Hallå pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
Two pieces of pretty big news today.
We changed the release date of Surmount, from May 9 to May 2. We did the opposite of a delay. Unbelievable. There were just too many great indies launching on the same date as us.
Yesterday was the big day for Space Deer! I published the first strip on a bunch of different platforms. I’ll tell you more about it after the strip.
Space Deer - No. 1
I think that’s a fitting start to the strip! I’m really proud of how it turned out. And it did extremely well over on Twitter. Which I did not expect at all. Best case I thought I’d get maybe a hundred or so likes on it. This blew my expectations by a factor of 1000x. It’s still making the rounds as we speak. My mind was completely settled on the idea that this would be a quite launch and that I would build up interest in the comic over time. But as I’m writing this the strip has 28k likes, over 60 fun and positive comments, and I’ve gained between 2000-3000 followers.
It feels ugly to talk about the numbers, but I want to be honest with how it’s affecting me. Cause I’m not used to this type of attention! I made this first strip in full color and a bit longer than the others will be because I wanted to “start it with a bang.” And that worked much better than I would have ever thought possible right out of the gate. Now I’m worried at the reactions when all these readers discover that it’s not a continuous long form story, but mostly black and white comic strips. Part of me wants to go and color all the strips that I have already drawn to avoid disappointing them, cause I think the color helps a lot with pulling people in. It’s a good thing I’m too busy with Surmount today, otherwise I don’t know if I could restrain myself from coloring the next strip. Either way I think it will be good to post an uncolored one to see how people react. It will be so much easier to make the strip if I don’t have to color everything.
I also posted the comic on Webtoons, Tapas, Substack, tumblr and instagram. It hasn’t done nearly as great anywhere else. Only 10 likes on tumblr, despite the fact that I have over 10k followers there, who I think mostly followed me because of the old Space Deer comics from 10 years ago? That crazy contrast between twitter and tumblr is a great reminder for me that the engagement on the post is not as indicative of the quality as it feels. There are probably many invisible factors as to why something might pop off in one place but not another. I feel extremely thankful and relieved to have received confirmation from at least one place that what I’m doing isn’t a complete waste of time. I feel like this will pay off if I just stick to it. And this is something I really want to do with my whole heart, so hell yes!
I’m not quite sure how I’ll be sharing the Space Deer strips in this newsletter. Whether I should link to them or always embed them. The fact that there are two per week also makes that more confusing for me. I’ll probably wing it a bit until I figure it out. I would appreciate your thoughts on that if you have any.
This is an energizing start though! Brace yourself for a lot more Space Deer!
Mini Notes
📝 Essay - a matryoshka of possibilities
I’ve often been questioned when I tell people “I like to make deep things,” and I’ve never known how to answer it, until I read this essay.
I begin by describing something, which in my mind I imagine to be a room. I might describe the objects in the room, and what it might be for. But then, if I do it just right, something about the description of that room reveals a trapdoor. And my task is to open that trapdoor and fall through it. Now we’re in a different room. Perhaps we’ve been here before, but it’s less familiar. We have less of an intuitive sense of this space. It may contain some surprises and intrigue. And perhaps that’s enough. But ideally, I think there’s at least one more trapdoor in this new room, which takes us to an even more alien domain, one of which we may have almost no intellectual familiarity or understanding whatsoever, and yet in a surprising way, it seems to me that as we go deeper into the unknown, we find ourselves closer to universal qualities, associated with myth.
This is what I want to do with everything I make. Descend through trapdoors.
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Take care and have a creative week.
So cool! Congratulations.
I thought it was an excellent introduction. Having the seemingly regular deer be on a remote planet -- just because! -- is such a Jonas move. Hehe.
It could have been used as a technical excuse for why Space Deer is able to walk on two legs and talk, but apparently not, because all the other deer seem normal enough.
This is not a criticism but a compliment. I think, perhaps, when you get real comfortable with what you're doing, that you end up making those kinds of "just because" decisions that just feel right to you for whatever reason. Those kinds of "decisions" create wonder for the reader. I still remember that old page you did with Blackbeard and the spirit bear; that page was full of those "just because" "decisions", but you resonated with it and it resonated with me -- and still does.
I saw a couple of comments on Twitter saying that technically it shouldn't be "404 ERROR!" but "500-something..." If you changed that number, I'd argue that you might appease a couple of developers out there but the emotional resonance for you, me and countless others -- when it comes to that number -- would be lost.
My point with all of this, is just to say, I think:
hope you keep doing what feels right to you. It's the reason why all of these people started paying attention in the first place. So I'd invest in that, if I was you. ;)
Woo! I'm happy for you, you got lots of cool stuff ahead! That's incredible. You both made a good thing *and* people liked it!
Very pleasing comic. I like how free the naked deer looks - like a child.