Hey, everyone! I am pleased to announce the launch of my official creative project newsletter:
I encourage you to subscribe today! I will be publishing news and progress updates on my current comic project, Space Trader (working title), which has been previously mentioned in the blog! Space Trader is a 30-page sci-fi comic book in the spirit of such classics as Firefly and “Han Solo, Day Trader.” My brother, David Ferrell, wrote it, and I am in the process of drawing it! When you subscribe to The Big J, you not only get the latest updates on Space Trader, but also my future creative projects! If I decide to start updating Sketch Comedy again, or launch any of the spin-off projects I’ve been considering (e.g. The Independently Musical Adventures of James Andrzejewski or HowardQuest: The Video Game, you will hear about it first through The Big J.
I also wanted to explain why I chose the word “failure” in this particular strip. Sketch Comedy served as a creative outlet for me, it met my goal of at least breaking even financially, and it helped me develop my cartooning and website development/management skills; in those respects I consider it a success. However, every year since I launched SC in October of 2010, I resolved to reach 1,000 average daily visitors to the site, and every year I failed to achieve my resolution. While I was updating, the daily average came out closer to 100. This wasn’t the only reason that I decided to put the strip on hiatus, but it was a factor. I’m trying new things and exploring new approaches, but you can bet I’m still comics.
To all my regular readers: thanks for indulging my illustrated navel-gazing and inscrutable esoteric interests. You can continue to keep up with me via Twitter, The Deev, and now, The Big J.
I love that you can has stillness of comics.
As my acting teacher used to say–quoting Samuel Beckett–“Fail Again. Fail Better.”
Good to see ya back. Rock Rock On!
Ah okay now I understand the hiatus. I subscribes so I’ll be waiting to see this new comic and hope to see SC updated as well one day. 🙂
Aw, Sugar Cube
Space Trader sounds like a really interesting working title.
Glad to see you’re still comics, and I’m signing up for that newsletter right away! (Just have to clear my 100+ emails from Enjin that I never read)
Thanks for your support, everyone. It’s good to be back in the game!
Also, I would play HowardQuest.
We don’t have enough wizards in video games these days.
That’s a great strip!
I just published a strip a couple weeks ago with a similar theme: Life Lessons.
Sorry to hear about not reaching that 1k mark like you’d hoped. I’ve been at it since 2006 and due to a couple year-long hiatuses and some other issues, I’ve only averaged about 2 per month, so despite quite a lot of advertising (~$100/mo currently), I’m still only averaging about 300 visitors/day. One thing that keeps me hopeful is that my pageviews are still 2-4k/day, which tells me that the people who visit are reading an average of about 10 pages of the archive. And since regular readers usually only see the most recent page (or two), I know I’m nowhere near reaching a saturation point.
Thanks for the encouragement, Sam, and thanks for sharing your Life Lessons strip. Keep at it, man! With tenacity we will overcome and thrive!