comic shopping in australia

This week I wrote a guest post for the Weird Orbits Tumblr while my fellow Weird Orbits creator is away enjoying herself in the USA, so I thought I would post it here as well for you guys to have a read. If you have a Tumblr you should check out what she’s up to. She updates a lot more frequently than I do here and there’s always plenty of new content to have a look at.

One of the best aspects of living in Europe and being born in Australia is that I get to do quite a bit of traveling. I’ve been able to manage going back to Australia on average every two years to visit my family and play the tourist in my own country. Not only that, but because I know I wont be able to live in Europe forever, I do a fair bit of travelling here as well. What this means is that I’ve been able to check out quite a few different cities and had some amazing experiences, not to mention trying all manner of food and experiencing quite a few different cultures. Everywhere I’ve been though, one thing has occurred to me – comic book stores all seem to be the same no matter where you go. They are all so similar it’s comforting, right down to the socially awkward guys behind the counter. (For some reason the staff are almost always men. Except when I was in Zurich, but I don’t count that one as it was 2 stores in 1 – a comic book store and a travel agent. I know, strange combination.)

I have been in charge of the Weird Orbits Twitter account since we started creating and on my travels I have tweeted about every single comic book store I have been to. Some people may call it pandering, but I tend to look at it as a way to help and show support of the people that one day could be selling Weird Orbits to the masses. Fingers crossed. So when Lena asked me to write a guest post on Tumblr, naturally my thoughts went to these Twitter posts and how I could once again show my support.

Now some of these pics aren’t the best because I was using my mobile phone to take them, but I hope you at least find them interesting. And who knows, perhaps you’ve even been to one of them. I know if you’re reading this from Melbourne Australia, you’re at least aware of one of them. So without anymore waffling from me, here’s a sample of some of the places I went to on my recent trip back home to Australia.

First on the list is Heroes HQ in Ballarat and I’m sorry for the weird slant in the pic, but remember camera phone. This is an owner operated store and you can see Garry behind the counter. He was a teacher for years before he decided to pack it in for what he loves, comics! And trust me, walking around this labyrinthine converted house you can tell this man loves his comics. Every room has a different theme. My favourite was the 18+ horror room, but that’s just me.

This one is Comic ‘R’ Us in the heart of Melbourne. Hidden away through a small opening off the main street, round a corner and up a flight of stairs, this easy to miss store boasts a pretty solid collection and luckily for me has a few of the classics as well. I managed to grab Superman Red Son and Batman Arkham Asylum, which was pretty handy as I had just finished Grant Morrison’s fantastic book Supergods and was able to read the comics I had just read about.

This last one is a Melbourne institution. If you’ve ever been to Melbourne chances are you’ve either been in here or walked past it. Minotaur is home to everything a sci-fi, anime, comic, horror, movie fan would ever want. Everything from the latest Walking Dead and Avengers titles all the way down to Dr Who and Adventure Time merch. I giggled like a school girl crushing on the swim team when I found some Venture Bros figurines in there, but that’s just between you and me. I also picked up a copy of All-Star Superman (another Morrison gem) while I was in there. Again sorry for the quality, but camera phone. I wasn’t going to put the second photo in because of the blur, but you really need to see the size and scope of this place.

As a bonus pic I thought I’d show you Strips & Stories in Hamburg Germany. This place wasn’t the largest store and it only had a limited selection of English language books, but it was also used as an artist’s hub and was very supportive of the local scene. I have a soft spot in my heart for Strips & Stories as it was where i first discovered the craziness that is John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew. If you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this and go buy it. It’s insane, in a good way.

I hope you’ve enjoyed a quick look at what could be the other side of the world for you and a little insight into my holiday back home, (where i spent way too much money on comics – if such a thing is possible). If you enjoyed my contribution to the Weird Orbits Tumblr check out our Twitter account where I try to tweet everyday or my personal blog This Random Brain where I try to update every week or two.

making time for weird orbits

Lately I’ve been having some trouble trying to make/find the time to write. I know this is a problem for a lot of people who are doing the whole creative thing non-professionally. Between the day job and other commitments it can be real hard to just simply put aside a few hours here and there to just get down to business. I’m not going to tell you how to do anything, or what you should be doing, as everyone has different schedules, different issues and different constraints on what they’re doing. All I’m going to do is write about my three main issues and how I get around them. If you get something out of this, great. If not, well I hope that you can at least feel like you’re not alone.

My major issue is simply tiredness. I work in a job that can be physically demanding, spending anywhere up to 12 hours a night on my feet running around and dealing with the general public. It’s not a mentally demanding job, but it is tiring. At the end of the day I get home and all I want to do is put on the television and mentally disengage from my body. I know that it’s going to be almost impossible for me to sit down and write a few words, let alone a few hundred like I should be, before calling it quits. What I’ve started doing instead of watching mindless television is that I’ve begun looking for things to watch that are either within my medium or at least come from source material in the rough ballpark of where I am. This helps me do 2 things. First of all it helps me to relax and de-stress from the day’s events, which is what I’m looking to do. Secondly, and most importantly, it means I am doing research for my own work. I know some of you will scoff at this. Probably call bullshit on me and claim that I’m just being lazy, but I am currently working in a visual medium and to see what other people are doing and how they work around their problems is a great help. I remember reading one of Stephan King’s books on writing years ago and one thing he wrote stuck with me. He said that if you want to be a writer you have to read and read constantly. Not only read, but read everything. If something is written brilliantly figure out what the author did and learn from it. If the author has written something not worth the paper it’s printed on, figure out why and avoid the same traps. He was specifically talking about the writing of novels and stories, but the advice works for every creative field. And luckily, when you’re working in a visual medium, that means that you can relax, sit there and take it all in. It really takes no effort at all and you’re still doing something even if it may look to others that you’re slacking off.

Another thing I have found problematic with my own efforts is motivation and procrastination. Sometimes I just don’t feel like doing anything and try to avoid working on my project all together. Everyone feels this whether you’re doing something creative or not. There are several ways I’ve tried to combat this and it ties in a little with my first issue. When I feel like this I will watch something, just like my first point. I’ll take in the information and use it accordingly. Sometimes I watch things that I know are going to be awful purely to motivate me. I know that by the end I will feel so annoyed that someone wasted time and money on something that I know I could have done better, that I will just write out of spite and try to prove my assertions accurate. Other times I just force myself to do something, train my brain to think about my projects even when I don’t want to. Granted this takes more effort, but I have found when I force myself to work something out, whether it’s a story arc, a new character or simply to plan a few blog posts ahead, I will have a breakthrough moment. For example the other day I had nothing to do, I wasn’t working, I had no plans. All I was doing was wasting time in a YouTube wormhole, watching random videos that lead to others that all meant nothing. I thought to myself, ‘What am I doing? This is pointless.’ And at that moment I forced myself to close the browser and reread a script I had written that needed a new draft. At first I wasn’t in to it, but before I finished reading it something in my brain had switched on and I was redrafting, or doing what I should have been doing to start with. I admit it can be hard to just do this, but nobody ever said that it was easy.

Because I work with the general public I have made a lot of friends, some best, some good and some mere acquaintances, but this means that I am constantly invited to things or asked to tag along to nights out, drink binges, celebrations all those fun things people do at night. What this means is that I have too many distractions from writing. This isn’t a problem that I alone have (and to be fair they aren’t really problems if you enjoy them), but everyone has these distractions, and if not these, then some other pointless endeavours demanding your attention. My simple answer to most of these distractions are to say no. It’s not that friendly and sure you may annoy someone with your constant absence, but you have to think to yourself, what is more important?

1. Would you prefer to go out and spend time and money doing something that does nothing for you in the long run?
2. Or would you rather work on your art and see yourself reach the lofty goals you’ve set?

If your answer is mostly the first one, then, and this will sound harsh, but maybe you shouldn’t be trying to achieve a career in this field and be happy with amateur projects for now. If your answer is mostly the second, then learn how to say no to people. You can’t please everyone, but in times like these you really should be trying to please yourself or at least give attention to the ideas in your head. They wont be there forever and you really need to get them down somewhere or you may just end up losing them. Having said this, I do make time for certain events and occasions. Birthdays, weddings, dinner with friends are all important events that need your attendance and our lives would be pretty boring if all we did was work, no matter how rewarding. My main point here really comes down to learning how to say no at the right times. Learn when it’s right for you to not attend something and learn when it is right. Besides, not going out all the time makes it all the more special when you do.

Just to reiterate, these are the three issues that I face – Tiredness, Motivation/Procrastination and Distractions. I’m never going to get rid of any of them on a permanent basis, but what I can do is work my way around them. Hopefully what I have found to work for me and what I’ve learned to do may be of some benefit for you. I know that as my workload increases and becomes more demanding I face these issues more and more, but I like to feel that I am meeting these challenges head on and becoming a better worker and, more importantly, a better writer in the process.

Twitter

When we first decided to start a comic book together we knew that we’d have to begin to understand and utilise social media. It seems that anyone who is serious about using the web to create anything, whether it’s a comic book, series of novels or even to showcase your artwork, needs to amass a following or at the very least have a visible web presence. We needed to get the word out about what we are doing and social media was the logical choice. After all, how do you expect people to know about what you’re doing if you don’t tell them? It is basically free advertising. Our first step was Twitter.

I was put in charge of our Twitter account because I was already using social media for more personal interactions with family and friends on the other side of the world and because I was the writer and had a better understanding of how to use words to the benefit of our purpose. That’s not to say I knew everything about it, it was just that I was more used to the kind of interactions that occur online and more comfortable using it. I know a little about marketing and PR and it just seemed like it would suit me better than my comic book partner. It was the old ‘words versus pictures’ debate – she being the artist, me being the writer (that being said, we do have a Tumblr that’s in the works and she is responsible for that as it deals primarily in pictures).

Twitter is a great tool to get the word out about what you’re creating and helping other people know your product and in turn you know about theirs. For me it’s like two-way advertising that’s very low-key and allows you to interact with your audience in a very casual sense. Like anything you put out on the web there are dangers involved, but so far we haven’t had to deal with anything too controversial. Sure we’ve had spam followers and messages, but we haven’t received anything extreme like some people get, for example trolls. I put this down to not being that important or that we haven’t had too much attention as of yet. We are, after all, just figuring all this social media stuff out for ourselves and are using a combination of what we already know, what seems logical for us and for the most part trial and error. But what we use Twitter for mostly, is just trying to become part of the online community of comic creators and to build a following or audience. This brings me to my next point, how do you build an audience?

I read a few internet articles and blog posts about building your online audience and most of them said the same thing – follow people and people should follow back. So that’s what we’re doing. I follow anybody that seems like they have something to do with comics or nerdy things, anyone who’s amusing, anyone trying to gain an audience for their creative works… The list of people I will follow is long, however, I am a little selective in who I follow in some regards. This is something you’ll have to decide for yourselves, but I tend to not follow people who put up hoops to jump through, like going to a separate website to prove you aren’t a bot. I don’t see the point in this. You want people to follow you and hear what you have to say, but you’re going to make it difficult for them to do this. It doesn’t make any sense to me. If you’re using social media, why be anti-social? I don’t follow people who are merely quoting other people, or spreading the word of any religion. I don’t follow you if all you’re after is followers and trying to get some kind of Twitter fame while giving nothing back. I know that last bit sounds a little hypocritical, but it’s not just about building an audience, it’s about building the right audience.

There’s no point in trying to get people interested in your project if they’re just not interested. It’s like trying to sell shorts and t-shirts to people living in Antarctica. There’s no point. Sure these people may come along eventually, but right now your focus should be on growing a fanbase of people who are actually interested in what you’re doing. The basic rule of thumb is to offer something to your followers that they can’t get anywhere else. Which can include anything ranging from pics and samples of your artwork, strange happenings, your thoughts on various topics, or even what you ate for breakfast. I don’t care what it is so long as it’s your unique voice and it’s somewhat interesting.

Once you have a bit of an audience though, you will need to keep it going so they don’t lose interest. After all, no one likes being bored. In my experience it makes sense to Tweet something at least once a day. My Tweets range from what we did with the comic book, what movie I just saw or book/comic I just read, amusing things that happened or I witnessed… the list is endless. Again, just try not to be boring, superfluous and always have something to say or share within the online community that you’re creating around your work. Speaking of the online community, try to involve yourself with discussions, retweet things that interest you from people you follow and take part in Forward Fridays. All these things help to let people know that you aren’t only there for followers and fame, that you want to be an active member of your community. Most importantly don’t Tweet constantly. There’s nothing more annoying than someone who fills up your Twitter with nonsense so much that you never see anybody else on your Twitter feed.

Currently our follower count for Weird Orbits is at 460. I know it’s not that impressive in comparison to some people, but for us it is perfect. We have grown at a steady pace over the last three months we’ve been using Twitter for our project and almost every one of our followers is at least interested in what we’re doing, so that when it comes time to unleash our comic we know that we have at least 400 odd people so far who will check it out.

logo time

I thought that so you’d all think I was serious about this whole blogging thing I would publish another post today. I doubt I’m going to post everyday of the week (my life just isn’t that interesting), but I did think it would be a nice idea to start the new and improved This Random Brain by letting you see how serious I am about blogging this whole comic thing. I thought I would start with something pretty obvious and non-spoilery – our logo.

Now we unveiled it on Twitter a couple of days ago once we reached 350 followers. We’ve developed a kind of milestone thing on there. Every time we reach a certain number of followers I like to post a picture or sketch and 350 was our last. I think 250 may have been our last one, and then 200 and 150 were the ones before that. Don’t quote me on this though, as my memory of numbers could be wrong. At the moment it’s not really doing much to build excitement, but my hope for the future is that it will help to promote Weird Orbits a little by building some excitement once we are fully operational for what’s coming next. So far we have had a couple of retweets and favourites, which I got excited over. It shows that people are actually paying attention to what we are doing and helps to keep us going. That being said, no one commented on our logo reveal *insert sad face*, but there was some excitement over our behind the scenes pics and character reveals. It seems that people are responding to the way our comic is being produced and the art style we are using. I wish I could take credit for the art style, but that isn’t my department and it’s all down to my fellow co-creator. We have a very clear 50/50 division of work where I am responsible for the words and Lena is responsible for the art work. Which brings me to the point of this post – our logo.

It was my responsibility to come up with a name for our baby. In our first meeting we realised that we needed a name that fully encapsulates what we are going for. You see our comic isn’t a normal one panel or small strip comic, nor is it a comic about one specific character. We couldn’t get away with calling it by our main character’s name, for example we couldn’t call it The Adventures of Shiny Robot Man or RX-387 stars in Megacity Mambo. That would be against the flow of the comic as the little guy so far only appears in issue number one and then wont appear again for a few issues. I wont go into how we are structuring Weird Orbits just yet, but the name we needed had to be a little more encompassing of our complete goal of telling lots of stories in this universe that we created.

We thought that we should have something a little more like the old school stories of comics and television, something like The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected, Tales of the Crypt or if you’re a Futurama fan, The Scary Door. At first we thought of so many different names, but none of them clicked for us. Our tale is in space, in jungles, in giant cities… We are using all kinds of genres, Action/Adventure, Science Fiction, Horror… We literally have no boundaries of where our stories take place and our characters will bump into each other every now and again, so we needed something to show that. We finally came upon Strange Orbits, which suited us nicely, but there was one hitch – someone already had that name. And the worst part was that it wasn’t in recent use. Now I know it’s not unheard of for things have the same name, but we wanted something that truly belonged to us, so that it was a no-brainer that we would need to think of something else. Then I thought to myself, ‘What about Weird Orbits?’ And the more we thought about it, the more we liked it. Which honestly worked out better, because the more we thought about Strange Orbits the more we didn’t like it. Problem solved, so to speak. Now to come up with a logo.

This is where Lena comes into it, being the illustrator of the two of us, it was her task to invent our logo. I can’t go into this too deeply, as I didn’t create it, but I will say it’s more work than you think coming up with logos. First you have to decide the font you want to use and if you don’t like them you have to invent your own, which is time-consuming. Then you have to pick colour schemes, any tweaking of the font, the size of it, will it be all capitals or lower case… the choices are endless and you have to just follow the rabbit hole and hope what you end up with is good enough, or you start all over again. Fortunately for us, we really like our logo. It also offers us the chance to mix the colours around depending on who we have on our cover page and where it is. We also have a nice option to have a smaller version for the spine of any future physical publishing we may do down the line. And this is what we find ourselves doing mostly, preparing for the future. We are treating this project like it already has a following in the hope that a following will one day come.

 

 

 

Here it is. What do you guys think?

the start of a creative collaboration

So here we are, it’s been a year and I haven’t posted a thing. So much for keeping up with my blog posts. Ha! But I’m back with all new intentions for this blog. You see about 3 months ago a friend and I had the idea to collaborate on something creative together. We were just sitting around our day job, debriefing the day’s events after hours and she just came out with an idea. We were just two people, a writer and an illustrator, not doing much in our respective careers. Admittedly she was doing way more than I was in our everyday lives to advance on our career paths, but I digress… She just turned to me and said, ‘Hey, you wanna make a comic together?’ I had about a second’s thought and said, ‘Yes.’

I think it was a week later and we were in her house showing each other what kind of things we write and draw and it fit. Then it was merely a matter of planning what we were going to create and how to go about it. I wont go into all that now cause I’ll leave that for another post, but we came up with an idea and it all began to take shape. We now had a plan. All that was left for us to do was to begin the actual work, which was, if I’m going to be honest, quite daunting. It had been awhile since I had written anything of note and I had a fear that I wasn’t going to be in shape and had forgotten how to write like I used to. My fears were soon to be told to hit the road, as the more I thought about what we wanted to achieve, the more the ideas kept coming and the more everything came together. I can now quite happily say that I am 3 issues into our project and have the next 7 issues planned out, and that’s not even mentioning the fact I have complete character and story arcs planned.

If you want me to talk about what we are doing in terms of story and characters, I’m afraid you will be disappointed with this blog. I have no intention of telling you the story or what’s coming up and planned on this blog. NO SPOILERS! What I would like to do is give you updates on how it’s coming along and occasionally let you in on what my process is, what troubles we have come across and more. But for the full story you will have to read along as we publish our baby. As we publish I do plan on offering insights into why we made certain choices in terms of characters and plot points, also as to why certain themes and ideas were included. I just don’t want to ruin the story for anyone reading along. I hope it will be interesting. However, as you will no doubt come to understand and realise, we are not comic book people. Growing up I was never into comic books or graphic novels. I much preferred novels or films to what seemed to me to be childish and incomplete stories with bad characterisation and even worse dialogue and plot points. These type of comics are what we are trying to avoid. We hope that we can bring a fresh perspective to an old art form purely as outsiders using a new (to us) medium to tell our stories and we hope that you follow along with us. If we succeed in our lofty ambitions we will be overjoyed and if it fails, we hope to do so spectacularly.