So here I thought I would make my life a little easier by making the pages smaller and then I had to go and ruinate everything by experimenting with color. Oh well! Hope it was worth the wait. I’ll try to get another page done this weekend so I can be on time with the next page.
From now on I am just going to draw clouds as backgrounds forever.
And, at last, the inevitable!
Unrelated to this particular story, The Dawn Chapel got a nice little writeup in the San Jose Mercury News as part of an article on the SJPL graphic novel contest. Neat!
And there you have it!
There’s been a handful of new readers coming in the last month and a half, and now that this story has wrapped up I’d like to remind you that if you enjoy the comic, the easiest way to show your support is to share it with your friends through the space-age technology of your blog or twitter, adding it as a favorite if you’re a belfry user, and voting for it on Topwebcomics. Every little helps!
Some significant numbers for this comic: with this one finished, that’s 30 pages of comics in the bag, which is the recommended number of pages (or strips) that They say you should have before you should really start promoting your work, because that’s supposed to be the minimum amount necessary to really get an idea of what a comic’s voice is. Technically there are 37 pages of Dawn Chapel now, but I’m leaving out How the Raccoon Got his Coat, because it was completed a year before I even launched this project and was cannibalized for convenience; and I’m also leaving out the two single-panel pages, because in my estimation, sequential art needs at least two panels or you can just go home.
Anyway, yes, that’s how we do math around here. Also worth celebrating? The printer arrived last weekend. You guys are awesome.
The next big milestone on the itenerary is the 50-page mark, which I expect I’ll also hit right around the one-year mark. Some of the feedback I’ve been getting has to do with some dissatisfaction with the format of this comic — that is to say, some of my readers feel like each little story is like a fun-sized candy bar: they are sweet, but so small as to be disappointing when you’re finished with each one. So I have two or three more short stories planned and then sometime around this fall I plan on launching into a much longer three-act story, which is a prospect that simultaneously thrills and terrifies me.
Finally, one of the consequences of the newspaper article is that my coworkers and family now know about my efforts here, so everybody better stop cussin’ and sit up straight.
