Sad day for comics...

Today it's been announced the publisher I've been working with, Fair Spark Books, is closing its doors. This year has been rough for many and the knock-on effect has been an affect on sales since the beginning of lockdown which means it's no longer feasible to keep the business going.

It's sad day, not just because I was due to have a book published through them, but because they were already putting out great books and everyone involved has such a love for the medium and a passion for getting all-ages comics out into the world, it's a shame it's had to come to an end.

On a personal note...

Of course, this news now means my comic won't be getting published as originally planned, but I'll get to that in a moment.

I wanted to just take a minute to thank Aaron and Tom, in particular, as well as everyone else involved with Fair Spark. As many artists will probably sympathise with, I sometimes suffer from a bit of imposter syndrome or perhaps not have as much confidence in what I'm doing.

Just by agreeing to take on my book, they showed me there's potential in what I'm doing and having people behind you, encouraging you every step of the way is really a huge boost and it's really helped me make it so far in the production of my book.

Thanks again, Fair Spark team.

So, where does this leave the comic?

Well, for starters, I'll say production hasn't stopped. I'm still working on the final part of the book as I've been noting in my Week Notes posts.

I originally planned to self-publish the book as single issues before signing with Fair Spark. The plan changed to put out a single graphic novel but now I think I'll be going back to the original plan.

When the decision to make a single graphic novel was made, the artwork for issue 1 was already done and ready for colouring and lettering. But, I changed focus to get the rest of the story written.

Since I'm nearly done with the planning stage, I'll continue on until I've got rough pages for the entire book finished. After that, I'll go back to issue 1 and start trying to get that ready for publishing.

Once issue 1 is nearing completion, I'll then focus on the artwork for issue 2 and so on. I'd hoped I might get issue 1 out this year but I think I want to wait until the artwork for issue 2 is nearing completion (something we talked about early on with Fair Spark), that way I can start thinking about releasing the issues in fairly quick succession.

That said, in the time since I signed with Fair Spark, I've since had many ideas bubbling away in my head so I may take the opportunity to play with other ideas between issues of this book.

I'll leave it there for now. Onwards!