What happened to Lunar Flare Productions?

Since I'm sure someone may ask about it sooner or later, I thought I'd address the issue of what exactly went down with Lunar Flare Productions, my short-lived creator studio. I'll start off with a bit of background information for those who haven't the first clue what I'm talking about.

A while back, almost two years now, I had this idea in my head of starting my own creative studio. The idea began with an attempt to produce a graphic novel composed of ten, twenty-two page stories by ten different creative teams. Needless to say, that effort completely backfired on me and not one of the stories was ever completed. Still, I had this desire to try again. Because as we all know, the definition is attempting the same action repeatedly and expecting different results. So I tried again. And this time, I went a bit more full-throttle. I created a logo, bought website space, all of that (things I had put off before until after the anthology was complete). I decided I was going to focus on two things -- novels and comics.

I had one series just about ready to go with a first issue, and that was my creator-owned Love & Bullets. It originally began as concept and characters created by myself and Kyle Shire for a student film. We only shot a few scenes of the film and never moved beyond that. So I decided to do it as a comic book, because I really fell in love with these characters and the backstory we had begun to create.

I transferred the screenplay into comic script and added some additional things into it. I found an artist, Keith Jim, to draw and ink the series (a quick note: this image you see is not Keith's artwork, this is a variant cover I made for Wizard World with a photograph of actress Marguerite Ada, who would have played the main character, Angela Lockhart, in the film). It was this project that actually began my lettering career. I had trouble finding a letterer, so I began to teach myself how to do it, with the help of the many great tutorials at Ninja Lettering. When our colorist had to back out as well, I took on that aspect of the creative process too, although I wasn't as adept with it as I was with lettering. After quite a bit of time, we had the first issue ready to go and the first half of the penciled and inked pages for the second issue in my hands. We published through Ka-Blam and released the issue through IndyPlanet under LFP's logo. I even printed up a lot of issues and handed them out at Wizard World Chicago, with the variant cover you see above.

It was a spectacular failure.

There are many reasons for this. I could go ahead and blame an overly competative industry. I could blame Ka-Blam and IndyPlanet for the way their print-on-demand service is run. I could blame Keith because his art isn't quite ready for prime time yet.

But in truth, the blame lies with me.

I've realized from this experience as well as from speaking with other creators, editors, publishers, etc. in the industry, that you need a few things to run a successful studio. First off, you need the money to afford self-publishing and you need to be able to get your work into the hands of Diamond Comics Distributor and have them agree to put the book in their catalog. You also need the money for effective advertising and you need to know how to market your book effectively. This is one of my biggest downfalls, as I haven't the first clue of marketing or running a business or anything of that nature. You also need the money to be able to pay your creative teams competative wages. Yes, there are people who will work for free or a percentage of the profits, but these people are few and far between and if they're really good, they may end up getting a paying gig sooner or later -- and really, there's no way you can possibly fault them for that (I know this happened with me fairly recently). Or sometimes, you may simply get creators who flake out and cease answering e-mails (this also happened with me quite a few times). And while Ka-Blam may be a great service for preview copies, it's still too expensive and has too much of a stigma. Love & Bullets #1 had a cover price of $2.50, which is pretty reasonable. But each issue cost almost that much to print, so we only saw a few cents of profit per each issue. And we only sold six issues. To add into that, Ka-Blam's processing and shipping time varies with what level of expediency the customer selects. A red eye edition is one that will be printed and shipped immediately, but this is significantly more expensive than the cover price. To pay the closest to the cover price will result in a shipping time of almost a month. And if you're an international customer, the shipping is completely ridiculous.

With this knowledge, plus my own dissatisfaction with the first issue, I decided the best route would be to close up LFP and instead focus on my work and submit it to publishers myself. As for the future of Love & Bullets, Keith and I seem to have parted ways. He wasn't too satisfied with the project himself and expressed a desire to work on more superhero-oriented books. I am working with some artists on developing five-page submissions for various publishers and I'm continuing my freelance work for AC Comics. I've rewritten the script and the entire plot for the Love & Bullets limited series and I'm much happier with the result. The first issue is more action-packed and features more story than my first attempt did.

My second novel, Chasing The Dragon, was originally going to be published under LFP's banner. But now, I'm searching for another home for it and I may have found a studio for the book. But more info will be provided as it becomes available.