Cool and Collected

Welcome Back

I've got an interesting couple weeks ahead.

I’ll be tabling at TCAF this weekend. This is a convention that has been on my wish list since I started Pesto Comics.

The fact that it’s so indie-focused is something that I don't take for granted at all. People travel from all over the world to come to this convention and I'm a 14-minute train ride away. If I’m totally honest, it’s events like this that helped me believe it’s all possible.

If you’re reading (or listening) to this as soon as it was posted, I’m there right now, enjoying the hell out of it, standing on the same ice that I play my Sunday hockey on and in the same building the Toronto Maple Leafs have played for years.

Just a week later, I'll find myself in the beautiful Maritimes as I make my first ever trip out there for the East Coast Comic Expo. I don't have too many conventions on my schedule this year so it's feeling extra front loaded in 2025.

I also had the good fortune of getting the prints for From Parts Unknown #3 early. That means I'll be able to have them at my tables at both of these conventions and get them out to backers well before we launch From Parts Unknown #4.

The last round the fulfillment with Naked Kaiju Woman and From Parts Unknown #2 was a challenge. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but it certainly didn’t go as smooth as I had hoped.

I'm feeling a lot better about how everything seems to be lining up this time out.

Jerry Carita mentioned it doesn't feel like there's so much of a convention season nowadays. I totally understand that sentiment.

If I were motivated to, I could arguably go to a convention every other week. However, this year it really does feel like the start of a new season.

Most of my comics projects are well underway, already with artists as I sit idle waiting for layouts and completed pages to hit my inbox. (It’s always a great joy when they do.)

Now, for comics, it's time for me to put on my other hat and become the salesman.

Looking back on campaigns like Stay Cool at a time like this can be extra helpful. I get to relive the campaigns with new context, brining the experience of all the others I’ve launched.

It’s always a bit stressful going over numbers, as they still aren’t where I need them to be, but I’m happy to give budding creators some real context to the costs of creating a comic. Beyond the paywall, I’m sharing real financials to the penny - but first, let’s talk about how Stay Cool came about.

Main Story

A New Strategy

Having a pipeline that's almost running itself is something that I could only dream of when I launched my second campaign for Stay Cool.

I was still experimenting with the format and trying something unique to possibly hit profitability.

The cost of printing colour comics was a lot higher at the time. Part of that was the printer I used, another was the economics then. For that reason, I decided to create Stay Cool in black and white. It nearly halved the print cost immediately and seemed like a sound strategy, but had some unforeseen downsides - which will become clear when we look at the numbers.

I still hadn't joined ComixLaunch, but I was fortunate enough to get some help from Pat Shand. He looked at the campaign before I launched it and gave me a few very good pointers, some of which were too late to follow.

The noir genre is hit or miss on Kickstarter and black and white is equally so. The more actionable advice was to make sure I had stretch goals in mind, a shipping table available and variant covers to get backers up the ladder of reward tiers.

Finding Rafael Chrestani

I'm always on Facebook’s Connecting Comics Artists and Writers group looking for the latest from the great artists that post there. It's truly unreal how many talented artists are looking for work - and at reasonable rates for indies. Rafael was one of them.

I initially reached out to him for a variant cover on Unlimited Udo. This is how I test out most of the artists I work with. It's an excellent opportunity to see if we can work together easily enough.

After working on Stay Cool, I was quick to reach out to Rafael again with the script for Naked Kaiju Woman, so clearly this partnership worked really well.

Rafael used to send me layouts for all the pages. After I approved them over and over without really making any changes, he stop sending them as I know I can trust him to put together a good page without having to approve it.

It's become a fruitful collaboration that’ll very likely extend beyond Naked Kaiju Woman. (In fact, he had a recent Instagram post that inspired me to write something new for him in 2026-27).

Stay Cool, however, was already fully baked before I knew I’d get into comics at all…

Beyond the paywall, we get into specifics. Funding amounts. Costs. Budgets. All followed with a ‘lessons learned’. Subscribe to get all of it!