Forging Ahead With Steampunk

Yes, I think I can do two Steampunk issues with the little guys.  I'd gotten a new Steampunk book out of the library the other day mostly to see if anything in it sparked ideas for a new paper doll design, but got inspiration for another adventure.  This one being a dirigible ride (in the standard cardboard box).

Seven panels roughly sketched out and multiple lines of terms and phrases later, plus a potential cover design, and I called it quits for the night.  Too tired to put more down on paper at this point but I'll let it gel a bit and see what I come up with tomorrow.

Words like:
Hijack, incoherent, Gadgeteer, Master inventor.

Phrases/dialog like:
We could use a monorail
Power supply is low Captain
Where are the floating cities?
Squash buckling adventures (I got the squash)
Are we not Renaissance cats of the highest order?
It's all the rage
We are floating above your dystopian society

These are the things that spark what I put in strips, sometimes it only takes one word - one key word - and off it goes, full speed with the imagination.

Small Dry Spell

Maybe I am running out of ideas after these past few years.  However I did go to the Festival of the Books in Waukesha this past weekend and attended a number of panels, most of them on publishing, e-publishing, etc.  Got some good info, new ideas, and talked to writers. They did have a Graphics Novels panel but that didn't really apply to what I want to do.

However, sitting through one of the BORING panels I did start writing down some dialog and small sketches for another mad scientist in a box strip while listening to the history of Steampunk being discussed.  (It was only boring because they were running through a list of movies and books, all of which I'd seen or knew about already). 

So -- I have most of a small adventure plotted out using the Aether Rider (aka The Wind Bag), which still needs an ending, but that won't be hard.

I also sketched out three jointed paper dolls - a sparrow, cockatiel and parakeet - with flexing wings, moveable head and tail. 

I'm sure the panelists thought I was taking notes.  LOL

Merchandise?

I know it's too early to think about merchandising when the issues aren't even available much to the public yet (only issue #1 and #2 are fully printed) but I've had feedback from people asking about merchandising.

One would think t-shirts, but who buys those anymore?  It was far more popular to get a printed tee back in the 1990's, not in today's market.

Mugs....bleh, too boring.

Carry bags.....no, nobody uses the ones they buy at the stores, and those run under $2 each.

I figure I could do freebies to include in with the issues. Either bookmarks or trading cards or some such.  I've got to think on it a bit.  Maybe a t-shirt or two would be worth trying.  My sister wants one of the two mad scientist cats sitting in a box waving a toilet brush over their heads claiming "This is OUR sterile environment, everybody stand back!"

Working On The Covers

I've been spending time working on the different booklet covers, trying to get things together to do a print run on the strips again. 

Not only the cover design, but also the inside cover info, greeting, back inside cover details, and maybe a back cover picture as well.  It's not as easy as you'd think it would be.

The goal is to get 9 or 10 designs done, pick the best five and run with those.  Do I just have an illustration on front or do I use word balloons too?  Does it have to do with something inside on one of the strips or keep to something generic?  Does Marcus have to be in EVERY cover illustration or can the little guys have their day in the sun? 

Decisions, decisions......

Introducing A New Character

OK, it's offical, our 'new' cat Molly (Miss 'M') is making an appearance on a temporary basis to the strip.  As I mentioned before, we adopted her from animal control at the very end of Dec. 2012, and she's settled in here pretty well.   Her comic strip character will have the same type of ear.

There's already so many different cats in the strip that adding another one should be only on a temporary basis. As such, she'll be there to be 'babysat' while her owner is away for a short while.  I'm having her come up with all sorts of explanations for that tiny ear when the other cats ask about it.  Everything from 'can opener accident' to 'zombie rabbits in last year's apocalypse'. 

She will NOT say the real reason it's deformed.  Mostly because I personally don't know how it happened to the 'real' cat. 

Adding One More Cat?

Well, I'm debating working one of our two new cats in real life into the strip. Molly has a mini-ear, she was found by (or turned over to) animal control last fall with a healed former hematoma on one ear and potentially some loss of sight on that side of her head. We can't tell how much, but she looks like a bobble head doll when she's trying really hard to triangulate on something.

Anyway, her little ear is deformed and feels like an old piece of folded/gnarled leather. She's fine with it, it's not hurting her, but I was going to introduce a cat with the same problem into the 'household' with the other guys.  Her markings will be easy to do - the vet classifies her as a 'white tiger', which means she's mostly white with some black spots and brown/ticked markings and a dark raccoon striped bushy tail.  In the right light I can see more stripes on her, but mostly she looks like a white cat with blotches and a 'racing stripe' on her left side angling back to her tail.

The Art Made A Connection

Funny thing how comics connect to people.

I did an event where I had the first two issues available on the table.  People generally bought the set, not single issues (nice!) and several vendors purchased some too.  The event was a few days long. On the second day one of the vendors came over to talk about the cartoons. She’d read them all the night before. I told her how a lot of it was based on our own cats, but that we’d lost Dax to cancer a year before.

She said “Oh, not DAX!”

That threw me. She obviously was more upset than an average person hearing about someone’s pet passing away – then I realized that based on just a few strips that Dax had been in as a specific character, she had been ‘made real’ for a complete stranger.  Enough so that the person was actually shocked at hearing about her passing.

Dry Spell

Here I was - going for two months and NOTHING creative along the line of a cartoon!  Argh!  However soon as I wrote to a pen pal about that it broke the artist block and I got going on a 3 strip story and a six strip story.  It's so nice to be back in the groove again.  When you sit there with a pen in your hand trying to come up with something funny and new, and nothing comes to mind, it gets pretty frustrating.

The longer one isn't finished yet. The small cats were introducing the Siamese to the video game CATHAIR 2000, which had a recent upgrade.  She took to it at first till she ran into a few problems -- being 'killed' by a video Marcus absolutely horrified her.  By the time she found out the video mice were not real mice she was too disgusted to continue.  Ha!