jbwarner86

It's been a long time coming, but I'm over two months into the new continuity of Nineteen-Ninety-Something and it's time to clean house. I'm going to begin deleting the old strips from my website.

But, like I mentioned before, I don't want to deprive readers who still want to read them. I was thinking of selling the old archive as a zip file, perhaps through my Patreon as a new tier, but I'm not the most tech-savvy guy in the world and I need some tips on how to put a zip file together and so forth. Anyone got any suggestions?

I want 2020 to be all about personal change, and that starts with charging ahead with projects I've been neglecting for too long. Hey, here's one to start - the Nineteen-Ninety-Something Patreon page is finally live!

For just $1 a month, you can gain early access to the rough versions of the Sunday strips four weeks before they go up on the site! And once I get enough patrons, I'll start putting together the very first real tangible Nineteen-Ninety-Something book collection that YOU can purchase and take anywhere!

Also, watch this space for forthcoming announcements of merchandise! It's all finally happening, folks, and you're witnessing it!

What better way to ring in the 2020s than by going back to the 1990s? It's almost here, folks - 1990somethingcomic.com starts funky-fresh on January 1 with a kinder, gentler new continuity! I'm having a lot of fun with this new version of the series, and I hope you all do too

Now, the only issue that remains is what to do with the old continuity. I've had a few people say to me "please don't delete the old strips, I still want to read them." But the purpose of starting over is to have a more pleasant replacement for those dark and gritty strips that don't reflect my creative desires. So I do want to get rid of them eventually. As of right now, they're still there on the site, but gradually I do want to take them down - but I also want to keep them available somewhere somehow for the sake of the people who want them archived. Just not publicly, because this new version of the series is what I want the world to see.

So I've come up with a few options. I could just give everyone fair warning before I start deleting the old strips so they can save them to their hard drives themselves. Or I could maybe sell a zip file that has all the old strips in it, which might be nice because it's not often that I earn money for drawing Nineteen-Ninety-Something. But as always, you're the audience, and I value your feedback. What are your suggestions?

The process of figuring out what to do with Nineteen-Ninety-Something continues. I legitimately wonder if anyone on DeviantArt has ever been this indecisive about how to draw a comic strip.

My first big brainstorm for how to reboot the series was "Do it as a comic book, those are more popular." But to be perfectly honest, every time I've tried to do comic books, I lose my enthusiasm for them real quick. Comic strips have always been my biggest passion - I never read graphic novels much as a kid, but I collected the heck out of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot and Bloom County and they all informed my sense of storytelling. This is the medium my brain has been hardwired to pursue.

So I still wanna fix the series, but without restarting it in a completely different format. I'd rather just go back and rewrite/redraw the strips that don't hold up. As an experiment this week, I went back and redid the first week of strips from January 1990 and I think they turned out way better. There's no reason why this series can't continue as a daily webcomic once I knock the kinks out of those embarrassing first years. But the issue of monetization still baffles me.

I was hoping to move the series to Webtoon, because it's blowing up right now and it seems like the place to be for webcomic artists who want to make a career out of it. Except their format doesn't really work well for horizontal strips like mine. Everything there is vertical book-like pages meant to be scrolled through on a phone. So I need to find a place that'll let me publish my strips as they are, from this new beginning I'm writing, and still be able to monetize them. I know I mentioned Patreon before, but the process of drawing all those extra rewards for donators is very intimidating - I have a day job, and what little free time I have from it is already dedicated to the strip. I barely have time to draw anything else regularly.

So maybe I should just go back to submitting to regular book publishers? I don't know, I really don't. This series has been my greatest creative passion for almost a decade and a half now, and I still can't seem to make it work right. How do I just get to the point where I can do what I love for a living?