In case you haven’t noticed, full-color rendering for Johnny Saturn is back, and it’s here to stay.  We started again on Monday’s episode, and it continues in this style from here on out.  At one point, because of medical problems with my right hand and arm, I thought my coloring days were over.  I’m glad to say that I’ve adjusted my approach, and colors are here to stay.

As I mentioned Monday, I bought “Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite.”  This was a good read, and very imaginative.  The characters aren’t all that likable as people, and they can’t even make nice long enough to put their recently deceased adoptive father in the ground.  The interior art is very much Mike Mignola inspired, and Dave Stewart on colors is outstanding.  I’ve never heard the music of My Chemical Romance, so that had nothing to do with my purchase of this book.  I guess I got this graphic novel for the wacky antics, weird superheroes, and ironic writing.  B+. 

What webcomics am I reading right now?  Well, it’s Girl Genius, PvP, Evil Inc., Sheldon, and Side Chicks.  There are some other old favorites that I’ve fallen behind on, and I need to catch up with them.  Girl Genius is my favorite—The Phoglio’s surprise me again and again with their outlandish imaginations, and I’ve actually grown to care about the characters.  Side Chicks has gone through three artists so far, but it retains its high quality and engaging storytelling.  Evil Inc. is brilliant, and Sheldon is to me the funniest comic I read.

If you ordered a copy of “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father” from Amazon.com, could you place a review for us there?  We have three reviews up, but we could use a bunch more.  Don’t worry about being glib, or offending us—Just write what you think of the book.

Scott

Benita and I will be appearing Saturday only at Mid-Ohio Con. We’ll be at the Comic Related table. We’ll have copies of “Johnny Saturn: Synns Of The Father” with us for sale, plus maybe some other merchandise. Stop by and introduce yourselves!

Scott

–Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father, regularly $19.95, now $15.00 plus S/H

–Johnny Saturn issues 1 to 6, regularly $3.50 each, now $2.50 each plus S/H

–The Johnny Saturn Pinup Gallery, regularly $2.50, now $2.00 plus S/H

–Sixteen Month Story Studios’ Fantasy Calendar, regularly $10.00, now $5.00 plus S/H

–Johnny Saturn 2008-09 Sixteen Month Calendar, regularly $10.00, now $5.00 plus S/H

As a special incentive, we are including a free Sixteen Month Calendar (while supplies last) with every order that includes Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father!

All books come signed by both authors!

If you want to find out what the buzz is about Johnny Saturn, this is the time!

For an independent comic book, the art, story, and even the colors in this mini-series are high-quality. You’d swear this title were published by one of the larger companies instead of by Scott Story and his wife, Benita.—Comic Buyers Guide

…Saturn is a tour de force and well worth reading.–Silver Bullet Comics

Take tight storytelling and old school artwork, toss them in a blender with the best of what has come before and the hope of things to come and Johnny Saturn is what is born from that volatile concoction.—Byte Marks

Go to www.johnnysaturn.com .

Lots of changes going on here! Phil Hofer has worked tirelessly (He stayed up all night!) to get the site working again after its database corrupted. It ends up that a plugin was at the root of the problem, so now it’s gone.

This also explains why I haven’t been blogging—I couldn’t. The blogging part of the site was the first part that broke, leading to the discovery of the other problems. It’s like getting a sore foot, and finding out that your spine is out of alignment. (OK, terrible analogy, but you get the basic idea). The posting function is fixed now (Thanks, Phil!).

eShop, the source of our problems, is out of the picture, the plugin that powered our store. I’ll have a new store up and running by Monday, one with more options. For now, if you feel you need a copy of “Johnny Saturn: Sins of the Father“, you need to go to Amazon.com for it.

If I can draw your attention to the new navigation buttons under the comic, and the pull-down menus in the top nav bar, these are some of Phil’s additions to the site, and they are damn tasty!

I’d also like to mention the Johnny Saturn will be taking part in the “Frumph.NET’s Great Holiday Hunt,” which you can read more about here.

I’ll probably post more this afternoon!

Scott

Lots of interesting stuff going on.

First up, today is my birthday.  I was born on an American Air force base forty-four years ago in Seville, Spain.  I’m not sad to see another year come and go, because my forties have been the best decade of my life.

Next up, I changed my old Myspace page into a satellite Johnny Saturn site.  I was more than pleasantly surprised at how flexible Myspace has become!  It was quite fun to format this page!  Through the magic of RSS, the comic strip and the blog will appear on Myspace as it updates, but if the reader wants to see the full-size comic or the comic’s archives, he need only click on the image there and be transported to this site.

http://www.myspace.com/scott_story

It should be noted that we have similar RSS feeds to Comixtalk, Xaviar Xerexes’ excellent webcomic site.

http://comixtalk.com/

Tomorrow, I plan to spend some time filling out the Zen Cart Johnny Saturn Store.  The video tutorials have been excellent, so I should be well on my way to establishing this new hub of Johnny Saturn swag!  If you want to see Zen Cart in action, please visit Comics2Games new site.

http://bluelinepro.com/storecomics2/

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to the Amazon.com “I recommend” link in the right column.  It’s not too late to order a copy or two of “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father” for Christmas!

Scott.

As 2008 winds down, and Benita and I make big plans for Johnny Saturn in 2009, I think it’s worthwhile to review our year.  In many regards, this year was huge for us.  In other regards, it was a “rebuilding” year.

The biggest event of our year was the publication of our graphic novel, “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father.”  It was very heady for us as the book’s listing came up on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and numerous other websites.  Later on, we also published “Johnny Saturn” no. 6, and the “Johnny Saturn Pinup Gallery.”  This latter was particularly satisfying, because artists from all over the planet contributed pinups.

Next up for us was building of the current johnnysaturn.com site.  Prior to this, Johnny Saturn was distributed among Graphic Smash, Webcomicsnation, Comic Genesis, and Drunk Duck, while the blog was located on Myspace.  We had pretty much maxed out the scattershot approach, and now it was time to consolidate.  In June, we discontinued or downgraded all those other sites and established a WordPress-based, Comicpress run site to be our hub.  This was a titanic undertaking, one that involved reformatting all the old strips, learning new skills, and eventually even changing web hosts.

The third biggest coup for the year, and arguable more important than the first, was placing twice in the Webcomic Readers Choice Awards, winning first place for Antagonist of the Year (Dr. Synn), and third place for protagonist of the year (Johnny Saturn).  Many benefits issued from this honor, including the friendship of Phil Hofer, aka Frumph, of the Frumph Webcomic List.

After that, the comic collective Palace in the Sky asked us to join, and we happily did so.  This collective is primarily made up of high quality fantasy comics, but Johnny Saturn, while not a traditional swords & horses fantasy, came to fit in quite well in their lineup.  Palace in the Sky continues to be one of our big referrers, and we are proud to be associated with them.

Also of note, 2008 saw Benita and I interviewed on a Podcast for the first time, and our friendship with Chuck Moore of Comic Related.  I had one article in Sketch Magazine this year, and have submitted two more.  Benita and I joined the Indy Webcomics Group, a local collective of cartoonists who have garnered national attention.

All in all, this was a year to remember!

Inked in marker, and roughly water colored, this was a proposed cover for the trade-paperback, “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father.”  This wasn’t bad, but it came nowhere near the attitude I wanted to capture for graphic novel’s cover.  It had good foreshortening, but overall it lacked in dynamics.

I’d like to remind everyone that Benita and I will be attending the Woodcarver Retreat this weekend, hosted by noted horror writer and supernaturalist Bob Freeman.  Many of you might remember Bob as the writer for the “Johnny Saturn: Synns Of The Father” forward, and an old hand in the indie comic world himself.  Benita and I will speaking about the differences of writing for comics, as opposed to writing for prose.  We won’t be covering many of the fundamentals of storytelling and writing, because those in attendance are skilled prose writers in their own right.

Today’s blog is part production blog, and part “What’s going on with Scott and Benita” blog.

Item: We sold out of our first print run of “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father,” and we just got a new shipment of books in.  To celebrate this, we are going to include a free sketch card with each purchase of the book within the next thirty days.  The card will include an original piece of art by me, done in whatever medium catches my attention, and whatever Spire City character I’ve got an itch to draw.  It’ll be random, and one-of-a-kind!

Item: “Johnny Saturn” has just joined the Web Comic Planet Collective, or WCPC!  This is not a traditional collective, or exclusive from our memberships in the fabulous Palace In the Sky (I love this group!) or Graphic Smash.  Instead, WCPC is more of an alliance of webcartoonists joined in the common goal of promoting our comics, a think-tank of outside-the-box thinking to take our comics to the next level!  This group was founded by personal friend and webcomic activist Phil Hofer, aka Frumph.

Item: I’m putting together a formal Stumbleupon group, a pooling of webcartoonists who will Stumble each others’ work on update days.  If we can gather a good number of these online cartoonists, then our Stumbleupon influence will greatly increase and all members will benefit.  If you are a webcartoonist and possibly interested in joining such an effort, please email me for details.  If you are comic reader, please be invited to Stumble all the new episodes and blogs as they come up on Johnny Saturn, using the Stumbleupon icon that comes with each new post.

Item: I’m happy to announce the arrival of the Graphimancer, my new website devoted to my illustration and fantasy artwork.  If you are interested in hiring me as a colorist or inker, please contact me.  I’m also available for cover work, and digital painting.

Thanks! Scott

I want to remind you that the current sale we are running, to commemorate selling out the first run of our books, that we are including a free sketch card with each copy of “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father” that you buy from this site.  These sketch cards are completely original handmade art, such as these (Shown at actual size):

OK, change of subject.

I was recently asked how long it takes to make an episode of “Johnny Saturn.”  My stock answer is nine hours per episode.  I’ve arrived at this estimate the following way: 8 hours to pencil the page, 6 hours to ink the page, 4 hours to color the page, and up to an hour to letter a page.  For convenience sake, let’s round that off to the nearest even number, 18 hours.  Since each original page is made up two episodes, the individual episodes take about nine (18/2=9) hours.

We post three of these episodes a week, amounting to about 27 hours of work per week, or more than three traditional work days (plus change).

Obviously, we do this comic because it’s a passion: I love drawing and creating comics, and Benita is a natural storyteller.  But, why else?

One answer might be that this ongoing schedule to keep producing quality work on a timetable helps us produce a lot of material for printing.   Another answer might be that we love presenting our story as it comes out, and interacting with readers.  Both would be true.

I would also ad that there is a tremendous level of satisfaction with actually doing something creative, and keeping up with it.  We prove that we aren’t simply dreamers, people who plan to get around to doing something creative someday but never do.  We have something tangible to show for our efforts, and that is psychologically huge for us.  When readers actually get the subtleties in the story, or figure out what we are up to, or come to care for our characters, the emotional pay off for Benita and I is huge.

I’ll end this by writing something that should be obvious to creators of all kinds: Using the imagination at a high level is itself a pleasurable experience.  The more you use the imagination, the stronger it gets and the more pleasurable it gets.  You could probably enjoy this benefit by engaging in highly developed daydreaming, but it’s so much better to have something to show for it.

Scott.