The fourth part of this action-adventure-comedy-sci-fi webcomic I’ve been making for a while debuts today! That’s what I mean by “takes off.”
The dry adventures of three hapless young space alien fighters and a guy named Jeff are chugging along. A few people are reading and enjoying it, and that makes me happy.
What makes me happier still is that there is now a “StarCrash!! with Jeff Character Themes” album by Sakuwa!
It must be my Homestuck-loving teenage self’s dream to have a story with both music and visuals (and characters whose arms disappear when they stand still).
Oh, and I want to thank my fellow writer friends in the Quinlan Circle (of course), the Aradia Magical Girl Comic Collective for adding StarCrash to their ranks, and all those Discord writing and comic communities I don’t talk in nearly as much as I might want to! Your support means a lot to me. Same to you, readers and sharers.
The comic is basically scraps of ideas that I threw together. I’ve always loved making comics, but before StarCrash, I’d never put in the sustained work (or sustained attention) to bring a comic that’s longer than a few pages into fruition. Too often I would either draw off the top of my head and run out of steam halfway through a chapter, or develop characters with no world to speak of and keep developing them until I imploded.
No longer. No longer! Look—and this is a note to the artists out there—making comics, or really any creative work, is hard but satisfying. Making a profit off it is great, but for most of us that’s an unreliable target for our personal satisfaction.
Look—I had big, slightly profitable plans that got dashed. In the spring of last year, I printed a boatload of copies of StarCrash’s first cluster of comics, hoping to sell them at a zine fest. Unfortunately, as you know, COVID happened. ……..Oh also I didn’t get accepted to the zine fest anyway.
But! BUT! I kept myself from feeling crushed by reminding myself that, hey, now there is a printed version of my comic—another dream come true. I can give copies to friends. Plus, it turns out there are several places around town that sell comics and zines by consignment. I mean, it’s not like they move fifty indie comics an hour, but they’re there and they’re passionate about what they sell.
So why did I share that? I dunno, just reflecting.
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StarCrash!! with Jeff: On Sale Now at a very small amount of locations in Tucson, and also online!
Thank you for reading, and Patrons, thank you for Patreonning.
For more fiction madness, check out my reflections on short story writing for the heck of it and my review of the extremely overwrought sci-fi manga mess that is Ultimo!