Monday, December 16, 2013

Yoshimi returns? (a blatant plea for artistic collaborators)

I'm currently looking for artistic collaborators on comic book projects.  I'm lousy at making these connections, so I'm making a blatant plea right here.  If you want to humor me, here's your chance.

It's funny, too, because with all my rotten luck breaking into comics, the last missed opportunity ended up providing me with a major plot element for my WIP, In the Land of Pangaea.  Based on a scenario originally envisioned by artist Don Bryan and further developed by me, I tried to keep the project alive (read an aborted effort here) until I totally repurposed it.  That's all well and good, but at the time I really wanted it to remain a comic book.

The couple of Bluewater biography scripts I've had published have only whet my appetite.  I want to do some original work now.  I want to do it badly.  I want to work in the sandboxes of other people, too.  Mainly, I want this creative outlet.

The (main) title of this post references Yoshimi, who's the featured protagonist of The Whole Bloody Affair, the source of another tortured march to publication.  I've been wondering if there was ever going to be another Yoshimi story.  The dramatic arc of her life completed itself before she hit sixteen years old, so I wondered what could possibly justify bringing her back.  And then it struck me.  She doesn't have to be the main character.

So that's how she appears in my initial notes for Boxer, one of the comic book projects I've cooked up and would love to develop with an artistic collaborator, maybe shop around to publishers (because most of them really love not having to do that themselves, the creative team for a project they didn't come up with).  Boxer is my high school drama.  The main character is the eponymous figure, and she's not herself a boxer.  That's her mom.  Her story is about establishing a legacy of her own, which is funny because that contrasts so well with Yoshimi's unexpected return.  There's another character who's the narrator, sort of like how Brian K. Vaughan has cleverly made a star out of the narrator in his Saga.  This narrator also happens to dramatically affect the shape of the whole story, because this is her interpretation, and she sometimes lets her imagination get away with her.  (Yes, somehow all three leads are female.)

If I make a big deal out of my hopes for Boxer out of a half dozen other potential comic book projects, it's because this is the one I'd probably most like to see move forward first.

If you know anyone who could help me with this, let me know.  If you only want to wish me well, thank you for that as well!  Either way, this will be one of my major goals for 2014, just so you know, that along with finding a publisher for Seven Thunders, and maybe one or more of my other manuscripts.  2013 was hopefully the last push for my self-publishing efforts.  We'll see!

10 comments:

  1. Sorry, don't know any comic book illustrators. Pat Hatt has over twenty, fully illustrated books, but don't know if the guy does comics or not.

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  2. I'm learning to become one. Let's see if you still need one by the time I can do a decent job. I share that dream of presenting my story as a comic book, you know. It is going to take a little while to get there, though.

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    Replies
    1. Dragons make good artists. Although I hear dwarves are pretty good too!

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  3. I've always had a dream of making comic books Tony. Keep the dream alive.

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  4. Really what you need is a Kickstarter to get the thousands of dollars needed to hire someone to do the job. That or get a bank loan.

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    Replies
    1. I'm in a position to give artists money these days, so that would not be out of the question. But it would not be thousands of dollars. More like several pieces of eight!

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  5. Here are some other ideas for you: http://www.ehow.com/how_4453889_find-illustrator-comic-book-idea.html

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