![]() It can’t be a friendlier version of a textbook for kids. It needs a main character, preferably one that 7-10 year olds can relate to. I restructured it as a large ‘story’ composed of hundreds of characters across all 15 geological eras, but still no dice. Short stories and anthologies don’t do well. The response was that the middle-grade market currently only wants longform stories. I shuffled RAWR! Dinosaur Friends, as a full-color iteration of the same anthology-type format, around to a couple of portfolio reviews. My first attempt at rebranding, trying to keep a reference to my grayscale zine roots. They assured me that 500 copies is not a large number per se, until a person factors in the lack of wider distribution. I wasn’t sure how impressive this was until I told other writers. Apparently I had sold about 500 copies of these zines. Then I checked my purchase history of when I formed a zine out of my dinosaur comics. That je ne sais quoi from six years ago must still be there. The full-color version sits at around 14000 notes, currently. I poked my little dinosaur comics blog with an updated, colorful version of ‘that horseshoe crab comic’, just to see what happened. I understand that internet metrics are worthless, but 4000 notes must mean some thing, even if it’s just Tumblr. This was easily the most popular thing I had ever created. RAWR! Dinosaur friends returned to my mind. ![]() I was also getting more involved with my local comics and writing communities, and was being encouraged to create pitches to sell to publishers. I wanted to, again, chase that high of rattling something silly off and getting a big, broad response. When I shopped Warlock’d around local publishing groups, I started to realize exactly how heavy and complex it was. Making a complete longform project is a lot different from rattling off one-shots every week. ![]() I worked on a longform comic project called Warlock’d for a bit. I wanted to really draw some stuff and not be restricted by, well, restrictions that I had set up for myself to accommodate my unusual prior situation. I also had better equipment than I did in my little un-air-conditioned 1-bedroom in Berkeley. The types of jokes fell into a few broad categories (Animal comparisons, simple stories that span millions of years and thus have unearned gravitas, mockery of pop cultural ideas about dinosaurs, gentle corrections of dinosaur facts, etc.). The final factor was, I felt like I was not challenging myself with the artwork or writing. Another factor was that my comics, like much of social media that purports to be educational or historical, were being used as sources…and they most definitely were not researched enough to be considered educational. One factor was that I was an armchair paleontology fan and the space was increasingly hostile towards those who weren’t updated on the latest in paleontological finds, especially with anatomy. I hesitate to call this ‘viral’ in an age where actual virality can rack up hundreds of thousands of interactions, but it was still an affirmation that hey, maybe something about what I was making was there, resonating with more people than I could ever know in my lifetime. This is the first comic I made that reached a larger audience than normal, to the tune of about two-thousand notes on Tumblr. Which resulted in… this.Īnd yes, I’m still friends with Andy Purviance, to this day. My response was to go for a gorgonopsid or a quezalcoatlus. One of the best responses to my comic was a polite inquiry about which dinosaur would be the most impressive to ride in a parade for a queen, and T. I think I hit about ten notes and felt very happy. I posted it to a few comics and dinosaur forums and to my surprise, readers came out of the woodworks. Making these comics made me feel like a small, safe child in a natural history museum. I could continue making it for my own enjoyment and that was enough. The first few comics were quite rough but I managed my expectations. These comics were drawn with bezier curves and agony. My computer was not able to handle brush strokes in Photoshop so I built it with vector shapes in Adobe Illustrator. The computer used grayscale tones so that it would be cheap to print. ![]() I thought the combination of dry scientific concepts and casual style of writing would spark interest. The humor was derived from a style of internet humor called (sorry for the swear word on a middle-grade publishing blog) ‘shitposting’. The first iteration was a slapdash, punk homage to the natural history museums I loved to visit as a child. RAWR! Dinosaur Friends started out as a webcomic concept, one that I wasn’t initially intending to pitch as a proper graphic novel. Retrofitting Dinosaurs for the Future of Humankind
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