Greg Burgas, a reviewer for Comic Book Resources (under a nice little subheading of “Comics Should Be Good!”), said that Tiny Life: l(a is “a far more complex work than we might think, and Jones does a fine job establishing the premise without giving too much away.”
For his complete article, click here.
Here’s a little preview of pages 3 and 4, penciled entirely by Colacitti.
Page 3
Page 4
I think the few criticisms I’ve gotten will disappear with this volume.
Yesterday I went to my Mom’s for Thanksgiving. It was a good time had by all (especially since our entire family is screwed it up in major ways, there were only about 6 people present; no fighting).
I brought along a few poster ideas to see what my family thought – I’m planning on giving them away to stores who buy more than just one or two copies – and my mom surprised me.
A few weeks back I got some advanced copies of Tiny Life: l(a and gave them away to people who’ve supported me in some way over the last 15 years (coincidentally, the day I got them, two old friends found me on Facebook and were given a free copy. I also now have their addresses and a suspicious amount of knowledge about their credit histories). Of course, I gave one to my mom.
As I was showing her my ideas for the poster, she gave me this shirt. I appreciate it, and I’m sure I will wear it. But it gave me an idea:
Why couldn’t I have shirts available? And hats and buttons and mugs and whatever else they make on CafePress?
My mom’s so smart.
Last night I had a fairly in-depth and lengthy interview with Scott from Comic Book Outsiders. It was very pleasant and I was a bit impressed by Scott’s knowledge of comic books and regular ole canonized literature. He compared Tiny Life to Atlas Shrugged, The Bell Jar, and Fight Club!
Hopefully, my fate is better than the fates of these authors (Plath killed herself, Rand had cancer for years, and Palahniuk was outted). Hopefully I get rich, become well respected, and live happily with both of those facts.
I’ll let you know when the interview is available for download.
Godaddy.com just told me that someone else still owns tinylife.com. They won’t say who, but if you go to tinylife.com, there is nothing there. So someone owns it, but they’re not doing anything with it.
I was so happy for a few minutes there. I was skipping and kissing random peoples’ babies and skipping away when random people yelled at me.
Now I’m back to skulking.
And saying “…Just go to sliver limited dotcom, that’s sliver el-tee-dee dotcom.”
Dammit.
I’m very excited. I just bought TinyLife.com!
I’ve been trying to get TinyLife.com for years (literally). Warner Bros. or something had it forever, and I was afraid they were going to charge me like $1000 for the name once they decided to give it up. But they didn’t. I bought for $10.14.
I think what I’ll do is just make it a redirect site (for now) and link it to Sliverltd.com. I just have too much shit on sliverltd.com to really try and move it all over there just because the name is easier to remember (if you’ve listened to any of the podcasts, you’ll hear me say “Go to sliver limited dot com, that’s sliver el-tee-dee dot com for more information.” I always had to say it twice).
Maybe eventually. If I start to make some money.
I mean, when I start to make lots of money.
I just got word that the books have been printed and they’re on the way. They will definitely make the Dec. 3 street date. I cut it pretty close though.
See, I originally asked my printer for a quote on 2000 copies of a 20-page book, which is what Tiny Life was supposed to be…
Hold on. Let me back up.
My original intention for Tiny Life was to print monthly comics (or bi-monthly, probably) at cost and at print run. This means that if it cost $1.50 per book and there were 1000 books ordered, I would sell 1000 copies at $1.50 a piece. My plan was to simply have this as a sort of “free advertising” type of thing. People read the individual issues, wet their appetite a little, buy the big book (which I would charge the usual amount), and I would, therefore, sell more books without actually spending any more money. However, that was not to be. Diamond said – and I can’t blame them for this; I’m sure they’ve done the math – that they can’t sell an item unless they expect to make a certain amount of money on it. So they said that Tiny Life – because there really isn’t a market for an independent-black-and-white-stick-figure-based series in today’s saturated semi-adult-themed-superhero market – wouldn’t be sold as a monthly series.
During this time, I got quotes from a lot of printers and asked for 2000 copies of a 24-page book. When I got word that Diamond didn’t want a monthly book, I just changed my quote request from “24 pages” to “120 pages.” Of course, it costs a lot less per book to print 2000 copies versus 500 copies.
So when Diamond asked for their orders – MUCH less than the 2000 I had quoted – I had to rerequest a quote for 500. Of course, the price per book went up and I was apprehensive. I then asked many other print houses for quotes. Lebonfon was still the best.
Unfortunately, that took some time and I was afraid that by asking all those people (and asking the very nice people at Lebonfon to “hold on for a few more days”) for another, lower quote meant that I would have to push back the street date.
But it didn’t.
Tiny Life: l(a is debuting in more than 200 comic shops around the country on December 3, 2008.
I gotta say, I got lucky with my penciler. I got lucky with Nicolas Colacitti.
The reason I had to get a penciler was – originally – because I couldn’t write / rewrite / breakdown / pencil / ink / tone / letter / publish / print make a website for / do interviews for / go to conventions for / pay for Tiny Life all by myself on (what I thought at the time would be) a monthly basis; it was simply too much work and some aspect would suffer (for a more detailed idea of what suffered, buy Tiny Life Demos to see how awful my penciling was simply because I lived by the motto “a page a day”). I needed someone to do at least one of the jobs. Since then, we’ve decided to make the book a series of novels as opposed to a series of comics (which, if you’ve read earlier posts, you know my stradegy was to simply make a very limited run of comics available and make the novels my primary concern). This means that, if I had to, I could draw the whole thing.
But why would I ever do that when Colacitti makes such beautiful pages:
Spectacular.
Colacitti emailed me some previews of page 1 of left. I think it looks pretty sweet. I’m sure I’ll mess it up when I ink it. Click on it for a closer view.
The above posters are now available for the low low price of $2 each. You won’t find a better deal than that on posters anywhere. Unless you go to the downloads page; they’re free there.
Just go to the garage sale page or, to buy them directly, go here.
Tiny Life Blog 