I’ve decided to post the original submission I did for Zuda last year. Click on the big ass picture and enjoy the read.
I also wanted to talk a little about the whole Zuda closure and how it affected my work and this project. Scroll down past said big ass picture and click on the Keep Reading link for wall-of-text ranting! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO KNOW, IT’S IN YOUR RACY NATURE.
Click to read the original submission!
Man, what do I say about this? I want to take a minute here and just explain how this whole thing played out.
So let’s talk about this project. I’ll do a post on influences and development later, suffice to say there was a lot of music involved. ME started sometime in the middle of September 2009, when I was trying to figure out what to work on. I knew I wanted to do a weekly and I was itching, like many, for another run at the Zuda deal. So I started work on it and finished over the course of the next couple months, pretty standard stuff. In the middle of it I realized that even if Zuda didn’t want it, I still wanted to do it. I really like this story a lot.
So I turned it in at the end of November, maybe the first week of December, I can’t quite remember. At that point, I knew it would be a wait so I sunk into some celebration. I did what I think a lot of newer creators do, and I didn’t work on anything for a while. That’s the thing I regret most now, but hey, you gotta learn sometime right?
And then the 3 months came up, I saw other comics that I knew had been submitted after mine coming into the competition. I figured, well they’re just looking for the right place for my comic now, it’s not right for the current competition. I sent a few emails to their feedback form to make sure my sub hadn’t gotten lost like some others I’ve known, but I never got a response. Right around February, I started getting antsy, but I wanted to be patient. That’s something that has to be expected in a business like this, with so much material going through so few people.
I had decided to let things ride with Zuda to see where it went. In the meantime, I started up another comic with a friend in the hopes for another contest entry. It was a fantasy/sci-fi thing based on a really old comic of mine. It was right in the middle of that that I found out about the competition end. They told us they were reviewing submissions in the queue, and I believe they did just that. But it meant another 3 months of waiting to see if mine would make it through to their new format.
Obviously, as with so many other really amazing entries, it did not.
And now I’m left knowing exactly what I knew 6 months ago. Mourning Electric needs its own site. It needs to be mine and mine alone, broken free of the Zuda format, the need for ultra-compressed storytelling. It needs to be its own comic.
So I’m hard at work on the new script, I’ll be redoing the pages in a new book-style format that will allow for more decompressed storytelling.
I appreciate the hard work of the Zuda staff and I’m definitely sad to see them abandon their efforts in such a hasty manner, but I want to thank them for giving me and so many great creators the inspiration to get moving on those projects they’d been sitting on. I hope you keep all em comin.
