Insomnia

It's four o'clock in the morning on a fucking Saturday, and I can't fucking sleep.  My wife woke me up, and then my dog started going crazy downstairs--turns out she had to pee--so, I let her out, and an hour later, there I was, still rolling around in bed, letting my thoughts chase each other through the empty spaces of my mind.  The NAACP had it right: "The mind is a terrible thing."  So after an hour or so, I decided I ought to get up and set pen to paper--metaphorically speaking--and see if maybe that won't help the situation.

So here's what I was thinking.  I started thinking that I should get an ISBN number for Bronx Angel and put it up as like a $3 e-book on Amazon.com.  Granted, that doesn't seem revolutionary or anything now, but at the time I wrote the book, there was no such thing as e-readers, and even afterwards when I really wanted to do digital distribution, the information infrastructure just wasn't built out yet.  I mean, I always thought Proletariat Comics would succeed mostly via electronic media, but at the time, the world wasn't ready.  Amazon was still something like four years from putting out the Kindle.  We published an online-only magazine back in like 2006, but we did it via PDF because that was pretty much the only way to do it, and folks complained (endlessly) that they didn't want to read it off their computer screens.  Couldn't we put it out via print-on-demand or something?

*sigh*

I called it Proletariat Comics because I wanted it to be revolutionary.  "Experimental Creators, Revolutionary Comics."  That was me.  We had an official No Superheroes Policy.

I wanted to publish different kinds of stories by different kinds of artists, and I wanted to take submissions, and I wanted to take them seriously.  I wanted to stretch the conversation, to change it, to make it bigger.  After a while, it became clear that Horizons Magazine (our quarterly) was the best way to do that, but although we managed to put the thing together and even to find some advertisers for it, the distribution system simply wasn't there.  Apple hadn't even put out the iPod with the wheel yet.  Comixology was still YEARS off into the future.  A pad was something women bought when they were menstruating.

In any event, Sally and I ended up having a terrible house flood back in 2007, and suddenly the money that we were pumping into Proletariat Comics needed to go into repairing and restoring our basement.  I talked to my partner Jerry and then closed the company unilaterally, and now, well, these are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.  Digital comics distribution and the fact that my book has now been languishing on WOWIO for something like four years.

At the time, WOWIO was a good deal.  It was free and completely ad-supported, and they paid you a royalty based on the number of downloads you got each month.  I made several hundred dollars that way my first year and was more than happy with it.  Anybody who was interested in it could read my book, and I got paid a little each time.  Who could want more?

Sadly that system came to an end, and here we are.  I should really put my book on Amazon.  Or something.  Not necessarily because I think so many folks are gonna go buy it--I know that they aren't--but because it should at least be available.

Or, you know, I could just put it up here.  I could run it as a webcomic right here on the blog.  That way it might get read, right?  By folks who're interested.  Isn't that the point?

So I spun that around in my mind, started thinking about how I could run a little commentary on each page as I ran it, and gradually... well, you can see where this is going, right?

I'm going to call it the Sunday Comics.  I'll run a page every week with a little commentary, starting tomorrow.

And now maybe I can get some sleep.  What'd'ya say?