Everyone’s probably wondering why I haven’t updated Polterguys in weeks.

Well, that’s because I started working at DreamWorks TV Animation in Glendale last month so I’ve been a little distracted!

AHHHHH seriously, you guys, I’m super excited to be here working with an awesome team and on an actual show. It was a lot to take in this month and I can still hardly believe it’s for real. 

Towards the end of December, one of my classmates from Concept Design Academy recommended me for a storyboard revisionist position on the show she was working on which is Puss in Boots on Netflix. They needed someone to start right away so the last two weeks of 2016 was a blur of training my replacement at Soapbox, preparing for my holiday trip and getting ready to join the PIB team immediately in January.  

A few moments from that crazy period stood out to me though. Calling my mom in the parking lot and telling her I got the job which made her cry (and made me cry, too.) And surprising my family with the news over dinner in the Bay Area. I honestly didn’t think it would happen this quickly since I only seriously started considering storyboarding as a career option in 2014. I’m extremely grateful for everyone who’s helped me find my way here in LA and I just know I couldn’t have made it this far without such good and wonderful people looking out for me. 

I’ve been excited, anxious and I’ve just been learning as much as I can this past month so thank you so much for your patience with updates, too. I promise we’ll be back in the swing of things again soon.

Kickass lady from the South Pacific

It’s been over a year since I started at Soapbox Films and I just wanted to pause and celebrate the fact that I have been making a living off my art for over 12 months! That’s…a pretty big deal for me. I never went to art school and I’ve long ago thought I’ve missed all the opportunities to pursue art careers. One year ago, I moved back to Los Angeles anxious and uncertain about my future; I’ve decided I was going to take a chance and give storyboarding as a career option. I guarantee you in my wildest dreams I had no idea I was going to end up drawing animated characters from Disney, Dreamworks, 20th Century Fox and that I was going to be part of the industry I’ve always had a deep and lasting passion for.

Moana is special to me because she’s the first Disney “princess” I’ve had to draw in my first week at SBF. She’s brown-skinned, beautiful and easily reminds me of women from my own culture. I was fighting back tears driving home my first few days thinking how lucky I was to be in this position. I remember how special it was to watch Mulan onscreen so many years ago and feel that connection with her. (I’m Filipino-Chinese, by the way so I get to identify with these two characters!) I know Moana is going to be just as special to so many little (and not so little) girls. I am fiercely proud to be even just a tiny part of that. I want people to fall in love with her, too.

Technically, yes, I don’t draw for the actual movies- I draw little animated cycles to help market them for our clients. It was an insane journey to see the little doodles I work on go through the process and get finalized as fully-rendered sequences. It’s exciting and humbling knowing that I’m collaborating with some of the best artists alive today. You can see some of them here! (Moana moments on Twitter, Kakamora Haka, Moana and Kakamora)

I’m so grateful for the people who have made it possible for me to get here and I want to keep learning and growing from this point on. The second volume of Polterguys is still chugging along! If I get enough pages done, maybe it’ll mean I can release a printed book next year. I’m still working on a storyboard portfolio too, saving up for more classes and taking in as much as I can to understand film and storytelling better.

Thanks for reading this and go see Moana!

Dear Theodosia is my contribution to the Ham4Pamphlet project, a compilation of of forty-six illustrations made by different artists tackling each track in the Hamilton musical.

You can view the entire book here.

I’m so excited and proud to be a part of this fantastic project and I owe it all to the organizer, Arielle Jovellanos. She had an opportunity to go backstage after the show and decided to bring along a thank you gift to the cast. You can read about her story in a compilation of her own tweets here.

More media mentions under the cut!

THAT’S MY ART NEXT TO LESLIE ODOM JR’S FACEEE!!!

Yeah, I enjoyed screencapping this one and seeing my friends’ art on it, too! From this video feature with Leslie Odom Jr.

Dear Theodosia featured on the Nerdist!

This was a nice surprise! For The Nerdist’s Fanart Friday #81.

The Official Hamilton Musical instagram featured my art!!!

This one just kinda blows my mind!!!

You can read the comic below or open the images in a new tab to view the fullsized pages. Enjoy!

Click to visit my Patreon page!

I’m back!
Now that I’m settled in a new place here in LA, I can finally get back to the business of comics! I’ve decided to finally set-up a Patreon campaign so I can let you guys help me create more Polterguys pages and art. Please check it out and consider helping out other artists as well!

While I don’t have an update when pages will go back up, I’ll be doing my best to build up a considerable buffer again to avoid hiatuses like this one in the future. Again, thanks so much for your patience, everybody.

I’ve got a place in LA for a month so it’s a very temporary situation and I’m still looking around for jobs. Everything’s still a bit touch and go so I’m asking for a little bit more patience with my comic’s hiatus. I know you guys can’t wait to see what happens next and believe me, no one’s more eager to see this book finished up than me!

Thanks for understanding.

Woohoo! Polterguys on Sparkler Distro

YEY! So, Polterguys is now part of Sparkler Distribution exclusively which means from now on, you can pick up Polterguys books along with other fantastic comics and their related merchandise from their website.

What does this mean for Polterguys? Well, distributing through Sparkler means I can concentrate working on Vol. 2, the classes I’m taking and building up a new portfolio. I’m gearing up for a move back to SoCal and getting help with orders and shipping with current and future books just sounded like the best deal for me. Everybody involved has been super helpful and I’m excited to be part of a group with such a great mission: bringing entertaining and diverse stories for and about women to the world.

Other links I have neglected to put up here:

Make sure to catch up with Volume 2 as it serializes at Polterguys.laurbits.com.
Polterguys is also getting mirrored on Tapastic now (since Inkblazers shut down.)

Watch this space for more entries in the future! I don’t think we’re quite done playing in this world yet…

Vol. 1 featured at Fantastic Comics and The Dragon

So delighted when people send me pics of Polterguys books out in the wild! Thanks to my sister, Thien and The Dragon for sending me the photos in this post.

Another year has passed! Here’s my review for last year and my hopeful outlook for the year ahead!

2013 Highlights:

• I managed to get out of my comfort zone and take a challenging CGMA class on perspective from October through December. The homework frustrated the heck out of me and I was nearly brought to my knees every Saturday on deadline night. But I got really good feedback and hope to use everything I learned in making comic pages this year!
• I completed the Vol. 2 script towards the end of fall last year and I’m really excited about finalizing it for production. I feel I’ve grown as a writer and I hope the work is stronger for it.  I didn’t always think I wanted to write stories, but this year I really sunk my teeth into the craft of writing and really tried to absorb everything I was learning. I also developed more patience for the process which made the whole ordeal much more fun and sustainable for the long run.
• I finished a staggering amount of nearly 300 books last year in audio and hardcopy form! I can hardly believe it myself. It is an incredible gift to live so close to a library as amazing as the Downtown Ann Arbor library. I didn’t have a community resource like this growing up and I guess I want bananas. I borrowed everything from manga to business books to contemporary classics and I feel everything managed to inform my writing in the end. Guys, I heartily recommend binging on free books. You just can’t lose!
•  I maintained a fairly steady stream of side income freelancing which helped with self-publishing costs. This year that’s going to change a little because I’d like to prioritize Vol. 2 work but it’s still a good feeling to be reminded people want to actually pay for my art.

2014 Resolutions!

• Finish Vol. 2!
• Figure out a sustainable way to handle blogging, updates & social media processes. As you could probably tell, I got a little withdrawn online when it came to updating all my platforms last year. I confess it’s much easier to be on top of everything when you already have a book out than it is when it’s in still in the works. I’d like to figure out a way to blog and share stuff that hasn’t already been said before but that’s gonna take some strategizing!
• Maintain balance by working out, meditating and continue taking care of body.
• Get Polterguys wider marketing and distribution opportunities.

Getting my second book out to the world soon! Once again, thanks for sticking around!

Vol. 1 at Fantastic Comics in Berkeley, CA

Happy belated Thanksgiving, guys! I hope everyone’s having a great time with family and friends.

I’ve been meaning to share some kind of infographic about Polterguys Vol. 1’s performance since it came out last year. First because infographics are cool and second, because it’s always nice to see some real numbers for research purposes. When I started out, I had no idea what how much money I was going to need or expect and that made it difficult to create a budget. My hope is that this could be another resource for those of you who are interested in making  your own books.

It took me a while but I finally found time this weekend to wrangle up numbers and slap on some colors.  Hit the jump to check it out!

NOTES:

Xeric Grant
I didn’t include the Xeric Grant funds in this infographic as income because it technically doesn’t count towards a sale. The funds are specifically meant to aid in the cost of production so you can only get reimbursed once you’ve spent the money.

Inventory
I ordered 500 books (since off-set printing isn’t exact, I got 13 more in my order) for my initial print run because this was the minimum order required to go through Transcontinental, a printer located in Canada that’s been well-recommended. It turned out to be a perfect number for me because one year later, I’m finally down to 50-ish books in my apartment.

From that perspective, I do consider Vol. 1 to be a moderate success. My goal was to sell-through the initial print run and that seems to be on track to happen. I’m anticipating a few more people will be interested in Vol. 1 copies once the second Kickstarter comes around so I’m not too worried about getting stuck with the remaining books for too long.

Now, for comparison, let’s look at a comparable book put out by a bigger publisher, shall we? The manga adaptation of Soulless Vol. 2 sold 548 copies in Nov. 2012. That’s my entire print run sold through in one month and that’s JUST through North American comic shops. HAHA, there’s definitely room for growth there! Someday, I’d like to place an order for a print run without having a small panic attack….(*ahem*) but I doubt that’s gonna happen soon.

So why would I be willing to give away 63 books, you ask? Well, 14 of those were sent to manga bloggers and publications, some of whom were extremely kind enough to write a few words about Polterguys. I think in general Polterguys was well-received and I’m quite grateful for that. I know a few librarians I met at ALA this year in Chicago appeared more interested in Polterguys thanks to the positive Kirkus Review blurb so it does pay to send out books for reviews. 

No. of Books Sold

135 books were pre-sold thanks to Kickstarter or 34% of current sales. That’s pretty major and I’ll always thank my lucky stars crowdfunding comics started getting in vogue in past few years. I seriously could not be more fortunate to have a few comic Kickstarters to model my own campaign from, and have strangers who have never heard of me or my work before be interested thanks to being featured on site.

Looking at the numbers, ALA 2013 was my favorite con because librarians and their friends were so amazing and bought a lot of books! Now, if you take ALA, AX, TCAF all together,  you’ll see that selling books at conventions face to face with potential readers makes up another 34% of book sales. On one level, I totally understand this and any sane, normal businesswoman would book herself a nationwide convention tour the next time around. So why didn’t I book more this year? We’ll get to that.  Short answer: It’s exhausting.

Sales

Because I don’t do this for a living, I didn’t care too much about the purity of these sales figures per item. That means that Kickstarter figure isn’t just books, it’s also prints, e-books, and shipping fees. At conventions,  I occasionally do sketches and sometimes sell prints but they are not a significant source of income at them (yet.) For my own sanity, let’s just call them all general ballpark figures.

Ok yeah, that’s not a bad looking number right? That’s definitely more art income than I’ve ever made….ever. But sales don’t exist in a vacuum because along with sales come…

Expenses

Always expenses. I was going through my reports on Outright and found these were the major costs throughout the year. Of course, cost of goods sold (aka the Printing Cost) was my biggest one-time expense at $2,202.19. (Sidenote: It is SO important you have good credit, guys. You definitely need to have a sizable amount of credit line to put THAT item on your card and pay it off immediately.) You don’t have to go bankrupt self-publishing but you really need to have financial stability in case things go haywire.

Shipping was a pain and this was even before the recent hike in fees across the board. I heard international fees are even crazier now. Not really looking forward to that in future campaigns.

The tax line is a bit inflated again. Sorry. I do freelance illustrating on the side and there’s no way for me to split the amount of taxes I pay from sales and that other form of income without me making calculations until next year. BUT I didn’t want to leave that off because it’s too important to neglect.

Advertising involves paying for the website where most people encounter Polterguys for the first time, printing posters, bookmarks, giveaways.

Other Numbers

Ouch. Yeah, I need a new external harddrive.

See that time frame? It takes way too long for me to make a book.

Bottomline:

Self-publishing will not make you an overnight millionaire…but you don’t have to lose money either. 
I have a little money saved up from this whole deal. I also freelance on the side and try to save up as much as I can from my dayjob. I’m happy that it’s given me a little supplemental income and anytime I get an email that someone’s bought a copy from Amazon or picked up a PDF off of gumroad, it gives me all the fuzzy feelings.

There’s a looooot of backbreaking, annoying, non-art-related work involved.
It’s overwhelming. So overwhelming in fact that I don’t feel I’ve gotten the hang of balancing everything yet. I want to make more prints for example but in the precious few hours I have during the weekend, I often feel I have to prioritize other things like writing Vol. 2 for example. The list of stuff-to-do is never ending.

So why do it? 
Because I have to. Because I have no other choice. Because it’s fun and challenging and meaningful and I’m not really that good at anything else.

Questions? Feel free to comment below!