Is the Comeback Harder Than the Climb?
TONIGHT: A Special Comic Creator Livestream On the Challenge of Making a Crowdfunding Comeback
One of the best parts of getting started as a creator is that you simply don’t know what you don’t know.
While that ignorance can lead to a lot of amateur mistakes, false starts, and wrong turns… it also shields you from the reality of what it actually takes to bring projects to life.
There’s a truism that most people who have never done a thing will almost always dramatically underestimate what it will actually take to do that thing.
“How hard could it be to make a comic book? Hundreds come out every Wednesday! It ain’t rocket science, I’ve been reading these things my whole life!”
And then you actually get into it, and you usually discover the time, energy and financial investment is around 10X what your novice mind ballparked. While many (most?) end up quitting at that discovery, every single creator who has ever completed a comic are among the stubborn few who just kept their head down and kept at it, despite the miscalculation.
The ignorance of what it would ACTUALLY take may have actually been the thing that made it possible to begin in the first place.
(The Red Ten Pin-Up by “El Guapo” Cesar Feliciano)
Had I known that THE RED TEN would take closer to ten years to complete vs the two we had estimated, would Cesar and I ever started it? I guess we’ll never know… but in hindsight that ignorance served us back then.
I’m thinking about this as I prep for a special ComixLaunch Panel of comic creators tonight. (You should tune in, it’ll be a free livestream on YouTube at 8pm EDT.)
The idea for this panel was triggered by an email from my pal John Schlim, Jr. a talented comic creator and writer who joined my ComixLaunch Pro program several years ago after his first Kickstarter launch failed to fund.
Turns out, John, like many first time crowdfunders, simply didn’t know what he didn’t know about successfully launching on Kickstarter. With a revised gameplan and some new ComixLaunch strategies, he was able to reboot, relaunch, get his first project Goth Ghost Girl #1 successfully funded back in 2017, and then he was off to the races. John successfully funded 12 more comic projects, in multiple genres, over the next five years and was on quite a roll, with big, ambitious plans for many projects to continue rolling out.
Then life happened.
A bunch of extremely challenging circumstances, most of which were completely out of John’s control, resulted in him having to hit the pause button on his comic book projects. It’s been three years since John has launched a project on Kickstarter, and he’s getting ready to mount a comeback. But making a comeback brings its own set of challenges, doesn’t it?
Having done something successfully before should bring some confidence that it is possible that you simply can’t have before you’ve done it. But it’s also true that knowing all of the work that goes into a successful launch… one can wonder if they’re still up to it?
While Lebron might still be out there playing like a top-10 basketball player at 40 years of age, he’s one-of-one. When you’ve stepped away from the indie comics game for a while, a whole new set of doubts and fears arise:
Will anyone care?
Am I still relevant?
Will anyone remember?
Do I still know how to do this?
Is this even worth my time?
How are we supposed to market anymore?
What important lesson have I forgotten.
Is everyone out there today so much better than me that I shouldn’t bother?
Did I betray the promise of "finishing the story" by taking so long?
If we’re not careful, we can talk ourselves out of a comeback before we get back into the game.
I had a feeling that John’s situation, though unique in it’s particulars, would seem quite familiar to many of the creators I’ve worked with over the years. In fact, I had half a dozen or so creators raise their hands and say “THAT’S ME!” when describing the fears around returning to crowdfunding comics after a longer than anticipated hiatus.
And so, tonight, we’re going to unpack this together.
While there are a lot of ways that the comeback is harder than the initial climb, there are also a lot of advantages that these creators can tap into that weren’t available to them when they started working on that first project.
My goal is that we dive into those strengths and opportunities and that the creators on the panel AND anyone tuning in live to watch, interact, ask questions, and make suggestions, come away with a game-plan to mount their own comeback story.
-Tyler
P.S. If you have questions or topics you’d like to see addressed on the KICKSTARTER COMEBACK panel, leave ‘em in the comments.