Blog 2: First You Need Artists - Second You Need to Pay Them (Patreon)

The TL;DR version of this post is that Exiern needs artists to make it and that costs money. For a long time now, Exiern has cost more to make than it earns.

At the moment, the costs and income almost balance but that's due to some temporary and unusual circumstances that won't last, so we're using that time and (relative) savings to make things we hope will boost income in future. More on that soon!

The ultimate goal is to have Exiern be able to pay for itself, especially if I have to ever pass the webcomic on in the same way Drowemos passed Exiern to Scott and he passed it on to me - that way it would be more likely to keep running.

At the moment, I make up the financial difference. No plans on trying to find someone to take over Exiern anytime yet but did I mention my job contract expires at the end of January 2022? No?

I should go into that a bit later. Might become important in the future.

As you might know, Exiern was created and written by Drowemos. You might have not originally known that he also originally illustrated as you can see here at:

extra.exiern.com

(With 60 posts so far on a daily update schedule, we're now over halfway done!)

So back then, I believe Drowemos used MS Paint to make pages before hiring an artist to remake a streamlined version of the pages he'd made. 

I believe this was the first page ever made by Studio Boom for Exiern before they remade a new version of the beginning of the story (as people may have noticed characters and subplots currently no longer present in the current version of the story - for now!).

Anyway, I'm sure Drowemos would be the first to admit he's not a professional artist, though I'm only reading his original version at the same pace as I post it and I'm finding myself quite engaged by it - I think he did all right. John Solomon disagreed, though.

I guess Exiern's come a long way, though. We've even had a couple of pages made by artists who've worked for Marvel as you might recall here and here.

Since Studio Boom, we've had Shipeng Lee for many years, Luis (formerly referred to as Antipus), Colin Wells - who I didn't specifically reference in the last post but should have (sorry Colin!) - who keep us updating weekly for over half a year back in 2017 with Chapter 29 when Luis had to step down in that time period (once again, showing close Exiern has been to stopping for very long periods of time), Luis again and then now Studio Katsumi (who was Studio Boom).

Of course, we've also had a long list of guest artists with some of the biggest contributors over many years being Sean Harrington of the webcomic Spying With Lana and Marshall Reeves of Yesterday Bound. There's been many more, we'll feature all of our artists in more detail one day.

Well, this is already longer than expected. I guess we've highlighted that Exiern has artists and because of the length of this post, I'll go into more detail about the money situation later.

Key takeaway points, Exiern has artists who make it and who like to be paid for it. Would be nice if it could pay for itself - the good news is we're on the way there but not quite arrived there yet! We'll talk about all of that next post but for now, thanks to all our wonderful artists over the years.

Oh and Drowemos and Scott deserve some credit too. Great job you guys.

(Also Chemiclord for writing my favourite part of the whole story to date. That deserves a mention.)