Weekly Update - 81 (Patreon)

Happy Monday everyone!  And holy crap what a week it's been!

We got our SECOND Landlord-tier Subscriber this week, Darryl Flood, so as soon as I get in touch with them to get their character details you can expect to see another new Kuserran Hero joining our roster!  Thank you so, so much for your subscription!

And we also got another new Scavenger!  Ashley Fox!  Ashley has been a friend of mine for quite some time now and I'm very happy to have her joining us!  She has a couple of her own webcomics over on Furaffinity with some very intriguing themes and characters in a very different, but also curiously dystopian* world!  (Explicit Content Warning because there is some explicit content, but if that doesn't bother you: LINK)

Comic this week?  Yes!  I was so excited for this next upcoming page I actually finished it super fast, with several days to spare, so it'll be going up on Wednesday.

Max Poster?  I spent what little time I managed to set aside on a particularly busy last Friday working on it and I actually made some pretty good progress!

Drawing:  Page 118 and Max Poster

Playing: Rimworld and Cyberpunk 2077 (again, though this time mostly because I'm GMing a Cyberpunk Red campaign and I wanna keep the genre/setting fresh in my brain)

Weekly Ramble:

It's a weird kind of thing when the page I'm working on now and a few pages to come are actually all pages that appeared in the first sketchbook I drafted, in 2017. Almost panel for panel. Like many of those early sketches, the context surrounding it has changed, but the original scene is very much untouched.

Back in 2017 when I was seriously considering getting into webcomicking, a common theme that kept coming up in researching the topic was that you can expect to have to stick with it for at least 4 years before you really start to see any form of recognition or success. I assume that means the minimum amount of time of consistent posting, without much additional marketing, before word-of-mouth starts to get around. I also assume that applies more broadly as well, to things beyond webcomics.  It was just weird how often it came up, from multiple sources that seemed to be speaking from experience, and it is weird how much it appears to be holding true.

I don't think I understood at the time how long 4 years really is. If you count from the publishing of Page 1, in August 2018, we are STILL not yet 4 years in. In the beginning, I was super excited about all the possibilities of having a successful webcomic with a big following. I created a Telegram group, a Discord server, I made a Twitter account and we put up our own website and I had all these grand, glorious ideas for extra content I was gonna do like card games and plushies and gameplay modules for tabletop gaming. Then I started drawing, and kept drawing. And for most of those first three years, it was just me. Drawing by myself. Alone. Posting comics to the silent void and waiting for anyone to notice I existed.

It was a little disappointing at first, I suppose, that my brand-new unheard-of webcomic-that-nobody-knew-about-and-anyone-reading-it-didn't-know-anything-about-because-I-hadn't-gone-anywhere-with-it-yet wasn't an instantaneous hit success like the comics I read and loved like Calvin and Hobbes, Dreamkeepers and Twokinds. But it also occurred to me that those webcomics had been around for ten years at least, almost twenty for some, and that they most likely weren't instantaneously successful either. I also knew that I wouldn't have anything at all if I was unwilling to commit myself to it. So I told myself that I would commit to a minimum of ten years. I continue telling myself that, 3 years later, that ten more years feels just about right.

I stick with it because I love drawing, and I love writing. I stick with it because I love these characters and this setting and I want to tell their story. I stick with it because I see myself getting just a little better at drawing with every page I drew. And I stick with it now because I see people poke their heads in every once in awhile to see how I'm doing. I have people showing up and sticking around now. I have people hanging out in the Discord now and people throwing actual money at me because they want to see me keep going. It's... well, it's beginning to feel less lonely than it has been for the last three years.

Now, I'm the first to admit I don't know what I'm doing. And I know there's that old saying "fake it 'til you make it" but I also don't like to pretend like I know what I'm doing. The more I do this thing, the more I look at other people who do things, the more I realize that nobody really knows what they are doing. Everyone is just kinda faking it. And the biggest difference between those who are successful and those who are not is just that the successful people don't let the fact they don't know what they are doing stop them from doing it.

Now, I wouldn't go so far to say that God Slayers has a cult following, yet, but we've got people now, who are returning time and time again. We've got people telling their friends how much they like the comic, and we've got people who see our ad up on FA and come to read the entire comic and go so far as to find ways to reach out and tell me how much they enjoy it. I might not know what I'm doing, but that all tells me I must be doing something right. So thank you for reading. It really does mean a lot to me.