Posted in: Comics | Tagged: kickstarter, quinton miles

Seeing Things In A Positive Light

By Quinton Miles

To say Light of Dawn's been the most interesting project I've worked on during my pursuit of a comics career is an understatement. It's been alive, dead, alive again, and if our current Kickstarter campaign numbers maintain, on its way to being dead again. And you know what? As much as it would suck, I'm okay with that. Either way, it's already had a significant influence on me in terms of my "career strategy" no matter what happens.

As I alluded to above, this isn't Light of Dawn's first Kickstarter campaign. After fading away in publisher slush piles last summer, I just couldn't let this one go because I thought it had so much storytelling potential. And "Write what you want to read", right? From Oscar Celestini's amazing artwork down to the "Veronica Mars meets Gemma Masters" concept, I certainly thought it was a unique title that could find its audience in time. Unfortunately, we couldn't get one sizable enough for us to find out and it died.

Or so I thought.

Fast forward to early April. Light of Dawn, and its failure, had a direct impact on how I approached all of my project ideas that followed it. After seeing the cool things some of the big guns were doing in digital comics (Mark Waid's Thrillbent, DC's Digital Firsts, etc.), I was extremely curious to see how a combination of those concepts would work for an unknown talent. As a result, I soft launched my new free digital comics portal QAMCOMICS.COM with my first series, a new project entitled TEMPLATE. As of today, we're officially two months into the story and awaiting approval from Comixology via their Submit platform for the collected monthly editions. It's way too early to say how it's doing, but I'm extremely encouraged at the reception it has gotten.

Additional plugs aside, I bring that up for a reason. During a check of the site's traffic one day, I came across a link on Tumblr from a user excited about Light of Dawn. That link led to another. And another. And another. And so on. One of hundreds of posts, some with nearly 300 reblogs, filled with people asking about and wanting to read it. Some users even managed to hunt Oscar down and ask him about the book and its status. All of this happening, mind you, nearly five months after it died. After seeing that large of a response, I thought to myself "We've got our audience!". With that enthusiasm, I approached Oscar again and got the band back together. Light of Dawn's back, baby!

Or so I thought.

We've got about nine days left in the new Light of Dawn campaign. And, despite the support I thought it had, we're no closer to making it than we were the first time around. After this failed the first time, I created a personal mandate to not do anymore Kickstarters until I built up a bigger following and had a full story to show people, which is exactly what I'm doing with TEMPLATE. Breaking that rule on the project I created it for in the first place just stings all the more, especially knowing that it likely is dead for good this time.

But there's still a little bit of hope with these last days, and I'm hoping this article will bring a new set of eyeballs to the project. Oscar and I very much want to do Light of Dawn and at this point, its fate is quite literally in the hands of the people. If we don't make it, that's alright too. Take the good with the bad, learn from it, and move on to the next thing.

Big thanks to all the folks who have pledged! We appreciate it!

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