January 2015 – The Designer Monologues

Very cool — the World’s Greatest Science Adventure Comic, Atomic Robo, is transitioning to webcomic. They’ve done nine miniseries over the past seven years as traditional monthly comics and collected trade paperbacks, but starting this year, new issues will be freely available online, and then collected into for-sale printed trade paperbacks for distribution.

They’re putting the existing nine volumes up on their site for free, starting this week, are opening a webstore for trade collections and merchandise, and have also launched a Patreon for fans to support them. Welcome to 21st century creative business models, folks.

The digital-then-print-for-those-who-want-it thing is a solid plan for comics creators — but the combination of an existing fan base, and a Patreon to help contribute, allowing them to release new digital material for free, while still maintaining collections for traditional distribution? That’s a great example of tailoring your business model to your specific situation — an absolutely essential hallmark of being an Insurgent Creative.

Here is co-creator Scott Wegener talking about their plans, from their blog:

Here we are in the not-quite-cyberpunk future of 2015. As part of my plans for the year, I intend on getting back to more frequent blogging (yeah, yeah, I know — everybody with a blog says that. Well, I need to get back on top of productivity this year after the train wreck of 2014, and blogging is an easily-accomplished method of getting onto a structured schedule), so here we are.

I started this first full-time week of 2015 with an attempt to climb the mountain of neglected organization: I created a top-level Trello board for projects, after being convinced of its usefulness (along with the pomodoro technique), in a series of blog posts by my friend Eddy Webb. This top-level board has only 3 stages: Conceptual/Development/In Progress.

“In Progress” = Actively underway towards completion.

“Development” = brainstorming, initial drafts, research, work being done.

“Conceptual” = the basics of an idea to do, maybe an outline.

I expect to get more granular when I dig down into more month-to-month and day-to-day organization, but for right now, I’m in the HOLY CRAP THAT’S A TON OF STUFF panic stage.

First on the plate, obviously: Get the late stuff out the door. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to that.

Month: January 2015

Insurgent Creative: Atomic Robo

2015