1841 Me No Wanna.

John is bound & determined to be annoyed about Thomas being asked first.

The other day someone randomly pledged to my Patreon, but didn’t shop up in my notifications. I just got an email about it. Apparently they mistook me for someone else, which is a whole other series of unanswered questions… Anyway, they have a patreon too and they sell 3d models that you can print on your 3d printer. That got me thinking. Many years ago you it was a trend for webcomics to sell little statues of popular characters. I only know of a couple off the top of my head, but Shortpacked did some & Wapsi Square did at least one. It’s been almost a decade since then & techn ology may have caught up to the point that I could do something like that via 3d printing. Honestly I doubt there’s a market for it with my characters, but in my dreamer’s brain it seems possible. I have a vague memory of pricing a 3D model a few years ago for something else and it was like $200 to get it done. Honestly that’s not that high a bar if the end user is the one who is going to actually make the figure and paint it, or whatever. In theory I could even get a 3D printer & make them myself to distribute. They aren’t so expensive that I couldn’t save up for one, plus that’s a business expense so I could write it off on my taxes. I’ve never bothered much with merchandise because it always fails hard. For every one person who says they want to buy a t-shirt the actual numbers work out to more like -100 because I invest time, which equates to money for me, and never sell anything. Or maybe one or two things in a 5 year period. Patreon has worked much better because it’s basically people saying “Listen dude, just make the comic, okay? I don’t need your crap cluttering up my space.” Still, there’s something inside of me that wants to have a little statue of each of my characters. A physical representation of these figments I poured my life into at the expense of everything else I ever wanted. Chances are I won’t do anything, but it’s nice to think about.

Also, the other day they started offering the Homestuck books on the Viz manga store… I don’t even know how to process that. I love Homestuck, but it doesn’t belong there. I mean if Homestuck can be sold in a digital store for the same price as, like, Dragon Ball then why not my stuff? Maybe the doors will open to any schmuck if you knock long enough.