So I'm asked to produce Books again...
Graphic novels were my strong point a long time ago. I was just never really good at creating one I liked enough to keep around for very long so I was always crumbling up my big projects and throwing them away in the trash bin to never be heard of again. But just like animators who animate for a living they also take time off from animating and will work on regular still imagery work. That's because creating animations take a lot of time, even for those who are just offering worthless loops and 30 second animations as their supporters demand more of them, you know "please kind sir or ma'am will you make longer animations?! Please tell me this 10 or 30 second animation is not the whole thing!"
Indeed it is the whole thing because animators are lazy and don't want to make longer animations. You want my opinion, these animators are better off retiring and finding some other hobby to make money off of if they can't give their Patreons more than a shitty 10 or 30 second animation. Sorry, just being brutally honest there. Well part of the reason I gave up on producing graphic novels and comics is because my audience shrunk after Pixiv evicted me and threw me out in the rain with nowhere else to go. It took me at last six full years to gain 12,000 followers and I've seen artists who had around 100,000! It's difficult building up these strong fanbases, and then some fuck face moderators or site owners want to take all of that away from you because they can't stand up to harassment from the worse scum of the earth, BANKERS.
Although I understand that people prefer my books over the regular stills because the stories are so deep and well developed. I'm not someone who sits here and writes up terrible dialog like "oooh and ahhh!" I put an credible amount of effort into that stuff. I'm thinking well if people want to see me produce books again I'll need to kick my own ass and find that story development creator from within and bring him right back into the fold. Right now he doesn't want come out.
I was working on a graphic novel a year or so ago, one of my horror erotic tales from the Shadow Hill series I am deeply passionate about. And I made it to 65 pages, but there are over I don't know how many panels, but I'd say about 300 renders it took me just to come up with all those panels for just 65 pages. I may be miscalculating this, except according to all the scenes I managed to save, there are a total of 200+ scenes saved on my hard drive from that project. What this means is that I either produced 200 or 300 renders and that's a lot of work! In order to finish the book, it's going to require at least 150 - 200 pages, and I'm going to assume that if 65 pages is 200 or 300 renders, imagine the total amount of renders I'll need to complete for 200 pages!
(Spoilers)
The Exiles was another 1990s inspired Horror/Thriller story project I had plans to work on after I finished the first half of Escape From Echidna instead of starting on an immediate sequel. The Exiles is also part of the Shadow Hill series. The story is about five heavily oppressed women suffering from sexual repression and various psychological disorders.
These five women each have their own inner demons to face, and they must fight against powerful psychological forces that will attempt to harm them. The only way they can be free is if they can overcome them especially if they ever want to be tolerated in normal society again. Veronica however doesn't agree with this assessment and believes that people like herself are misunderstood and wrongfully judged by society. She believes that if they cannot be accepted for whom and what they are, then what is the point in their existence at all? Knowing that she cannot force nor expect society to tolerate her illicit attractions, she will be expected to make a tough decision if she ever wants to return back to civilization or remain an exile forever.
In order to cure the problem each woman face they are forced to attend a mandatory psychological retreat session for seven months in an isolated hostel manor far away from civilization. During that allotted time, they encounter unspeakable evil, and all sorts of threatening adversaries that will challenge and terrorize them until they succumb and fall to the dark unless they can either escape or fight the forces, both task proving to be impossible. So this whole story was about repression, and overcoming psychological threats in the face of danger. With this story I was influenced by the likes of Clocktower (the SNES version), and wanted a similar story to it. A group of women trapped in a manor miles away from civilization and then they discover bizarre and strange things throughout the place. It was perfect!
For what it's really worth, I'd like to get back into the habit and spirit of creating graphic novels if I can make any profit off them...I mean it would be hard to do with just 2000K followers VS 12,000 followers I had before. Depending on how long Baraag sticks around and openly allows censorship-free artwork to exist on it's platforms... I can see if investing in graphic novels and comics are still worth it.
Graphic novels and comics are a lot like animations, they have so much potential... I'm sure that if I started a Patreon or posted my artwork more frequently on X, I could amass a new following that expands and grows...But seeing how X and Patreon would never respect my rights to freedom of expression...I would get kicked off within a day unless I watered everything down to the point of hating my own work...And that's never going to happen. What's the point in being an artists if you're forbidden from creating unless it's something that the platform owners approve of? By doing this, they infringe on my ability to tell the kind of stories that would keep people coming back for more.
