The Far Reaches Webcomic

Hello everyone! I’m sorry for all the silence and no updates. I have been super busy with changes happening in my life and no time or energy for comics. For a long time I was hampered by chronic depression and I just couldn’t work on it. Now that the depression is taken care of I’m feeling better but I’ve been so busy with my new career.

As for TFR, I’m not really sure what to do yet. I had thought of rebooting it somewhat and starting, not from the beginning, but refocus on story and action and really put out something good. But I’m not sure that the time and energy involved are worth it for me right now. It’s very hard to make any money off a webcomic unless you happen to strike a real chord with your audience and you’re able to put out three professional pages a week, which has always been hard for me to keep up with. I’ve thought about doing a Zuda comic submission, and even about getting back into indie game production. I really don’t know yet. I have to give it a lot of thought. TFR never really took off and went anywhere. I’m thankful that so many of you enjoyed it and want it to continue. But on the whole the comic never really took off.

I spend three years of my life on it and while it improved my artistic and writing skills and I’m glad I did it, on the other hand it’s never really gotten popular. And so while I’d like to continue it, there doens’t seem to be any basis to believe that it’ll take off. It hasn’t done very well on Drivethrucomics.com, which I consider to be sort of the litmus test. And it didn’t do so well on Wowio.com either, when other artists were bringing in thousands of dollars, I was bringing in a few hundred.

So, what to do with it? That’s the real question. And I don’t really know. I’m convinced that TFR as is just won’t sell to a larger audience. There’s too much overwhelming evidence to support this. I’ve done advertising in the past and it never really helped it take off. Now maybe I could rebrand it and reboot it like they did with Batman Begins or something. But the simple fact is that when a comic is really good it’s going to take off and get popular (usually). Especially if there’s enough advertising, which I’ve done tons of, the comic should take off. Yet TFR never did.

Besides this, I have to think of how I can make a living. I’m out of work and while I said I have a new career, it’s satisfying volunteer work and I love doing it. But I need something to support myself. I can’t afford to spend a lot of time on something that’s just not going to pay and be worth my time. Which is why I’ve been researching the idea of indie game development again, as well as other options. I need something I can do at home, and I’m no good at stuff like medical transcribing or things like that. I only good at creative things. The problem with a comic is that if its for free on the web, you have to build up a big audience of at least 10,000 readers in order to make enough to support you since only about 5% will buy anything. An indie adventure game, however, while arguably harder to make, doesn’t have the same problem. You can have a demo or a video of the gameplay for free and then sell the actual game for like $10. If you sell just 500 games that’s still $5000. If you sell just 4000 games that $40,000.  And many are able to make a living from it. And it doesn’t have to be a big huge game. The big thing right now is to release an adventure game a chapter at a time and see how it goes. Thus there’s a lot less time and energy involved and you see pretty quickly how successful it it. I’ve really been wanting to do a scifi adventure. So I’m considering it, though I realize it’s a big undertaking even so.

Anyway, that’s the what’s been going on. Right now I don’t have time for a project that doesn’t have a chance of making at least some kind of profit as I go. Webcomics are just too speculative and take too long to make anything from.