Hello dear newsletterers! Partly as a reminder that there are just a couple of days left to back my Kickstarter project X365: A Graphic Novel By Neill Cameron, and partly as a sneaky way for me to road test using substack as a delivery mechanism for comics, here is the first chapter of the book! Direct to your inbox, in a hopefully-suitable-for-reading-on-phones format.
Enjoy, and stick around to the end for some Thoughts On Possible Futures For The Comics Medium!
… To Be Continued! (SPOILER WARNING: it gets a BIT WEIRD.)
Again, if you want to read the whole thing, either in digital form or as a beautiful-if-I do-say-so-myself printed book, head over and back the Kickstarter! WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
Here’s a look at how that first chapter looks in book form:
This has been an interesting thing about putting the book together: because I drew each panel of X365 individually, and they’re all squares, it actually makes it very easy to then collect the story together in different ways to fit different formats - as 2x3 grid pages for print, or as one long vertical strip for phone scrolling, as in this very newsletter. And that crosses over with a lot of what’s been my work from the last couple of years, converting MEGA ROBO BROS into the new format books, and planning the last couple of volumes in ways that can work across both the A4 Phoenix page and the smaller book versions. And I think this kind of modular approach to panels and pages is potentially going to be more and more important as a way of making comics that can tell the same stories but kind of stretch and squash to fit different platforms and formats, to find readers in different ways.
Sticking to that rigid 1:1 panel format as I did with X365 is, yeah, very rigid, and it means that in terms of composition you tend to mostly be focussing a lot more on each panel individually, and not so much on the page as the unit of storytelling. (Mostly, but not always - there’s definitely a couple of places in X365 where I had Fun Ideas for complex page layouts and then broke my own brain kind of drawing them blind, one little piece at a time.) I guess that rigidity can be seen as restrictive, because of course it rules out at a stroke a lot of layout options and scope for going crazy with the page. But, I dunno. As a creator I think I often respond well to having those kind of intrinsic restrictions, because then the fun of it becomes finding ways to play with and push against them, to do interesting things within them and occasionally, as a fun treat, to break them altogether.
And there’s a lot you can do with a square, it turns out.
Anyway, it’s definitely got me thinking about ways one could have some fun creating work to fit those different formats. The potential of, for example, making some comics for substack that could also work in print forms and other ways.
Or maybe before I get carried away we should see if I’ve just completely crashed people’s inboxes. Let me know if this worked!
WHILE I’M HERE
…a quick MEGA ROBO BROS status update: I’m still barrelling through writing and roughing the last volume, which I would love to share a peek at here but WOW, MY GOD, ALL THE SPOILERS. All being well and barring accidents I should finish the final chapter this week, having a complete first draft done in time for Christmas. It’s been a weirdly intense time at the drawing board, I keep having minor emotional meltdowns over on twitter. Follow me there if that sounds like an amusing thing to watch in real time!
Most of the comics I read on Substack are quite awkward on a phone (especially as my eyes are increasingly bum). Even when the flow is designed for vertical reading (eg Molly Knox Ostertag's excellent stuff), the text is simply too small to read. And there are a lot of comics creators who are using traditional layouts (eg Brian K Vaughn) which really need a big screen to work.
Square panels, at the size and resolution you've gone for here, work really well on big and small screens. Really interesting to think about how adaptable the square format is - converting traditional vertical, webtoon-style comics into paginated content for print publishing must be a very awkward process - especially when the verticality is a strong part of the storytelling.
Which is a long-winded way of saying: yeah, that worked well! Looking forward to the full X365.