What Dreams May Come?

So my friend, Juan Fernandez, the talented SOB that he is, gave my friends and I some extremely insightful knowledge regarding submitting books to Image. As most of you may know, Juan is a certified DC colorist, I mean this guy is the fucking bees knees. And too, Image is pretty much among the biggest independent distributors outside of Marvel and DC, but they're among the smallest minority houses that still, I guess, features an "open door" policy when it comes to submitting books. They're all about artists maintaining creator rights and what not, which is all well and good, so suffice it to say, I had the intent on submitting Periphery once I was done with it.

"Couple things to keep in mind", he said:

"Before you even approach them, make sure to have at least the first three issues ready to go!"

That wasn't all too surprising; matter of fact, just after I graduated from AI, I had put together a newspaper comic strip that I wanted to get syndicated for daily printing. It was a pretty decent story, but they all required 3 months MINIMUM amount of strips before it gets sent to print (yo that's like 90 3 to 4 panel strips I got 4 in and I was like, aight this can wait), so it's only natural that a comic book publishing company would want the same kind of security blanket from their artists. But here's where he caught me:

"Second thing to keep in mind, you're going to need to acquire roughly 25 to 28 hundred dollars to cover the cost of print, advertising, and distribution."

Well holy shit Sammy I do believe we've got an issue!

Where the fuck am I gonna get that type of money? So as I stood there in the cold night surround by my three home dawgies, I pontificated as to where I could establish such a high amount of fundage, but then, classic Juan, threw in the clincher at the very end:

"That's 25 to 28 hundred...EACH".

Go ahead and calculate that on your own time.

So the way I saw my life unfurling before me was damn near tragic; why in God's name did I think this was a feasible endevour? Allow me to spit some logic at you: Let's say, that somehow, you're able to procure 10 grand to pay Image, AND you've got three books ready to roll right? Pros: That ten grand has covered distribution costs, guaranteed rack sales at hundreds if not thousands of comic book shops across the US, and maybe even the world! Advertising on imagecomics.com (you're welcome), and a whole slue of other shit! Guess what; Cons: even with all of that, there is absolutely no guarantee that you'd see ANY profit from those books (for the benefit of the doubt, let's say initially), that means that in the three months that each of the three issues are released, you may not even break even, considering that you've got to use the earnings from that book to pay for the remaining issues.

Gamble? Too subtle a word I think.

So his advice was to just promote the book on my own; pay for the printing myself, chat up comic shops across the book on my own, and submit it to them all on my own terms and income. Of course it made sense, and for but a fleeting moment, all hope didn't seem lost.

What's funny though, it's like 6 a.m. right, and today is the first day off after my 21 consecutive days of work at my job, and I took it upon myself to digitally submit Periphery to Image Comics lol.

Why the fuck not right?

Fuck it if they don't like it, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and have a blast doing it...

But maybe....just maybe... lol come on obviously they're not gonna pick it up but a nigga can dream right?!

Cheers!