Hanzo, in this and your previous post, you are, of course, correct. And, thanks. I'll try to keep all of it in mind as I plow ahead. I'm committed to finishing it no matter how I feel about the art.

This thread is aptly titled.

It's sometimes hard to keep focus on how good we are. We see artists like Kirby,Kubert,Toth,Adams,Davis,Hughes... whoever is considered a great and we feel we can't live up to it, and it kills our drive, makes everything we do look so much worse, but as has been said, you HAVE to ignore that, and only compete with your last drawing.

This is going to sound like a back-handed compliment, and maybe insulting, but it isn't meant to be:

Rick, I've ordered comics with worse dialogue and art than you've shown here. And they've sold. That's all that really matters comercially. Being as unbiased and profesional as I can, I can tell you as a retailer I'd order your book based on the samples shown in this thread. I might only order a couple of copies, but then I only order a couple of each Valiant, a couple of most Avatar, most Image #1s...

See what I'm saying?

Anyway, once again, I really mean no insult with the above! I think you are doing work that's getting better page by page (fight the urge to go back and fiddle! at least until you finish the whole thing).

Stick with it.

Damn, Rick, are you going to just sit there and take that?

I mean, this guy basically just spit in your face.

Kidding aside, no retailer in my area -- about 5 or 6 -- orders any shelf copies of Savage Dragon at this point or if they do, no more than one.

That's it. I was depressed before but now I'm suicidal. I just want the pain to go away.

Pathetic.

Go grow a backbone and a pair of balls.

Pussy.

Seriously, though, I'm not insulted at all. The thought of having a finished printed comic in your store sounds really, really cool. I haven't even been thinking that far ahead.

But really, despite being in art for 40 years I'm still an amateur at comics so if it becomes something that people want to read, that will be as much as I could hope for. And very gratifying. I just wish I was faster. I'd like to do something with all these characters. The wife says, hang on til she has her engineering degree and then we'll pay some reputable people to draw some comics.

She's an angel.

Meanwhile, the fantasy novel I'm supposed to be writing languishes.

That novel sounds awful anyway.

hehe yeah, I didn't want to just give you a "thats great Rick" kinda response, I felt you were owed at least an honest one!

A friend of mine began by doing a small comic zine that I distributed in the shop. He sold 6-8 copies, and this made him feel pretty down, until I explained that at that point, I was selling maybe 15 Batman a month. His little zine was selling 50% what Batman was! It really is about distribution, be it digital, thru the LCS/DM or just going to stores yourself/posting samples.

Get it done, get it out there, you will find an audience, especially given the massive reach of digital these days.

Heh. Recently, a START-UP website, a WEBSITE, A START-UP, wanted submissions for to begin a serialization of novels one chapter at a time as they used to do in the old magazines like the Strand. They didn't even want a finished novel. Just send 'em the first chapter.

So out of the many they chose and remember, this was not a publisher and there were many chosen for this, not just one for a book deal, I was rejected.

Being rejected by A publisher for A book would be bad enough but to not even merit inclusion in a group effort based on one chapter is worse.

So yeah, awful is what it must have looked like to them, too. Very deflating.

Todd McFarlane used to bring a giant glass bowl full of the 200 plus rejection letters he got from publishers through the years to conventions.

He's one of the wealthiest men the industry has produced.

You're right. I'm an uncareful reader.

But now I'm getting sucked into the story. It was that "Just lads" that did it!

There's a "quite" coming later.

Very good work!

It occurs to me that you might not have been kidding. So, no. Just a random photo off the interweb. I changed it since then a little for Thug #1 to make him look more like the model I used after that, me.

In fact I'm the only model for everybody up to most of page 8 so if you know what I look like and how fat I am you can see there's at least a LITTLE drawing skill involved in translating all that into something else.

But I'm all I got.

And it's mainly for drawing !$#!$#^$! clothes and wrinkles which I have more trouble with than anatomy, not having done as much of it.

And also for speed.

I wasn't kidding, I thought you might have thrown them in as a joke. Not meant as an insult.

What an insult.