wondermark

100 of anything duck-sized is an awful lot of animal. I feel like that will be a more spectacular event when it happens. If I gotta die, I want to at least get on the news.

I feel like this an the appropriate time to mention that there is indeed a second MOD book, and that you can order it right now! It was compiled from submissions that we received in the wake of the first volume.

If it does well, there may be more...WHO KNOWS??

Everyone else has offered a lot of really great writing advice so I'll just take the outlier position and say the best way to share your writing is to place it anonymously in newspaper vending machines and then hide in your car waiting to see how people react to it

I think everyone who's been doing comics for a long time finds that the thing they end up doing tends to evolve and change over time, as they discover what they like most about it! And I have known people who try so hard to develop something airtight at the outset that it just sucks all the energy out of it. It's a cliché, but I would recommend to just explore the ideas that interest you personally, and don't let that be hemmed in by arbitrary rules you erect around yourself!

"the personal is general" - ironically, when you try to do something that you think everybody will like, it's toothless. When you do something that speaks to a wildly specific point of view, it's much more interesting to read.

Adding illustrations to the book at all was actually a suggestion from one of the agents we originally shared the manuscript with. At first we just had the set of stories, and our pitch was something along the lines of "We're in webcomics, so there are people who visit our sites, and hopefully that will make people want the book." Since these days in publishing it's all about your 'platform', or how popular you are going in.

One agent who liked the manuscript said "Wait, so the pitch is that you're in webcomics, but there's no art of any kind in here? That seems like a missed opportunity." So we thought about it and realized, hey, yeah, that would be pretty cool! Since we already had the stories, we figured we could commission illustrations from people we knew, and thus make the book even cooler.

At first I compiled a list of story synopses and sent it to a handful of artists. They could then choose which stories sounded interesting, I'd send the text of those over, and the artist could choose which one they preferred to illustrate. I'd say about half the stories were assigned that way.

Then, as I began to check off all the artists I knew personally, I looked at the list to see which stories were still unassigned, and tried to think of an artist whose style might go well with that particular story. I'd write to them and in some cases say "We have X story or Y story available, let me know if either interests you; or, there are others", and as the list of stories remaining got shorter, that became simply "I have this story, would you be interested?"

In truth it was a pretty time-consuming process! For the second book, using what I learned, I just set down a list of artists I wanted to work with, then tried to match them with stories at the outset. For stories I couldn't match right away, I'd ask for recommendations from friends of other artists they knew, and try to see if any of the stories we had left would fit their style. There's artists I'd like to work with that I just didn't feel like I had a fitting piece for, in the second book especially. But I'm really pleased with all the art we ended up with in both books!