Brilliant Ideas!

So, I have this BRILLIANT IDEA™. My partner always says that I deal with depression much better when I have an ongoing project. It’s true. Last year, during Nanographicmo, I was going through a pretty rough time. The constant stress/worry/panic/PURE FUCKING JOY of creating something that month may very well have saved me. I’m doing better now, thanks in part to some Vitamin D therapy, good friends and such, but things are starting to look really, really stressful and depress-a-rific in the near future.

Writing the script and treatment for THE SEEKERS helped, but I’m not so egocentric that I’m sure I’ll get Stan Lee’s stamp of approval, so I’m not counting on that project. (I’m not discounting it, either, mind you – it was a damn good script.) So, I want to do something, see it through, either on paper or in pixels.

This leads to some problems. As anyone who read TRANSLUNAR (pro tip: to read it for free click on the word TRANSLUNAR at the top of your window and download it in either .pdf or .cbr format) knows, I am not an artist. Much of that insanity was done with the GIMP and some Creative Commons images. So, in order to see a project come to life, I need to either hop in the wayback machine and have spent the last couple of decades becoming an artist, find an artist who wants to draw my vision for a chance at maybe someday not losing too much money on it or do the damn art myself.

I don’t have a wayback machine. Also, I suck at meeting people, and know very few artists willing to work for nothing. This leaves me with option 3, do the damn art myself.

It’s okay, I have the GIMP, and Photoshop, and Inkscape. Nate Piekos over at Blambot provides absolutely stunning fonts for lettering comic books, and the license for his free fonts is generous as all get out. He even has a number of articles about how to properly do lettering, something I did completely horribly in TRANSLUNAR.

And there are a ton of public domain images of the WWII era.

So, here’s the basic idea. I do a shitload of work for a while, behind the scenes. I register a domain name (or possibly a subdomain here). I do a lot of image editing. I build up a several month buffer (I hear that’s important, if one wants to be a webcomic creator). Then I launch the fucker.

You can guess that the story involves the Second World War. It also involves the years after (not the Cold War, though…). Science fiction exists to ask the question “what if?” Well, my what if is something I’ve never seen before, so I hope that it works. I may post details as the story develops, or I may force you to read it.

The point of this endeavor is not to make money, though it would be wonderful if I did. The point isn’t to build a portfolio, though that will happen. The point, here, is to get some of the stories out of my head, because every time I do that, I’m a little less down. If it entertains you, great. If you hate it, meh, whatever. It costs next to nothing to host a website these days, and if this keeps me from descending into depression-madness again, it’ll be money well spent.

Stay tuned. Expect to hear things as time goes on. I doubt this will be anywhere near ready to launch this year (I’m serious about the buffer, I’d like to be able to have a few months ready before I launch), but if I start busting shit out, it could roll early next year.

That’s where you come in, loyal readers. Don’t let me abandon this one. I’ll try and keep you all in the loop about what’s going on, but if you don’t hear anything about it, prod me. I’ll mark every post about this with the tag TANKERS so you can easily find it. Don’t see anything recent? Comment! Or email me (mchenry @ fish – god . com). Bug me on twitter (@ mchenrykeith), or Google+ (I’m McHenry Keith), or even Facebook (I don’t check it often!).

I need your help. I know me. I’ll want to abandon this at some point. Talk me down, remind me that I need to get this out. Remind me that I promised you all a kick ass, retro-future tale of World War II.

Do that, and I’ll thank you any way I can.

Thanks.