Drawing out the Dragons by James Owen

Author:James Owen [Owen, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Motivational
Publisher: Coppervale Press
Published: 2014-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

You can have everything in life

You want, if you will just help enough

Other people get what they want.

ZIG ZIGLAR

He who would accomplish little

Must sacrifice little;

He who would achieve much

Must sacrifice much;

He who would attain highly

Must sacrifice greatly.

JAMES ALLEN

CHAPTER FIVE

If You Really Want It, No Reason Is Big Enough To Stop You

I spent that week in Ireland, then came back to Arizona, where my wife and I moved into a little apartment. We had a book collection, a drafting table, a sewing machine, a hope chest, and a dog—and nothing else. She got a job selling floor coverings to pay the bills while I worked on the comics. When she got her first check, we bought some paper, pens, and pencils. With those art supplies, I started drawing what would become the first issue of my comic book series called StarChild.

This was an amalgam of stories that I had wanted to do since very early in my career. I’d started a Superman story years before, which is where the title came from: StarChild is Kal-El in Kryptonese.

The main story came from an adaptation of Silas Marner by George Eliot that I was doing for a company called Classics Illustrated, which, according to a now--familiar pattern, started to go under not long after contracting me for the book. (And incidentally, that story is why the main character in StarChild is an old weaver hermit. He was originally Silas Marner; I just changed him into my character, Ezekiel Higgins, so the sixteen pages I’d already drawn wouldn’t be wasted.)

I’d run a comic book company before, so I knew how to do it and I knew what my obstacles were. The main goal was to sell enough copies to pay for the printing bill. If we could pay for the printing bill, then I could work on the next issues. That way I could build an audience while my wife’s job could take care of the bills at home.

To pay for a minimum three thousand copy print run, which was the lowest you could do, economically speaking, we had to sell at least a thousand copies right off the bat. I finished that first issue of StarChild, and we sent it into the catalogs. A few months later, we got back orders for twelve hundred copies, which was ideal. We’d covered the printing bill and had pizza money left over. Priorities, you know.

The second issue came out a month later, on time, but the numbers were a different story. The orders came in for only six hundred copies. That was a little bit of a problem. If we couldn’t pay the printing bill, we couldn’t go on to issue number three, or four, or five—and my career would be over before it had even started. But then something happened that changed everything.

One week after the second issue of StarChild shipped to the comic book stores, I crushed my drawing hand in a car accident.

A young lady made a left-hand turn in front of me when I had a green light.

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