Extra Post: The Merch Problem (Patreon)

Happy post-Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it this month!  Since I've been away traveling to be with family most of this week and seeing as how it's Black Friday I figured it'd make for a cute post to talk a bit about the aspect of independent comic making that I've long struggled with: how to make merch people want.  I'll post a bit about things I've done in the past other than books and talk about what I'm gonna try to do going into 2020, so let's hop to it!

Making comics for me has always been a labor-intensive pursuit. It takes me a long time to make a single page and I've always been a bit stressed about waiting too long between updates causing people to lose interest, so I focus a lot of time on working to keep the comic alive and moving forward.  I always wanted to find things I could sell so people who like the comic can have something neat but I always end up in the catch-22 mental hell prison of [keep making comics, no time to do merch] vs. [take time to make & ship merch, lose time making comics].  Over the years I've found that small things that are easy to manage so I've tried different small-scale low-price things in that realm, because above all things I want people to enjoy the things I make.

One of the earliest investments I made was buying a 1" button press.  It's this big metal thing with two components where you put the button shell, paper art and a plastic sheet in one side and then a crimping back bracket in the other, and you can go ka-chunk ka-chunk and out pops metal buttons.  It comes with a special circle-cutter for cutting the paper art out to put in the button machine, you could print a couple sheets of designs at Staples or wherever and turn that into merch.

These were the very very first buttons I ever made.  I didn't really have ideas of what would make good designs so I used some concept art, pieces of my site's menu art or whatever else to make a set of buttons with.  Later I had an idea for a more complete button set, which looked more like this:

The idea for this set was I drew up some nice blister card art and got some sandwich bags from the grocery store.  At conventions people could buy a 5-pack or a 10-pack of buttons; they'd always get the main four characters but they could either get one random zombie button or all of them, depending.  I thought making a unified design with a consistent color scheme would make them look a bit better pinned somewhere as a collection, but then I think having most of them be non-specific or non-iconic undead characters ends up being like, well who would want that?

Buttons are nice but they do take me actual time to sit and cut and feed into the press, so at a point I started looking for something novel that required less assembly on my part, so I thought: what if I had some piece of merch where the assembly -was- the merch?  I've always been a constructive kind of person so I decided to design and engineer my own papercraft doll pattern from scratch and make some papercraft kits of my characters.  

I wanted to design these to be fairly easy to put together so I came up with a system of interlocking tabs that held box shapes securely without requiring any glue or tape. I also tried to design them to be entirely made of straight-line cuts so people who aren't entirely dexterous could still snip them out of a single sheet of cardstock.  On top of this I made a set of text-free instructions that showed how to put the pieces together using visual language as much as possible:

Additionally, following the idea from the old red button set I made some cute blister pack tag art to staple to the top left corner, holding it, the cardstock sheets and the instructions together into one product:

In retrospect, I think the problem I had with my papercraft kits, like with all of my stuff, is that it isn't colorful.  Working predominantly in a stylized greyscale with red accents I kept trying to include this element of my work in my merch, and it ended up being grey and kinda drab, which I worry might have been unappealing design-wise to people who aren't already invested in the comic.  I thought the core ideas were neat, but I learned from the attempts and moved forward.  

After this I kinda cooled off on new merch stuff for a while and focused on making art assets for our game.  I think the shift in focus from a black & white comic to solving color problems for the game helped me out tremendously with how to steer my work in a direction that can be more warm and appealing.  Despite the dire circumstances the story takes place in I like to focus on writing a hopeful story centered around people connecting with each other, so I don't think my work is entirely unmarketable in that regard.  Making it into a game also gives me more elements to play with- I never really had a Mascot Character I could merchandise, it's not really that kind of comic, but being a game lets me put it into a bright new context I can draw ideas from, and that leads me to this week's project.

The art at the top of this article is a sticker sheet I've been working on between finishing my last comic page and preparing for holiday travels.  Since we're making the game an arcade-style beat-em-up it adheres to a few of the tropes of that genre, one of which being "find prepared meals on the ground and under barrels and boxes and eat it to regain health".  This doesn't really work strictly in the comic sense but routing it through the game it clicks much better.  I want to call it the Street Food sticker pack and make a cute joke context about it, but the core thing I want to focus on is the food imagery.  Everyone likes food, so I think even if you're not familiar with Dead Winter you can relate to Alice eating a hamburger, which I think makes the sticker pack more appealing to use and put on things.  Also, now that every character has their own default color scheme from the game art planning I can make bright colorful stickers instead of drab grey ones!  

In addition to health pickups from the game I wanted to include some more sticker shots of the characters doing things they do in the game itself as well.  I love to draw action more than anything else and even though I'm trying to find something cute and appealing to make I do still want to include fun action shots, so I made some action variants to help fill out the 4x6" sticker sheet.  They're based on...

Lizzie's ranged-mode dash attack has her doing an upside-down bicycle kick for a moment before she lands on her head and tumbles on the ground a ways.  I'll have to add a little note in the top left corner to indicate that it is in fact right-side up, but the sticker could also be applied upside-down and probably look okay still.

Monday can fire both his pistols faster than anyone else can do any sort of attack, so for his action sticker I wanted to let him have his akimbo pistol pose.  Like the others this is a bit of a modification of the literal sprite art, since animations are designed to look good over a span of time I need to adjust details to make sure sticker art looks good in the singular moment of a still image.

Lou has a whirling cyclone attack where he swings both his melee weapons in a flurry, and for a few frames at the end of the smeary animation frames you can see him slow down a bit.  Lou's sticker captures his style of combat, spinning and swinging his utility bludgeons and having a pretty good time of things.

Alice is the team nurse, but in both the game and the comic she isn't relegated to field medic duties, she is also a crack shot with her carbine.  For the sticker pack, though, I figured highlighting her nursely aspect would be more appealing and in-line with the sticker sheet than her toting her weapon of choice, so for her action sticker I tried to capture her special ability, pulling her medkit and calling for her friends to come get their healing.

I have the stickers about halfway finished, but it will take me some time to send the designs to a printer and get them mailed back to me before I can put them up on my site's store, so I'm looking at stickers realistically being a 2020 thing.  But since I've moved to a new home I am conscious of my finances and I am looking for ways to earn a bit more money, so my mind is back on making new merch.  I think I've learned a bit from the past years of attempts, and I feel like I can make some nice designs based on my work now.

Moving forward into December I should have the pencil stage of the next comic page ready to share with you.  Also, for game patrons, we're super duper close to having our complete character moveset demo ready to share on Patreon, we're targeting that to be ready before the end of the year.  That is just a simple arena with simple spawning AI but you can try out all four characters and see how their movesets play and feel, I've been doing a lot of testing and adjusting values to make it feel as good as possible so I'm real excited to be able to get it into people's hands.  As for this weekend, I'm going to work on finishing up these stickers!  

Thanks for sticking with us, I look forward to what's in store in the next year to come!