State of the thing

Hi! Here at roughly the six month mark, I want to check in about what’s going on with Kidd Commander.

First: Please keep in mind as you read that I am not quitting. Look at me look me in the eyes I’m Not Quitting.

So! Here at ten and a half years, three volumes, two specials, and 896 full color canon pages, I am sitting at 78 paid supporters, not even half of whom have bothered to subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with what's going on (and of the 65 people subbed to this thing, around 50 of them open their mail). I make about 350 dollars a month, and that’s iffy because half the time peoples’ pledges get declined, and they don’t fix them because many of my supporters appear to have forgotten they’re supporting me.

I could talk a lot about the events that got me here writing this post, but I want to try and keep the focus on the stuff that affects Y’all The Audience, so the short version is I have become convinced that western comics culture is simply uninterested in the kinds of things I’m trying to do with my work, both in the mainstream and in indie spaces. This comic has been supported almost entirely by maybe a dozen extremely dedicated readers for a very long time, and I hope y’all know I see all of you and appreciate it more than I can even explain, but even if that faction was generating enough support to keep us going it’s not fair for y’all to be carrying all this weight. I really believe in webcomics as a medium for marginalized people to get their voices out there, but for whatever reason it’s obvious now that prioritizing accessibility isn’t going to work. This is meant to be a team effort so a handful of people DON’T have to spend a significant amount to keep it going but it has been proven, over and over again, that the kind of things I make isn’t something comic audiences consider worth significant time or engagement, let alone financial support or even just a post on tumblr lmao. At this point it’s just not realistic to expect an audience to show up if they haven’t already. I do not think we’re meeting that December deadline.

Sucks! Here are the new plans.

We're sticking it out updating as regularly as possible, staying the course until December, at least. Worst case, we get there and I’m still not making rent. No matter what I'm finishing out the current arc and it is going to print, although if I have to start working a regular job at my level of disability I have no idea how many more years that will take. Then, once we're out of the Caravan I’ll close down all the recurring donation platforms, and that will be that for KC as a comic. The website will stay up as long as I can afford it, but it will likely quietly disappear eventually.

If we magically do hit 900 a month it will keep me in business, but even that is looking unlikely and there's literally no way the comic is getting finished without enough money to hire assistants. I think I have enough in me to get us through two more arcs after GTS, but unless something changes between here and there we’re just delaying the inevitable. That will probably be the physical limit of what I can do without help.

Like I said though, I do not think there’s anything else I can do to drum up any kind of interest in KC as a comic. But I want it to exist, god dammit, so I’m going to try and make it up with the novels.

I was intending to just self publish them like the rest of my work, but given how that’s gone for the last decade, I think it might be worth a shot to try the traditional route. I do not think the quality of the work is the issue! Nobody knows what to do with weird comics by weird people, but weird novels seem to do fine pretty regularly, and at this point I really don't have a lot to lose by trying.

I am not under the impression that literary publishing is any more lucrative than comics, but the amount I need to reach per month is so low; if I could just scrape together a little bit more it would be at least enough to keep working. And, honestly, I'm really enjoying writing prose again, I'd be delighted to be able to do them both. The other obvious upshot of this is, of course, once I'm physically unable to keep working on comics I can at least get Kidd Commander told with the novels.

It's not what I want! The novels were meant to only be companions, Kidd Commander is meant to be a comic, but it's better than nothing at all. I do also hate suddenly paywalling things, but it's been made abundantly clear my optimistic ideas of accessibility to queer/marginalized stories being something a lot of people would show up to support was naive. Again, I’m immensely grateful to y’all who HAVE been showing up and doing way more than your fair share all this time, but the objective fact is I cannot keep destroying my body working eight hours a day on full color comics for less than 400 dollars a month.

GTS is moving into finale territory but there’s still a lot of pages to make. My plan is to finish the novel manuscript then start querying agents while the arc finishes. I might even start a rejection tally here in the newsletter hehe. If I can't get published by the time my own secret arbitrary limit I’m imposing rolls around, I'll just do the self publishing route I'd originally planned and see if that can help keep us funded. Regardless, the plan is to supplement my comic income with novel income, whatever that looks like, and funnel whatever I can back into keeping the comic going. If I'm putting out novels and comics and merch and going to cons and everything else I'm currently doing and I still can't put together a paycheck, I'll finish whatever comic work is left in the arc at that point, then probably just shift to working on the novels between greeting people at Costco.

I don't mean for this to sound like I'm giving up here in the middle of the year, I fully intend to go down swinging. It would break my fuckin heart for the comic to just end prematurely, I am already pretty upset that it’s gotten to the point of even having to consider all this. I've just had a pretty huge shift in my perspective over the last couple months and I feel like I owe it to my work and my supporters (and myself, I guess) to like. Prepare the escape pod, both for me and for y'all to be able to transition into whatever Kidd Commander ends up being, rather than let the whole thing explode at once and have nowhere to regroup. It's optimistic to assume anyone will follow me from free comics to paid novels, but I'm gonna do my best to make it easy for anyone who wants to do it to see how things shake out for this crew. I think quitting this story would literally kill me, I'd rather it exist at all than let it die because it's not the ideal I envisioned, and I hope some of y'all who have been with me for a while will stick around for the rest of it even if it looks a little different. If you wanna see some of the writing, you can see the current draft for the introductory chapter of the first novel over here.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support. Let’s all keep doing our best until we can’t any more, okay?