In March 2016 I returned to Germany and worked until the middle of the summer. I didn’t do much with Success at that time, because I was focused on working and trying to set up a new life in Germany for myself and my fiancée. It wasn’t meant to be for us to live in Germany, however, and I returned in mid-June. In July I got married. Around that time, I decided to get back into the comic version of Success. Instead of using the BAMBOO tablet, however, I had read something about a stylus you could use to directly draw on your iPad screen. I went to a store to buy one, and the salesperson recommended to me the Apple pencil. So, I went to an Apple store and tried out the Apple pencil with the iPad Pro. That was it. It was amazingly responsive, felt great to draw with, and I was hooked. I immediately envisioned the entire process for making my comic.
First, for all of the comic pages of dialog, I would download the comic panel layouts from www.comicbookpages.com, then in Photoshop I would input the text and lay out the speech baloons. Next, I would import the pages into Procreate on the iPad Pro and draw the images. Then, the finished page would go back into Photoshop for final export and uploading. To make the pages of music, I would layout the pages in Finale, import them into Procreate, and do the drawings. Simple, right? Cough, cough.
The problem, however, was that I couldn’t afford to buy an Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, especially after just having gotten married and come back from Germany penniless (ask me why in the comments!) So, I spent the next few months selling everything I could possibly part with and accumulating enough money to buy the equipment.
Finally, in 2017, I bought the iPad Pro and Apple pencil and began to work. It was glorious. I worked in coffee shops, I worked in libraries, I worked everywhere I went.
But the comic didn’t really get started in earnest until spring of that year, when I spent a few months in Crecy-la-Chapelle, France, doing some substitute work at a little Montessori school in a manor house basement. There, the head of school let me stay in the large manor house attached to the school. When finally I moved to France, I spent my evenings and weekends in Paris and drawing, drawing, drawing. One of my favorite places to draw was in the cafes across the river from Notre Dame (before it burned). I used to draw for a bit, go up to the second floor of Shakespeare & Co. and play on the piano, browse some comics, and then go back to drawing.
From that time, I hammered out a schedule. I estimated that it would take me 2 months to complete one scene from the play if I worked on one page a day. Not a professional graphic artist’s schedule, I realize, but it was manageable for a weekend warrior like myself. To keep myself honest and make sure I stuck to my schedule, I set up a Patreon account and elicited monthly contributions from the general public. My five contributors, (two if you consider that three of them were my wife, my mom, and my stepdad) helped keep me to my deadlines.
For the next three years I drew at a pace of almost a page a day. Wherever I lived or worked, I worked on the comic in my off hours.
In March of this year, 2020, I drew the final panel of the comic. During May of this year I sent pitch letters to about 50 comic companies hoping to get a print version of the comic made. The next step for Success is to create a full cast recording with professional actors. I think it would also be great to have them read out the entire book for readers as well.
Of course, my dream is to have the comic published in a print version. Can you picture it? If no publishers bite, I’ll probaby launch a Crowdfunding campaign. I’ll have more updates for you then!
Happy reading!