You know what's fun? Being a comic book writer and telling your artist what to draw and then...they do it.
So I don't think I've updated you all on the status of the Giapetta project.
We've been meeting with Disney Publishing for the last several months. For a variety of reasons, our tech is not a natural fit for books, even books with toys attached. But we've come up with some scenarios to make it work, and because Disney is VAST and it grinds VERY SLOWLY you just have to work with them as best you can.
Last month Disney had us meet with some of their publishing partners at this mega publishing expo in NYC. That went okay but the virtue of doing one of these things is making new contacts.
So being the plucky cold-callers that we are, my friend/co-partner Ellen marched into one publisher's booth (not Disney affiliated) and said, "Hey, we've got this cool project that might interest you, do you have five minutes to look at it?"
And the publisher, Kira, looked at our demo, which is a digital comic that I wrote about the girl character Giapetta, and it shows off our tech on the iPad and it's cool and funny and flashy. Kira said, "We don't do anything with digital technology so while it's cool, that's not of interest to us. However, I *love* your character and your comic. If you had a finished product I'd buy it from you on the spot. I know we could sell it."
So, Fred, our main partner has fronted some seed money to me and Dani - our illustrator - to put together a pitch. Which is why I'm having a variety of characters drawn up and I just laid out a big splash page scene for Dani to draw.
Who knows what will become of it. My current motto after all the near misses is "Nothing means nothing until the check clears." So I don't get overly excited about what MIGHT happen.
However, I am actually getting characters drawn (like Capt. Tanderson) and storylines synopsized and we will have a receptive publisher look at it. And that's cool.