that's one of 'em.
