Signal Boost: "A High School Girl In The Crusades Graphic Novel" Now Available On IndieGoGo

The Leading Hispanic Voice in Science Fiction, Conqueror of WorldCon, and Future King of California Jon del Arroz has released a new Indiegogo campaign for his parody of his own Deus Vult graphic novel: "A High School Girl In The Crusades" (a.k.a. "Desu Vult").

This is a two-for-one campaign, as people who missed Deus Vult can acquire a copy now--complete with new cover--as part of a package deal with the manga-style parody. This is a smart move, as you'll get both the original work and what is being parodied in one go. Jon explains:

We are offering two different comics:

1. A High School Girl In The Crusadesis a 22-page manga-style isekai parody about a high school girl transported to the crusades (duh!). Art is 100% by The Quaff (Shotgun Samurai, Nuclear Warhead Samurai).
2. Deus Vult is a 66 page epic fantasy graphic novel about a crusader transported to a magical and evil realm. Art is by Jesse White and Matt Crotts. This is the 2nd chance for this book, and we are offering a brand new cover featuring art by famed fantasy artist, Lolo Guzman.

You'll find the campaign page here, and you'll find the covers for both books there along with other sample artwork for your consideration and the reminder of the original T-shirt that has now proven to be the inspiration for this project is a bonus- get one.

This is a good deal, so take a look at the campaign page and see what you'll find worth your money to put towards it.

The Business: Arkhaven Launches Webtoons Mobile App

Arkhaven Comics announced today via Bounding Into Comics that they've launched a competitor to the popular Webtoons comic publishing mobile application: Arktoons.

Vox Day and Arkhaven Comics announced a brand new initiative, Arktoons, that will be an alternative and competitor to the wildly popular Webtoons platform.

Arktoons is described as a “digital comics site featuring vertically-displayed comics panels in the Webtoons style that is particularly well-suited for reading on smartphones and tablets.”

The user will not be required to pay to access it. Subscriptions will be available to support specific creators, using a model heretofore put into place--successfully--with Unauthorized, the video streaming site that Vox Day put together; benefits are not specified at this time, but I would not be surprised if this also would allow access to Social Galactic (his social media site) the same way that Unauthorized subscribers do.

Okay, that's nice and all, but I have to ask: why would Webtoons readers leave that?

There is a massive amount of comics content on Webtoons, far more than could be exhausted. Arktoons is swimming against the Network Effect here, and exclusivity is insufficient a draw for people; much like Gab, Bitchute, et. al. merely being a rival network-dependent technology competing against the dominant player is a massive black mark against it. It does not help at all that it is aligned with politics that are openly attacked and suppressed by the dominant players across the West. (In the East, merely not being either the top dog or not state-sponsored is detrimental enough.)

This is not where the action is. The value of Webtoons is in the massive size of its user traffic. That's why they can get away with being not at top-end graphical fidelity; they're aiming at young normies with phones that get replaced every year or two, and normies never go out of their way for a damned thing. Making a rival app means telling normies about it, and if they don't balk at not being on Webtoons at all, they usually balk at who's behind it. In short, this is a massively hard sell and Vox isn't making it any easier by being out front.

Network Effect businesses are not nearly as open to competition as people would want there to be. We'll soon see if Arkhaven has the savvy to surmount the big challenge before it.

My Life As A Writer: "The Shadowcast #11-The Red Menace", or "Gibson Finds His Footing"

The Excellence of Elocution, Razorfist, comes back with another episode of The Shadowcast.

Razor continues his historical contextualization of both the writer--Walter B. Gibson--and the publishing world of the day, and in so doing he reveals that much of the literary and storycrafting elements are the same today as they were then.

The big takeaway that studying Gibson and The Shadow gives you is how to properly approach writing popular fiction as both a business and as a craft. This is the early days, but here is where Gibson finds the template by which he would write stories about this character going forward- a template that Bob Kane would shamelessly rip off when creating Batman years later, along with everything else he stole to make his copy, and then proceed to goat-fuck into the dirt.

Remember that Gibson wrote two 40,000 word manuscripts--proper novels--per month. He wasn't just writing to market, he wrote as light-speed. He had to approach this as if it were any other job. Having a template to work from made this a lot easier, since the Outline stage of the process started pre-written at core points; all he had to do was flesh out the spaces he left for individuation.

He also had to make use of not only every magician's trick he knew to create mystery, capture attention, direct it where he wanted, and give it the catharsis he promised. He did this with an efficiency of word choice and use that many today cannot approach due to OldPub pushing literary obesity so their fat tomes push competitors off the shelves. This is so commonplace an issue that later writers write the character slow, as Razorfist points out with the Dynamic Comics segment.

The ability to write that fast and consistently is an acquired one, so anyone can do this and more than Gibson has done just that successfully- just look at Ian Fleming. That means we can do this too, but it means abandoning this Torturned Author bullshit and coming at this as the job it really is- proper Working Joe Can-Do Professionalism and not Soyboy Snowflake faggotry.

Fortunately there's a pair of books to get you going on this. I recommend both; they're short, no-nonsense read-in-an-afternoon books so you can read and apply between Lunch and Dinner.

Signal Boost: "Deus Vult" by Jon del Arroz LIVE on Indiegogo

The Leading Hispanic Voice in Science Fiction, best-seller and award-winner Jon del Arroz is back with another fantastic comic project.

DEUS VULT!

A crusade into another realm...

...leads to the deadliest of evils.

Sir Domingo, Spanish Knight and Holy Crusader, is blessed with a vision on his return from his triumphant conquest in the Holy Land. The Holy Grail appears in the sky, leading him on an adventure to another realm where demons and monstrosities lay waste to all of creation.

He discovers a strange race of people called the Kityin, who seem more kin to Earth's cats than they do humanity. He alone can lead them to salvation and away from the tyrannical rule of The Demon King.

Should he fail, not only the Kityin but all the people of all the realms will be destroyed!

DEUS VULT is a 66-page crusader fantasy graphic novel which will bring back memories of great comics like CONAN THE BARBARIAN and THE MIGHTY THOR.

The story is written by #1 Bestselling and award-winning Sci-Fi author, Jon Del Arroz, artist Jesse White, and colorist Matt Crotts with a special variant cover by our good friend Miss Sashi!

Jon's gotten very good at this sort of thing. He's all ready to go; this campaign is to finance actual production and distribution, since the writing is already done and you can see below that some of the artwork is also. When he said he's going for that classic Savage Sword of Conan look he means it, because that's what immediately leapt to mind when I saw these samples below.

While not as low as the novel campaigns I boost, you can still get in rather cheap. $12 gets you a digital copy, and $25 a physical one; this is one you want on your shelves, so I advise going for the hard copy. The bigger backer benefits include original art, being drawn into the book, complete sets of Jon's comics to date, and a Napa wine tour with the man himself. Yes, that last Perk is pricy; if you take it, bring the spouse with you.

This is the sort of thing we who are dissatified with what Establishment entertainment insultingly offers to us should support. We must find our own creatives, encourage them to create works that actually entertain us, and patronize them when they do. Now's the time.

You can find the campaign here at Indiegogo.

The Business: IndieGoGo Censors A Comic

IndieGoGo was never a true alternative to Kickstarter, in that it could be converged, and now we see proof.

"But we can make one that won't."

It will get shitcanned by Big Tech and Big Finance, or do you not remember the last time that happened? Without hosting, payment processing, and banking you don't have an online business. If any of those decide to deplatform you, you're done; it's why Gab's resilience is far more remarkable than people give them credit for, as they went from Typical Alt-Tech Flavor Of The Month to Burgeoning New Player purely due to its ability to withstand said pushes against it and respond by successfully building their own infrastructure- a fact thrown into the face of those that still seek to shut them down.

Yes, literally this: (Death Cultists) "Who owns Gab's servers? We can get to them." (Torba) "We own our own. Eat a dick."

As Jon says, this is not the first time IndieGoGo has done this sort of thing and it has the same vulnerability that Kickstarter, Patreon, Amazon, etc. do: SJWs on staff playing the role of Amenable Authority to external SJW pressure pushers doing Point & Shriek swarm attacks on their enemies. I expect that this sort of thing is going on. If it's not a one-two team playing Good Cop/Bad Cop, then it's a rogue employee trying to pick winners (his friends) and losers (his enemies).

This is why you have a backup means of backing, and that backup means is kept--as much as possible--on the down-low to circumvent problems like this.

Signal Boost: A.I. Wars, by Jon del Arroz

The leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction, Jon del Arroz, is back with different take on the AI Rebellion and subsequent war with same. That book is A.I. Wars, and it merges together not only several disturbing trends into a timely tale about what could happen to our posterity, but also pays tribute to past masters who first warned of all of this via literature.

You'll see not only previous Robot War stories such as The Terminator and the Butlerian Jihad of Dune, but also the social dystopias of Brave New World, Soylent Green, Logan's Run, and 1984 as you read this first issue. Literary-savvy readers will not miss the references, but unlike so much of that literary misery porn and cinemantic cancer Jon's telling a hopeful tale.

Jon's got a proven track record of satisfying his readers, and this sizzle summary shows it.

A.I. Overlords enslave humanity...

...but a brave few fight for survival.

Tom Palmer never wanted to be a hero, he just wanted to take his happy medication like everyone else in the A.I.-controlled factory, but when an accident causes him to miss taking his injection, he gets pinned with a terrorist act caused by humanity's resistance.

On the run, Tom Palmer must join the revolutionaries for his own survival. The hopes of future generations of humanity rest on his shoulders!

Fans of Saga, The Fifth Element, and The Expanse will love AI Wars! Read the comic today!

And here's a review from the Wolfman At Large.

If you want a copy, click on the image above; it will go to the Amazon sales page.

Signal Boost: Kamen America, Volume 3

Kamen America, a loving tribute to Japan's masked heroes mixed with the best of American superheroes, has had fantastic success in the indie comics world. Now back for a third go, a crowdfunding campaign is up at Kickstarter to make it happen. Get in on this; it's one of the best hero books around these days.

Signal Boost: 9Volt Comics Pulp

My artist, the wonderful ArtAnon, gave me the heads-up on this. If you're into comics or seek more independent creators putting out stuff you want, pay attention to this.

The Nine Volt PULP ANTHOLOGY features 17 amazing stories, and a full 224 pages of comic book magnificence from the independent writers and artists of the Triple A Comic Creators Community! Slam-bang action! Adventure! Explosions! This is the second incredible comic anthology from our group!

Their motto? "Make Comics, Not Excuses." That's something anyone can get behind, and they're delivering. Click on the image above to go directly to their store page.

You're Competing with Japan, Not WorldCon

If you think that the Pulps are only in the past, you're not looking east to Japan. There the Pulps are normal, and all of their pop-culture juggernauts have some degree of the Pulp aesthetic to it. Sure, it's Japanese Pulp, but it's still Pulp and you're a fool to disregard it- your young audience doesn't, because that's where they're getting most of their satisfaction these days (and have for many years now).

This is your competition going forward, and not the shit out of WorldCon. Your audience already has established alternatives, alternatives that are masters at audience engagement and understand the psychology of fandom well enough to give Lucasfilm cause for worry. Knowing the past and learning from the masters is good, but that's not enough; you need to get familiar with what the current masters do if you want to bring that Pulp diaspora home.

(Not to knock the European comics scene, but you guys are nowhere near the juggernaut that Japan erected.)

I'm not kidding. Watch that Thunderbotl episode and see how shameless they are in mixing up things that Western authors wouldn't even conceive of doing. Meanwhile, they tell stories featuring women being women (and man, that tatted chick looks like she came out of a Return of Kings article; based Japan is based) and men being men- hero and villain alike. No wonder they have so much pull in the West, such that Hollywood's had to play catchup (and still fail): Japan doesn't lie to the audience.

Nevermind the Big 5. Your real rivals are in Tokyo.