Comic Book IP Farming Comics by Bill Masuku - August 26, 20190 "Over the past few decades, comic books have become Hollywood’s most reliable well for source material. It’s easy to see why — not only is comics one the most vibrant storytelling mediums in the world, but the books themselves offer built-in storyboarding, providing writers and directors a visual template on which to build a film." -TechCrunch (2017) Somewhere between not quite an industry secret and not common knowledge is the gap where all the most fascinating pieces of information sleep. For comic books one such not-so-secret is the concept and practice of IP farming. I think it can be best summarised as "The creation of an intellectual property with the sole, or explicit purpose of adapting that property for another medium. And
Maximizing your comic revenue! Uncategorized by Bill Masuku - July 26, 2019August 26, 20190 When you are producing indie content, especially in a medium that is as niche as comic books/visual literature it can often be disheartening to not see the returns you need off the bat. Breaking even (all your costs are offset by all your income, where profit equals zero), while not a massive measure of success it is still one of the goals when you are starting out - even then getting to that break-even is a hurdle in self-published comics. In the beginning, when you ARE the business it can be hard to separate how much the books/materials are costing you. Do you consider transport to conventions a cost? parking? registration for the table to be able to sell? All of
Zimbabwean Comic Book Business Models African Comic Book Comics Zimbabwe by Bill Masuku - August 2, 20180 NB: While the title states 'Zimbabwean', I will make reference to other African countries. While creating comic books is a whole host of tasks in itself, selling/marketing the comic book is the real challenge. After all, a million dollar idea that no one sees is worthless. They key items observed here are value, cost, price and margins. These elements inform pricing strategy and affect the overall publisher's business models. DigiArt Studios is one of the main creation houses for comic books that have become the backbone of the comic book events and daily discussions about where to go in the industry analyzing where we have come from over the years. The studio has published several titles since its first publication circa 2014/5.
Three African Comic Book Archetypes African Comic Book Comics by Bill Masuku - August 2, 20180 It goes without that saying an entire post about it, but the African comic book wave largely borrows ideas, concepts, and themes from western comics. More specifically from the big two DC Comics and Marvel Comics publishing houses. Weirdly, the main three achetypes for characters and story telling are pulled from DC's Trinity. Just a quick note for those that don't know; DC Comic book's three main superheroes are Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman - collectively known as the Trinity. Three characters that are the pillars of the publishing house's sales, marketing, and stories. Superman: the man of steel, the man of tomorrow and truly the heart of the books, as well as the idealist of the teams he sorties with. He
Getting Off The Ground! – Writing Comics Comics by Bill Masuku - August 2, 2018August 2, 20180 Comic book writing for the most part sucks, it really sucks. There are so many things you have to cover and keep track of, in terms of creating dynamic panel visuals, what your artist is capable of, pacing of each page, how much information you can cram into a couple of centimeters, bargaining space with lettering and art. It's a mess. And I love it. While everything above is a technical nightmare, once you get into the swing of it it's like breathing and one of the most fulfilling experiences life has to offer. The problem is getting off the ground. Finding your swing, finding your rhythm, and better yet finding someone who can convert your napkin scribbles into high quality
Downloadable Photoshop Add-Ons 1 Comics by Bill Masuku - March 27, 20180 For $1 donation: Click here to download [wpecpp name="A3 Margin Lines" price="1" align="left"] A quick and easy set up for A3 comic book pages in Photoshop. Creating your margin lines in seconds, allowing you to get started on your comic book paneling quickly and uniformly. When it comes to comic creation, printing is one of the last things that creators give any thought. And this often leads to bad print jobs over, what are realistically minor things to make note of and adjust accordingly. Having been printing comics since 2016, I've seen where this can go smoothly and you can pretty much hand the files to anyone and get the same job done by different printing professionals. On the other hand while I
Comic book art and the need for a drawing tablet Comics by Bill Masuku - March 14, 20180 I've been drawing comic books, and comic art since I was in grade school, as you can imagine not all of it great. But this just meant that I still had many basic and otherwise fundamental things to learn about drawing, about the craft, and really letting my muscles mature enough in control that I could create the lines as I saw them in my mind. The amazing thing about life is that where ever you are in your growth cycle this is always true. You can keep learning new things, not just about drawing, but in seeing, in interpretation, in conveying meaning and intention. All contributing to the visual language that you are creating. In the last two years, if there's
Where my dream is headed Uncategorised by Bill Masuku - January 21, 20180 I started as an active member of the comic book creator’s community in 2016. The beginning was difficult, but that’s an article for another time, I want to talk about what this all means in the future and the potential that my country is sleeping on. I’ve found explaining this comes to hard heads and accepting it even harder heads, so I’ll start with an analogy but I hope everyone can understand, absorb and accept. Somewhere in your country there is a young man with a fever for running. Where he runs isn’t even a thought that passes his mind consciously. He however needs to run. With every muscle that will push him there and all the other muscles that will
Human Interface in Comic Books Comics by Bill Masuku - January 17, 20180 Art and information systems are so far detached from one another in terms of education that it almost seems out of place to consider them in the same spheres of knowledge let alone the use of one’s fundamentals in the instrumentation of the other. Luckily the entirety of my education has been interdisciplinary, so the combination of ideas was not only good but encouraged at a point. In IS, (information systems) one of the modules at Rhodes in my second year was Human Interface. With lectures surrounding around the idea that, no matter how revolutionary, how beneficial and how state of the art your program/app is; if the end user struggles to use it then it is as good as garbage. All
Adding Light – Character Drawing Live Stream Uncategorised by Bill Masuku - January 11, 20180 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn99TMdBNyA&t=100s For most drawing is really hard, but even if you do learn how to turn the images from your mind into something that other people can see. It's still a hell of a task to get that image to be 'real'. Even in the world of cartoon and comic book drawing, the laws surrounding life drawing still apply. Lighting, shading, colour, proportion. While each of these can be warped to a degree they still exist in practice. Here we take a look at how a light placed near a character affects their colour and how that light bounces, reflects and gets absorbed just like real light.