As you may already be aware, my new webcomic project Year of the God-Fox has finally gone live. I have blogged about the process of making the comic before, notably here and here, but now at long last you can read it too!
I should say, now you can read the Prologue, which is all that is up at the moment. You can also read about the process of making it, look at the World Map and browse the other free Extras. I say free because for the most part Year of the God-Fox (let’s just call it YotGF from now on?) will be exclusively pay-for material. I’m doing this partly as an experiment, to see if I can earn some income from webcomics (if it’s successful, be assured there will be more comics) but also as a way to gain some traction in the hopes of one day releasing the whole series in print form.
Because YotGF is—barring the bonus pages—entirely in color, getting it into print is more expensive than for my other comics like Angeldevil and The Iron Wizard. Previously my only other forays into color were with the relatively short Tobius comics, and even then the cost of printing was borderline inhibitive. My plan for YotGF is to have the webcomic which people can pay to read for a modest amount of money (about $6 per book, or $20 for the complete series) and then once the comic has gained a respectable readership I can see about taking it to a publisher and saying, “look here, I have this comic and it has x number of hits online, are you interested?” or perhaps even crowd-funding it though a process like Kickstarter. Either way, both options become much more feasible if I already have an audience.
So for now, it’s just a website. But it’s a very fine website. (I want to thank my cousin, Martin Gutfeldt, for building it for me and putting up with all my disjointed suggestions.) And if you would like to see it in print one day, you can help me with that goal by supporting it now.
Like I said before, currently it’s just the Prologue and a few extras, but there will be more. Starting on July 19th there will be a new chapter every week, and only people who have bought Book 1 or the complete series will be able to read those.
Year of the God-Fox has more or less consumed my creative energy for the better part of the last year. It has taken a great deal of hard work, sweat, blood and tears, and I am overjoyed that I finally have something to point to and say: “There! Look! I made something! Go see!”
For my part, expect some internet silence this week and a bit of the next as I will be attending AnthroCon in Pittsburgh PA, but once I’m back I intend to blog constantly about the little niddly aspects of making YotGF, such as how the map was made and why I decided to do the sound effects in hiragana. I’ll also be putting together behind-the-scenes notes on each chapter—sort of like a director’s commentary. Should be good fun.
Until then…
Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. You can email her at goldeenogawa@gmail.com or peck at her on Twitter @GrimbyTweets.
