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You know, there's what I think is some really great stuff about my love affair with online comics below this, and I hope you'll come back and read it, but that's the salon. This is the show:
OEL Romantic Science at Its Best!
Texas STEAMPUNK!
The WILD WEST GENIUS GIRL!
Nefarious VILLAINS!
A Dashing HERO!
WEREYOTES!
JACKELOPES!
...aaaaaaand...
PEACHES!
CATHEDRAL CHILD IS HERE!
The whole thing, all free, all delightfully Creative Commons licensed so you can share it, my gift to the world. ENJOY!
(Yes, you can print it out, but it would be cheaper to buy a book, unless you live in Australia or Spain, where you need an equity loan to to cover postage to there from the U.S.)
Please post the link to this post or the direct link to Cathedral Child ( http://www.webcomicsnation.com/divalea/cc/series.php?view=current ) with great abandon and enthusiasm, especially if you like it.
Post here or write me: divalea @ gmail . com
Go on, shoo. The rest will be here.
- - - - - - - -
"Me, I’m looking to find ways to use copying to make more money and it’s working: enlisting my readers as evangelists for my work and giving them free ebooks to distribute sells more books. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity."--Cory Doctorow
Just call me the Cory Doctorow of comics. Doctorow is (in)famous for his wacky business model of giving away his books online under a Creative Commons license to drive sales of his printed books. It's a business model I started using in 1995, putting up previews of comics online.
I know free-on-the-web sells books. I've know it for twelve years.
In 1998, Cathedral Child was manga-when-manga-wasn't-cool, OEL was "that big eyes and speedlines stuff," and "not real manga," manga collections were $20., not $9.95, and a graphic novel was most certainly not 5" x 7" inches.
Cathedral Child was a book I wrote for the myself who wanted to read it when I was young teenager. By which I mean, a smart girl hero, adventure, peril, triumph and art I loved. A mythology for myself that would not be betrayed later with grit and angst, a gutshot to screw with Batman, or death by silly driller.
You know, girly.
You know hard hard it is to get a girly book under the radar in the Top Cow, Wildstorm, Dreamwave-dominated four color junk bond Direct Market circa 1997? Real damn hard, and I did it with my little Internet, by putting art online so people could see it, instead of waiting for it to (not) come to stores.
Half my sales on CC and CA originated from the web, the other from being featured (for both books and Rumble Girls) on Cliff Bigger's Comic Shop News. I sold out two printings of the Image CC between 1998 and 2001. That's about 3,500 female-friendly GN's at a time when GNs were functionally nonexistent in the big bookstores. CC was reordered from Image every week for two years. Arcing over all that was the intro by my good friend, Kurt Busiek, crazy famous and award-winning and shit for writing Marvels and Astro City.
When I took Rumble Girls from print-to-web in 2003 (predating many creators now doing the same, some of whom I evangelized to tirelessly), it was to finish the series because printing it was bleeding me white, and the itch to do it my way had had me for well over a year. The DM market was drying out from its millennium-spanning whoop-de-multiple-covers-do hangover, and I was tired of production pains in the ass on one end of the serial print issues, and a royalty statement full of zeros and negative integers on the other.
That's what I know. Here's what I feel. Last year, I had a house fire that destroyed my home, ruined most of the things inside (which were not just a total of more than a century of lives, but some things were also a century or more old), and killed every living thing in the house. I and my family were greeted with a tidal wave of love, goodwill, and monetary help to start our lives over from, literally, the ground up.
I would have to write over two thousand thank-you notes, a wonderful situation to be in. I think people would rather have more of my comics. I sure hope I'm right about that, and that's not Miss Manners I hear tsk-tsking somewhere.
So, here's Cathedral Child, my gift to the world. It's a comic you won't be embarassed to read on a bus, unless you're embarassed about laughing, crying or missing your stop. Please share it. Send the links to friends, make them a CD, print it out for reading on the plane or the toilet, or the toilet on the plane. The only hitch is that you can't sell it, or make derivative works other than translations (which you also must share and not sell.) Share it like crazy, and please let me know how you liked it.
Since it's mine, I can give it away however I choose, and I do, with profound thanks and all my love.
P.S.: I do hope those who read Cathedral Child will buy print books or art or toss some digital president paper in the PayPal, so I can go on living my high life of unsweet iced tea and ham sammiches. xxoo
OEL Romantic Science at Its Best!
Texas STEAMPUNK!
The WILD WEST GENIUS GIRL!
Nefarious VILLAINS!
A Dashing HERO!
WEREYOTES!
JACKELOPES!
...aaaaaaand...
PEACHES!
CATHEDRAL CHILD IS HERE!
The whole thing, all free, all delightfully Creative Commons licensed so you can share it, my gift to the world. ENJOY!
(Yes, you can print it out, but it would be cheaper to buy a book, unless you live in Australia or Spain, where you need an equity loan to to cover postage to there from the U.S.)
Please post the link to this post or the direct link to Cathedral Child ( http://www.webcomicsnation.com/divalea/cc/series.php?view=current ) with great abandon and enthusiasm, especially if you like it.
Post here or write me: divalea @ gmail . com
Go on, shoo. The rest will be here.
- - - - - - - -
"Me, I’m looking to find ways to use copying to make more money and it’s working: enlisting my readers as evangelists for my work and giving them free ebooks to distribute sells more books. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity."--Cory Doctorow
Just call me the Cory Doctorow of comics. Doctorow is (in)famous for his wacky business model of giving away his books online under a Creative Commons license to drive sales of his printed books. It's a business model I started using in 1995, putting up previews of comics online.
I know free-on-the-web sells books. I've know it for twelve years.
In 1998, Cathedral Child was manga-when-manga-wasn't-cool, OEL was "that big eyes and speedlines stuff," and "not real manga," manga collections were $20., not $9.95, and a graphic novel was most certainly not 5" x 7" inches.
Cathedral Child was a book I wrote for the myself who wanted to read it when I was young teenager. By which I mean, a smart girl hero, adventure, peril, triumph and art I loved. A mythology for myself that would not be betrayed later with grit and angst, a gutshot to screw with Batman, or death by silly driller.
You know, girly.
You know hard hard it is to get a girly book under the radar in the Top Cow, Wildstorm, Dreamwave-dominated four color junk bond Direct Market circa 1997? Real damn hard, and I did it with my little Internet, by putting art online so people could see it, instead of waiting for it to (not) come to stores.
Half my sales on CC and CA originated from the web, the other from being featured (for both books and Rumble Girls) on Cliff Bigger's Comic Shop News. I sold out two printings of the Image CC between 1998 and 2001. That's about 3,500 female-friendly GN's at a time when GNs were functionally nonexistent in the big bookstores. CC was reordered from Image every week for two years. Arcing over all that was the intro by my good friend, Kurt Busiek, crazy famous and award-winning and shit for writing Marvels and Astro City.
When I took Rumble Girls from print-to-web in 2003 (predating many creators now doing the same, some of whom I evangelized to tirelessly), it was to finish the series because printing it was bleeding me white, and the itch to do it my way had had me for well over a year. The DM market was drying out from its millennium-spanning whoop-de-multiple-covers-do hangover, and I was tired of production pains in the ass on one end of the serial print issues, and a royalty statement full of zeros and negative integers on the other.
That's what I know. Here's what I feel. Last year, I had a house fire that destroyed my home, ruined most of the things inside (which were not just a total of more than a century of lives, but some things were also a century or more old), and killed every living thing in the house. I and my family were greeted with a tidal wave of love, goodwill, and monetary help to start our lives over from, literally, the ground up.
I would have to write over two thousand thank-you notes, a wonderful situation to be in. I think people would rather have more of my comics. I sure hope I'm right about that, and that's not Miss Manners I hear tsk-tsking somewhere.
So, here's Cathedral Child, my gift to the world. It's a comic you won't be embarassed to read on a bus, unless you're embarassed about laughing, crying or missing your stop. Please share it. Send the links to friends, make them a CD, print it out for reading on the plane or the toilet, or the toilet on the plane. The only hitch is that you can't sell it, or make derivative works other than translations (which you also must share and not sell.) Share it like crazy, and please let me know how you liked it.
Since it's mine, I can give it away however I choose, and I do, with profound thanks and all my love.
P.S.: I do hope those who read Cathedral Child will buy print books or art or toss some digital president paper in the PayPal, so I can go on living my high life of unsweet iced tea and ham sammiches. xxoo
