Kitchen Lich And Dough Zombies By Kelly Williams

Wow! Check out this amazing picture inspired by Marrowbones by cartoonist/illustrator Kelly Williams. I am really honored to get this, I've been a huge fan of Kelly's for years. Kelly's done work for Alterna Comics and top shelf. Follow him on Twitter, he's great to discuss comics with too. and check out his Deviantart page.  

The Townhouse

Still settling in and moving stuff into our new home. Already this is the most settled I've felt in Toronto. It's a great vibrant neighborhood, the place is perfect for us and I love my new studio. My new passion is filling the walls with art. I ordered a Travis Louie print this morning and I want a Tintin print and an Arthur Rackham one as well. This is really fun. In walking distance is a book store, several cafes, a wine store, a toy store and a grocery store. So, it's just great. 

Moving Day

So, our move to the townhouse has begun in earnest. Of course it's snowing. I just realized this is the first time I'll live in a house of brick. I did this sketch in a few spare moments in the chaos of moving.

The Don't Pick The Flowers Marrowbones Interview

Please check out the interview I did for the wonderful Don't Pick The Flowers site where I talk about Marrowbones and influences and publishing. You can read it right here.

Check Out: Hopeless, Maine

Today's guest post is written by Nimue Brown, who together with Thomas Brown make the wonderful comic Hopeless, Maine, published by Archaia.


"Hopeless, as a small, fictional island off the coast of Maine, has
been around for some time. It evolved from a peninsula, as islands are
wont to do, aided and abetted by a conversation Tom had with his
father. Tom’s father suggested that ‘Hope’ would be a good name for
the island…


 I landed about eight years ago, drawn in by the brooding atmosphere
and the mysterious story. Somewhere along the way, Tom persuaded me to
try writing about it, and I’ve never really left. But that’s normal.
People very seldom get to leave Hopeless. It’s that sort of an island.


Most people, in fact, either descended from the handful of founding
families, or were shipwrecked. The rocky coast does not suggest
comfort. Things peer at you from cracks and caves. Nearby, the seaweed
is moving. Whether the plant itself is mobile, of something large
slithers about underneath, is hard to tell. The air shimmers with
glowing things. They don’t seem hostile. But on the other hand, they
aren’t doing anything too friendly.


You have no idea where you are. But that’s fine, because knowing
wouldn’t help you in the slightest.


Hopeless is the setting for our graphic novel saga, first installment
coming soon from Archaia, and already coming out electronically
through comixology.


Book One of the Hopeless Saga, Personal Demons, introduces Salamandra,
a small girl with a penchant for magic. Sal is a touch feral, but
that’s not entirely her fault. Growing up in an abandoned house has
not done much for her social skills. Her parents apparently did not
want her. The local witch does not want her. The orphanage is obliged
to take her in. The demons, on the other hand, have all sorts of
other, more interested attitudes."


The Hopeless, Maine website. 

And on the Archaia site. (with preview!)

And on ComiXology. 

New Comic Wednesday

Starting tomorrow and going for at least the next several weeks I'm starting a new feature here on the blog where I have a guest post done by someone making a comic I really feel merits your attention. I'm calling it New Comic Wednesdays for lack of anything better.

We're starting tomorrow with Nimue and Thomas Brown's Hopeless,Maine. Tune i!

Marrowbones Guest Essay On SUVUDU

In this very brief essay I talk about self publishing Marrowbones and how DIY fits into traditional publishing.

Marrowbones Review In Kleefeld On Comics

( Page one of Kitchen Lich without colour, I almost published MB without colour!)

A great review of Marrowbones by Sean Kleefeld. Sean points out some weaknesses in Marrowbones one that I fully agree with. One great thing about reviews is that if you're brave enough and with the right combination of humility and tenacity you can learn very important lessons from the insights of reviewers. Especially the negative ones. Not that this is a negative review at all. But it's an honest one. I've been keeping this review open on my computer to remind myself not to make the same mistakes in book 2. With Marrowbones I've been thinking a lot of the importance of critics in the comic book ecology. We need more critical voices like Sean's. 

The Marrowbones Dr. Gangrene Interview

An interview the cartoonist behind Marrowbones, me (pictured above) did with Dr Gangrene. This was a really fun interview and I think I was more awake than usual and thus maybe a bit more insightful. The interview was being insightful as well, love what Dr Gangrene said about the book

"The world of Marrowbones Swamp is a place of childlike wonder in a dark horror wrapping" 

Perfect!

Read the full interview here. 

Buy Marrowbones here, and remember to follow the link back to my site: 

                                                                       

Marrowbones Review In Behind The Panels

Really great review of Marrowbones in the wonderful comics site, Behind The Panels. I feel like the reviewer understood the book better than I did! Check it out here.

To buy Marrowbones for 2 dollars you can hit the button below, after the purchase follow the link  "go back to eric orchard's website" to get to the upload page.

Marrowbones Spooky Book Contest Book List

This is a bit late in coming because I got so many responses that I needed some time to sit down and type out the whole list from the Marrowbones contest. So here it is, in no particular order, your list of wonderful, spooky books:

The Raven by Poe,  Frank and Stein and Me by Kin Platt,  Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson and Alpha & Omega series,  "The Haunted House," which starred Mickey, Donald, and Goofy, Pickman's Model by Lovecraft (Pretty much anything by Lovecraft),  Lord of the Flies,   Lois Duncan's "Down a Dark Hall",  Christopher Pike's "Whisper of Death",  Borris and Bella illustrated by Gris Grimly,  Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn,  The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman,  The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre,  We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson,   "The Music Teacher" by John Cheever,   "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Music of Erich Zann" by Lovecraft,  "The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link,  "A Diagnosis of Death" by Ambrose Bierce,   "Kehua!" by Fay Weldon,Renee French's collection Marbles in My Underpants,   Books of Blood by Clive Barker,   Roald Dahl's The Witches,  The Giver by Lois Lowry,   Jeremy Dyson's The Cranes That Build The Cranes, Spiderwick chronicles Black and Diterlizzi, Creepy Susie and 13 Other Tragic Tales for Troubled Children a collection of illustrated short stories written by Angus Oblong ,  The Hunger Games,  Jane Eyre,  Coraline by Gaiman,  Bram Stoker's "Dracula",  "There are monsters everywhere" by Mercer Mayer,  IT by Stephen King,  Vampire Hunter D ,  The Secret History by Donna Tartt,  'The Shadow over Innsmouth' Lovecraft,   Billy the Frog, by Guillaume Bianco,   'Something Wicked This Way Comes" Bradbury,  Now We Are Sick, by Neil Gaiman & various contributors,  Steven King's Skeleton Crew,  The Stand King,  Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series by Alvin Schwartz,  Ghost Story, by Peter Straub,  Hellboy by Mike Mignola, Locke & Key by Joe Hill,Night Shift by Stephen King, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, The Owl Service by Alan Garner, In the Walls of Eryx by H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth J. Sterling,  The Sea Curse, Worms of the Earth by Robert E Howard, "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, The Shining by Stephen King,  "A Tale Dark & Grimm" by Adam Gidwitz, Garfield Hallowe'en, The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey, The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers, R.L. Stine's Gossebumps series , Zodiac, hitechapel Road, A Vampyre Tale by Ontario author Wayne Mallows.


Phew! what an amazing list! Thanks so much to everyone who participated. I'm sorry if yours is missing from here, I tried to get them all but there are a lot!


You can buy Marrowbones here for 2 dollars, just follow the link back "to Eric Orchard's website" from the Paypal page for your download.

                                                     

Getting Your Digital Comic To Readers

To answer some questions I've been getting about the nuts and bolts of self publishing a digital comic I'm doing a small post on how I distributed Marrowbones. I'd love to see more people doing this. I feel like there is the drive and the technology to have a constant stream of great comics to read. That's kind of my dream, more great comics all the time.

To start I should say part of this experiment in self publishing was to see if I could keep the overhead down to zero dollars for the first while. And I have! I expect to incur some costs soon, as I attempt to get Marrowbones into eBook shops like amazon and Barnes & Noble but the initial push has cost me nothing. Well, nothing but time, which is a pretty valuable thing.

Anyway, the materials used to create Marrowbones were all digital. My Cintiq, my iPad and a few different programs. I consider all of these paid for previously from my income. So, it costs me nothing but electricity to draw the book. Which looks funny now that I write it down. But it's true.

Oh! There was one cost I forgot about. I had a friend format the book in exchange for art. so, some bartering did occur.

But, to get to the distribution side of things. To be perfectly honest I did not know how I would distribute this until 10 minutes before it launched. My assumption was that I would email out every purchase. I thought about this moments before the time I had announced for the launch and realized this might be unfeasible. It would mean people in China and Australia would have to wait hours while I slept in order to get their book. That totally negates the benefits of selling digitally, i feel. I really didn't want that. It also meant sitting by my computer all the time waiting for sales and emailing them off. I started to panic.

So, what did I do?

I googled "how to sell your eBook with Paypal"

Within moments I found an instructive video on YouTube and was uploading the book as per its instructions while I was till watching it, pausing and rewinding as I went. It was a pretty frantic 5 minutes. And I was pretty lucky. I wish I could find the video now! But no matter how many times I google it I've lost it.

The actual process is extremely easy and fast.

Once you have your comic formatted as a pdf and ready to go start an account at Mediafire. It's free to start a basic account. Mediafire is a free file and image hosting site. You can read more about it here.

After you have an account there, upload your book.

Once the book is uploaded you need to copy the link to your file. This is straight forward and you shouldn't have any issues doing this.

OK, so you're all done with Mediafire and that side of the process, next you need to create a "Buy Now" button in PayPal. You'll need a Paypal account for this. They make this pretty easy.

What you need to do here is have the Buy Now button redirect the purchaser to the Mediafire site with your file. So, create the button you need and open the advanced options at the end. Check "buyer is directed here after purchase" or something along those lines and place the Mediafire link into the space provided.

And that's it! It's insanely simple.

Now go make some comics!

..if you want to see how it all works, why not try it by buying my comic? ;) Only 2 dollars for 47 pages!

                                                     

Marrowbones Fan Page

Here's a sketch I did in sketchbook Pro for the cover of Marrowbones issue one. Nora with her epee.

First day of sales for Marrowbones have been fantastic! Thanks so much everyone! This has been really exciting. I wanted to clarify my reasons for self publishing this book, while money factors in of course, it was primarily about getting more material out there. Traditional publishing is slow, and with the kind of work I'm doing it's really hard to have a lot of work visible. And it also limits the stories you can tell. By releasing things digitally, these issues can be overcome, and you can still have a great relationship with traditional publishing. I've talked about the importance of traditional publishing elsewhere. I think it's very important.

Digital also allows me to produce work that can later be refined, unlike print which has a feeling of finality to it, a digital work can be refined and made better with ease. I'd like to talk more about this idea another time, I'm still gather my thoughts.

but what I mostly wanted to post about was my new Marrowbones fan page on Facebook! Have a look

You can buy Marrowbones by following the button below. After your purchase select the button to go back to my blog, which will take you to the download page.

And The Winners Are!!!

Georgia Beaverson

Dylan Edwards

Tence1

Steve "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

Lady3Jane

and

Kurt Mitchell

Congratulations all! It took me a bit to do the draw because I got a lot more entries than I had anticipated.

I've decided to change things a bit, since most people on this list already bought the book from you ALL get a free sketch of your favorite character as well as a free comic, if you don't already have him.

I used the names given in the comments, so please email me to collect your prizes!

Thanks so much to everyone!

You can buy Marrowbones #1 right here:

After you make the purchase follow the link "go back to ericorchard blogspot etc." and it will actually take you to the download site.

Marrowbones Is Now Available!

Marrowbones Issue One is now available for purchase! 

You can pay using Paypal or credit card, just press this button: 

Thanks so much for all your support!

                               

                                                          

After you've made your purchase click "return to eric orchard blogspot" and you will be automatically redirected to a page where you can download the book. If you are not redirected there or if you lose the link please let me know and I'll either email you the file or send you the link again.

Marrowbones Give Away Day Two

The second day of the Marrowbones give away is on, just leave the name of your favorite spooky book and your name will be entered in a draw in Monday for 5 free downloads of Marrowbones and a sketch, so 6 winners altogether!

I will do the draw Monday at 5 PM EST and announce it here immediately following, so about 5:30 EST. 

Lots of amazing entries so far!

Marrowbones Pumpkin Patch Give Away!

To celebrate the launch of Marrowbones on Monday I'm giving away 5 digital copies of Marrowbones issue 1 and the Marrowbones pencil sketch of your choice!


To win simply leave the name of your favourite spooky book. Leave it in the comments here, on Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter.


                                               

                                                    

Winners will be selected randomly.   I'll announce the winners on Monday with the list of spooky books.

Attack Of The Dough Zombies!

Just a few more days left!Marrowbones will be released on Monday. Two dollars for 47 pages of ghoulish fun.

A few interesting things about this comic; it's my first all digital comic for one. I did it mainly on Manga Studio and Photoshop but I also used my iPad and the Procreate app. With the iPad I could work on it anywhere. Which was great. I would create an image and import it into Manga Studio. It really made me wish there was a really great comic making app. Procreate is great for drawing but I'd love to see something that formats and creates panels as well. There's no reason not to make comics on the run, really. I thought Wacom's Inkling might be the device for this but apparently it turned out not to be ideal for finished work. It's interesting though, most of the time it's the hardware that's important rather than the software. I wouldn't have been able to do this so easily without my Cintiq.

Another thing is I did it fast. It's a 47 page comic done in about a month. That's pretty fast. But I think it looks as good as anything I've done. I've been talking a lot about developing a strong, fast style. And I feel like I did this here.

OK! More tomorrow!

A Map of Marrowbones

Nothing gets my imagination rolling like a good map, and I'm pretty happy with this one. This is a pretty basic map of Marrowbones Swamp. Every issue I'll elaborate the world a little more, zeroing in on a certain area. The main action happens at Ravensbeard Inn, near the center but there will be lots of exploring going on, too.

An extended version of what's in the comic:



"MARROWBONES SWAMP IS A SMALL POCKET WORLD WITHIN YOUR OWN. IT IS WELL HIDDEN AND THE EXACT PROPERTIES OF THIS WORLD ARE MYSTERIOUS. EVEN IT’S EXACT DIMENSION CHANGE RADICALLY OVER TIME, EBBING AND WANING. MARROWBONES ROVES AROUND EASTERN NORTH AMERICA; UPSTATE NEW YORK, MAINE, ONTARIO AND OTHER EASTERN PROVINCES. SOME OF THE STRUCTURES IN MARROWBONES ARE EUROPEAN SO IT IS BELIEVED THAT IT WAS ONCE SITUATED IN EUROPE. THERE IS ALSO A WORKING LAMPOST FROM NEW ORLEANS, A HUT FROM CENTRAL AFRICA AND A SMALL RUSSIAN CHURCH. THERE ARE OTHER WORLDS HIDDEN IN MARROWBONES, WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS. SO IT IS IMPORTANT TO STAY ON THE PATH AND IGNORE THOSE BECKONING LIGHTS YOU SEE IN THE DISTANCE" 

Ollie The Nervous Vampire

One of the main characters in Marrowbones, Ollie is very nervous and kind of sad. Nora is his only friend. He hides in his quiet crypt, worrying. 

Six Days To Marrowbones

Six more days! I hope... I'm lettering it now and had a sudden change of heart as far as lettering goes so there's some extra work happening. But that's fine. I ended up going with a lettering which is hand written over a font, like this: 

I'm a big fan of hand lettered comics but am too sloppy to freehand it myself, but I feel this works out really, really well. 

One Week To Marrowbones!

All finished the very first issue of Marrowbones! Just a few more tweaks and it's ready to go. I'l be selling it from here for now, at 2 dollars a download.

Marrowbones is the story of Nora, a young girl who gets a job working at her werewolf uncle's inn in a haunted swamp. Each issue will be a stand alone story or stories about Nora and her friends. The comic is 46 pages long with comics, maps  and drawings. If you like Tim Burton, ghost stories, Mike Mignola, Neil Gaiman's Coraline and The Graveyard Book, Hammer films, Vincent Price and other weird, fun, spooky things you may like this comic. 

"Monet Eggs"

Henry managed to totally shock me after he finished painting his Easter eggs today and announcing very seriously, "look daddy, they look like Monet" Which they actually do. My wife and I finally remembered that we have a picture book about Monet's lily pads. Still, we thought that was very cool. 

Happy Easter From The Henrysaur!

Nursery Comic Eisner Nomination

I found out last night that the anthology I contributed to Nursery Rhyme Comics has been nominated for two Eisner awards! Really wonderful news and so well deserved. It's an amazing book. Thanks so much to everyone who have supported it. 

Countdown To Marrowbones

A panel from page one of Kitchen Lich.

I'm doing the last three drawings for Marrowbones right now. After that it's the lettering, last minute edits and then creating the files for sale. What kind of file would you prefer; PDF or ePub? 

Marrowbones Troll

A character sketch for Marrowbones, which will be done this week! I'll be posting more work from the book this week. Marrowbones will only be available from here as a download for the time being, I'm thinking two dollars, which I think is pretty good for a book nearly fifty pages long. 

Veruca The Werewolf From Buffy The Vampire Slayer

A sketch of the character Veruca from Buffy the Vampire slayer. She wasn't in it a lot but I thought she was a really interesting character. check out the episode Wild At Heart from season 4.