As you may have noticed, I’ve been drawing a lot of comics lately. I’ve become disenchanted with the impact of straight-up writing, and decided to try my hand at combining some words with some images and see how that goes. If I may say so, it seems to be going pretty well so far– although some attempts have been a bit rough, there does appear to be a wavering upward trajectory.
On the day of the election, I created some characters in my head to play out the sort of conversations I saw around me, or those I wanted to see around me. If you create a continuing cast of characters in a comic, and you post that comic on the web, I believe it’s called a “webcomic.” So I created a webcomic, apparently.
As you may also have noticed, the comics that belong to that series have vanished from this particular page. That’s because they’ve moved to a new page called Giant If, their new home. I plan to continue drawing comics for this series as long as they occur to me, which might well be for the next four years. Check it out if you feel so inclined.
Making the new site also encouraged me to do something I’ve not done before, which is creating a Patreon. I started this blog in 2010 and have written for it since then without any sort of external funding from ads or anywhere else, and decided that maybe it’s worth a try.*
Patreon lets you choose to let people pledge a certain amount of money per month, or a certain amount of money per thing you produce (in my case, comics). Both have a cap, so you can for example decide to pledge $1 per comic with a cap of $10 per month, or whatever. I think that’s a pretty handy way to both a) require someone to produce something before you make any payment for it, and yet b) prevent yourself accidentally paying a larger amount than you expected if your donee suddenly starts producing at a higher rate than you’d expected.
I also put a link to my Amazon wishlist on there, because what the hell.
That does not mean that Cheap Signals is coming to an end, btw. You’ll see that I haven’t (yet) removed or relocated the comics I’ve been making that aren’t part of the Giant If series. That’s because I’m not sure where they really belong– do I want to make this blog solely about writing, and that one solely about comics (of all kinds)? I don’t currently know, and advice would be welcome. But right now I plan to continue to do writing, at the very least, right here.
This blog, she is not dead. I’m still making stuff– I can’t not.
*There’s also a donation button on this page, if you’re interested in becoming the first person to use it.