chimneyspeak:

For all my talk of it, I haven’t officially explained what Bum Rush is going to be. So here’s what my future endeavour is going to entail! 

Bum Rush is going to a boutique digital comics publisher, designed with a focused narrative in mind and dedicated to smaller, more fleshed out personal stories set in a superhero world. No tangled web of continuity and constant timeline confusion or stories driven by marketing departments and sales numbers, just fun and exciting superhero stories each with beginnings, middles and ends. 

So many people have told me they get exhausted and give up through navigating the maze that is the Marvel and DC timelines, which only exists to force you to buy comics from lines you don’t want to purchase. Enticing you to download comics in order to follow the scope of the over-arching narrative will never happen with Bum Rush. And my readers constantly ask what the point of reading the latest Batman is, when they automatically know he’s in no peril, and neither is any of their favourite superheroes, knowing that Marvel and DC’s marketing departments wouldn’t dare kill them off until they’ve squeezed every sale out of the characters. I don’t want Bum Rush characters to exist for more than a few years tops. I want them each to tell their stories and then get off stage, providing a satisfying experience for the audience without manipulating them.

Bum Rush will also focus on paying creators fairly, and giving them the royalties they deserve. Creators will be paid industry rate advances for the pages they provide, and also receive 90% net royalties for each download of their comics. Artists who write their own scripts will receive the full 90%, writers and artists who work from their scripts will receive 45% each. The other 10% will fund all of the hosting, advertising and web development that Bum Rush will provide. As we’ll be on an automated download system, costs will be essentially hosting, bandwidth and the download server, which’ll easily be covered by the 10% and the ads on the site. 

Though the true number is a guarded secret, royalties for working for Marvel and DC are between nothing and 5% to share between the staff of people working on each comic. As a self employed comic creator, learning this shook me to my core. I’m creating this system to found a place where creators get paid the amount they should have been paid for the last 80 years, using a system of distribution that doesn’t need a building full of people taking slices of revenue from each comic to give comic fans what they want. 

Working on Chimneyspeak for as long as I have I’ve made colleagues of a bunch of fantastic artists and writers, far better than me and a lot of the current talent working on comics today. I want these guys to tell cool stories and make careers out of their passions, something that’s currently only really doable through pursuing the webcomic path, because their art isn’t the completely rendered, same-y style superhero comics are so often shackled by, or their writing doesn’t revolve around preserving the status-quo and making sure everyone lives happily ever after. Through jovial talking on Twitter I’ve got a few writers and artists interested already, and I’ve been searching and gathering contact information from high quality artists and writers who are precisely not what you’d find in your average monthly offering.

I’ve got high ambitions for Bum Rush, and I want to attract people who love webcomics but have given up or shown no interest in the current cadre of monthly comics, into this cool world we’ll be building together. So many people have told me they prefer reading webcomics, not only because of the price but because every webcomic they read has something interesting and unique to offer, visually or narratively, and I reckon I can tap into that.

I’ll be drawing the free Bum Rush webcomic while the teams of creators work on their downloadables. The webcomic will give a glimpse of the world you’ll see more of in the download comics, and give all the more reason to keep comic back! It’ll star Redd and Mitsy and a host of other characters, with frequent guest webcomic creators providing free monthly stories paid at the industry standard for their work. 

Of course, Bum Rush won’t begin until current endeavours are finished and a business loan to pay every creator, web development and set up the advertising it needs to reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible. I have a potential investor interested already, so I’m hoping we can get started by the end of the year!