#who is the silhouette

Thank you all for your support!  The Kickstarter campaign is over, our goal was hit and we’ll be moving toward print.  Keep an eye on this space for updates on the book’s progress!  We are thrilled to be bringing this book to life.

All our thanks,

Allison & Tom

This is the final installment in Allison’s blog series on editing the anthology “Who is the Silhouette?”.  Today (March 3) is the final day to back the project on Kickstarter.  You can find the previous posts on submissions, the editing process and more at who-is-the-silhouette.tumblr.com.

Today is the day that it all ends.

The kickstarter, that is.  Today is also the day that so much else begins.

Following a successful kickstarter, there is a two week waiting period for Kickstarter to collect and process payments and finally deliver them to the creators.  During those two weeks Tom and I will send out backer surveys to collect shipping information, wrap up the book layout, do a final round of copyediting and get everything ready to send to the printer (this time ‘round we’re working with Keness, a company out of Pittsburg.  Previously we’ve printed with Print Ninja, which has offices in Evanston and China.  We like both for different reasons.). 

Then kickstarter releases the funds and the book order goes in.  The printer will create a print proof for us to review, and then we’ll give the go-ahead to print the whole batch!  And then we wait.

Depending on the type of printing and the location of the printers, the waiting period can vary from a few weeks to a few months.  During this time we’ll send out the PDFs, gather packing materials, and get ready for the intense period of sketching, signing, packing and shipping that will follow.  

Books come in and rewards go out!  Because of Tom and my schedules, we will likely prep books in batches, with a big push to send out as many of the rewards as possible in May and June (filling out backer surveys quickly helps us get you your book in an early batch).  Our contributors will all be getting bundles of books from us, which they can sell at shows or give away or transform into paper mache hats at their discretion.  

Rewards sent, Tom and I will breathe a deep sigh of relief and not know what to do with ourselves until convention season hits in earnest and we take the book to as many shows as we can!  As much as I love ordering books on Kickstarter, there’s something extra wonderful about buying a book in person from one of that book’s creators.  We hope our books will find homes on many more shelves across the country both during and after the campaign!

This is the fourth installment in Allison’s blog series on editing the anthology “Who is the Silhouette?” which is currently funding on Kickstarter.  To read the rest of the series, visit who-is-the-silhouette.tumblr.com.

From the beginning of the project, we knew we would be going to Kickstarter.  As much fun as making a book is, it’s not really real until we can get it into readers’ hands.  Kickstarter lets us manage preorders so that we can fund the print run with book sales and get a good idea of how many books we need before we place the order.

To calculate our base goal and our stretch goals, we did a bunch of math.  We needed to take into account the cost for printing, the cost to ship the books to us, the cost of packing those books and shipping them out to our backers, the money we had spent to pay our contributors for their work, the additional money we wanted to pay them if we could get past the minimum goal, the price of ordering extra books if we exceeded our initial goal, and the fees from Kickstarter.  It was a lot of math, and a lot of approximation and guesswork, but we came up with our numbers based on how much we could afford to pay out of pocket to make the book a reality, how many books minimum we needed to order, and all of the other factors that I named above.

Tom and I aren’t great at promotion.  We’re much more interested in making comics than we are in marketing them, but we have to get eyes on the project to get books into hands.  

One of our first (and very achievable!) goals was to post something every day on our social media, with Tumblr as the content hub.  We decided that Saturdays would be blog posts by me, Mon/Wed/Fri would be interviews with contributors and Tues/Thurs/Sun Tom would put together posts with sketches, pencils, excerpts and other visual teasers.

Our small marketing budget was focused on ad space.  We boosted Facebook posts, with mixed success, and identified affordable ad space on comics we enjoyed with Project Wonderful.  We shared the links with our friends, family, and fans (probably to exhaustion, apologies to folks who are sick of hearing us promote this project–we promise we’ll start talking about other things soon!).

Running a campaign is stressful.  The kickstarter for my graphic novel, Wit’s End, had prepared us for some of this so we were much more confident than we might otherwise have been.  The first week pledges came in quickly, with friends throwing us their support, and then everything slowed to a crawl.  During the middle of the campaign, even a single pledge was something to celebrate.  In the last few days, pledges started coming in again, the curve of the graph moved upward, and the hope we had clung to throughout the slow middle weeks started to manifest.  In our experience, the majority of pledges come in the first few days and in the final week and a half.

It’s still stressful.  We’re still waiting with bated breath, watching every pledge bring us closer to the finish line.  We want to get this book into print, into hands!

You can back Who is the Silhouette? on Kickstarter through March 3.  The final installment of this blog series will appear next Saturday, and will look to the future of this project!

This is the third installment of Allison’s Saturday blog series on the comic anthology “Who is the Silhouette?”.  You can find the other installments at who-is-the-silhouette.tumblr.com.

We broke the cartooning process into four rough stages: scripts/character designs, thumbnails, pencils, and inks.  Each team has a folder on Google Drive for their materials, and Tom and I keep a spreadsheet where we mark the date that different milestones are met so that we can keep track of where everyone is at and what they need from us.

We sent out a script template, which most of our teams chose to use.  We like this particular format because it gives a panel by panel breakdown of what’s happening on each page.  We used google docs to leave comments and suggestions and converse with the writers and artists.  A lot of our suggestions focused on ways to tie the individual stories back to the intro, to anchor the comics within the larger framework of the anthology.

With thumbnails, we were looking for clear sequencing and a suggestion of how the pages would come together.  At this stage we had a few notes for clarifying action, but mostly we just wanted to see that things were moving forward toward pencils.

Pencils were an opportunity for more detailed notes, again working to clarify the action and get things ready for inks–we wanted to give as few notes as possible once things had been inked, because pencils are so much easier to change.

At the ink stage, we focused on small edits, little details that would help draw the eye across the page, dialog tweaks and copyediting.  

Other editors may have their own systems and phases, and not all of our contributors did everything in the same order (some folks like to do thumbnails before scripts, and work out their storytelling visually instead of verbally, which is great!)  We wanted people to do what worked best for them, but also to communicate with us and give us space to provide notes.  We wanted to be a resource to help our contributors make comics that worked well together in the book and which they could be proud of.  The work they did blew us away, and we are so proud to have been a part of it.

Next week: Kickstarter and promotion.

Why were you interested in doing a comic for this book?

I love superhero comics, and getting a chance to have a crack at a new one is something that got me super excited.

How did you get into comics?

I’ve devoured comics since I was a kid. My favorites were Sonic the Hedgehog and Ghost Rider later on. When New 52 hit, I found out there was a Static Shock comic! (I adored the tv show). After that I was hooked.

What are some of the comics that inspire you?

Jason Aaron’s run on Ghost Rider was amazing to me as a kid. Just next level insanity, really leaning into the craziness of what comics can be. Kimmie66 by Aaron Alexovich was also a comic I checked out from the library time and time again. Its beating emotional heart and amazing setting always drew me in. Chris Hasting’s Dr. Mcninja is also one of my favorite comedy comics of all time, and that was super influential in what comics I wanted to make.

Are you a fan of superhero comics? If so, what are a few of your favorites and why?

Yes, my favorite superhero stories are people who have to deal with awful things, but still do their best to help people. Ghost Rider, Flash Thompson as Venom, sometimes Deadpool. These are the stories I love to read.

Who is your Silhouette?

She’s someone who just wants to live her life, and got dealt an awful hand. It’s not that she doesn’t want to help, she just wishes people didn’t have to need help in the first place.

Page 1 of Shadow of Luck, written by JD Boucher and illustrated by Odd Addams for the anthology Who is the Silhouette?

How do you describe your work?

I try to make people laugh, hope that it can make them think, but at the end of the day, I just want to write some good stories.

Any other fun facts, stories or info you’d like to share?

Stay tuned if you liked my story, I have a bunch of anthology work in the pipeline!

JD is available for freelance comic writing! Follow JD on twitter at: https://twitter.com/JDBoucher0 and preorder your copy of Who is the Silhouette? on kickstarter!

Page without text from You Can’t Outrun Your Shadows, written by Luz Bianca, illustrated by Mary Anne Mackey and lettered by Julie Gravelle for Who is The Silhouette?

Why were you interested in doing a comic for Who is the Silhouette?

I was actively on the hunt for comic anthologies to submit to, and this one really grabbed me. Not too spoil too much, but certain details in the prompt comic really inspired me. From the beginning onwards I really wanted to play with the idea of secrets and what it means to forget the past.

How did you get into comics?

I didn’t really care about comics at all until I was about fifteen. I used to go to boarding school, and my roommate told me all about several comics she’d read, including Peter David’s X-Factor Investigations. The character of Rictor, a gay, depressed latinx man, really spoke to me, a gay, depressed latinx woman. I picked up the first trade, and the rest is history. I got into writing comics for similar reasons. I want to tell accessible stories about underrepresented people, whether they’re saving the day or not, so I can do for others what Rictor has done for me.

Panels from a comic that Luz wrote, titled “Sara”

What are some of the comics that inspire you?

The Sailor Moon manga has been a huge inspiration recently, but whether or not that’s readily apparent in my work to an outside reader is another question altogether!

Are you a fan of superhero comics? If so, what are a few of your favorites and why?

I used to unabashedly adore superhero comics, but as I’ve grown older and heard more about the industry landscape, I can’t say I’m a fan in the same way I used to be. Still, some spectacular stories are out there. Tom King’s Vision is one that immediately comes to mind, along with too many X-Men stories to count (but I have to give a quick shout-out to the Dark Phoenix Saga). I’m also really enjoying Humphrey’s Green Lanterns.

Who is your Silhouette?

Andrea Bloom went missing in her college days. Some rumors connect her to one Mia Yu and an interdimensional lab experiment, but she’s been largely forgotten, swept away with the past. Until now. She’s kind and selfless to the point of self-sacrifice, determined, a bit of a dork, and quite the lesbian.

How do you describe your work?

Ooh, that’s tough. There’s usually a sort of distance from the real. I usually ignore or disregard logical realism, and go more towards emotional realism. If it conveys a feeling, and that feeling lands, I’m doing my job. There’s also almost always lesbians. Take that as you will.

Photo excerpt from a zine Luz wrote

Any other fun facts, stories or info you’d like to share?

My favorite emoji is the sparkle heart.

You can find more of Luz’s work at https://luzbianca.com/and@luzbianca417 (twitter) and in the superhero anthologyWho is The Silhouette? currently taking pre-orders on Kickstarter!

Hey folks, Allison here.  

I’m going to run a weekly blog during the Who is the Silhouette? Kickstarter campaign, with new content every weekend.  I’ll be sharing some of the things that Tom and I have learned while editing this anthology, and some of the things we were thinking about and working on while curating and editing the stories for this book.  If you’re just hearing about Who is the Silhouette? now, hello!  We’re excited to share this project with you.  Here’s a bit of background:

Who is the Silhouette? is a black and white anthology collecting 9 stories from 15 different creators.  The first story sets up the premise: a new superhero has been caught on camera saving people from a burning building.  But who is this new hero?  What are their powers?  Why were they there?  The next eight stories answer those questions, each with a unique take on the identity of The Silhouette.

Tom and I started talking about co-editing some kind of anthology together a couple of years ago.  We tossed around several different ideas, some of which we’re still toying with and developing and some of which we’ve let go.  This particular idea was not initially a frontrunner, but the more we talked about it the more interesting it became.  In May we wrote a script for the introductory story and hired our friend Willow to illustrate it.  We started sharing it with other cartoonists in June, opened submissions in July, and hit the ground running.

Waiting for submissions to come in was stressful.  At first we were only getting a few pitches here and there, and we were worried that we wouldn’t have enough interest to fill a book.  We would read the submissions as they came in, discuss their strengths, and remind ourselves that a lot of cartoonists wait until the last possible minute to submit work, so we couldn’t make any decisions until everything was in.  This proved true–a large portion of the submissions came in the last week, and any weighing we had done before that was a small side-note in the decision making process.

Going from an idea to accepting real people’s pitches was an interesting process.  When it was just our idea we had a sort of sense of what it would look like, and we had to let go of some of those preconceptions, let go of the imagined book and make one that was real, with real people with their own ideas and inspirations.  The creators we brought onboard are amazing, and I could not be happier with the sweet, weird, goofy, heartfelt stories that they’ve produced.  The real is so much better than the imagined.

Tune in next week for reflections on what makes a good submission, and keep an eye out for creator spotlight interviews, character sketches, and other sneak peaks throughout the month!

Hi All!  Who is the Silhouette is happy to announce that we will be launching our Kickstarter on Feb. 1st!  We’ve got some great cartoonist in the book and their work is amazing!  Stay tuned for more info, previews, and bonuses! https://who-is-the-silhouette.tumblr.com/