Brant was a fan of comics as a kid and it stuck with him into adulthood. These days he's also an aspiring comic creator. This column discusses his personal journey from fandom to the annals of the creative society that is the world of comics. Brant's current comic series is Wannabez and this is his journey. (If it's you're first time joining him, you can visit the link at the bottom of the article to start the journey from the beginning.)
SMALL PRESS IDOL
I honestly don't remember how long ago this was as it is all jumbling together, but Scott and I had entered Wannabez into Small Press Idol one year, maybe 2007. This wasn't my first foray into Small Press Idol, however. The year prior I had entered another property called Aroquin the Protector, which got eliminated in the initial submission process. Fortunately for me, I also letter, so I was able to hook up with two projects that year to letter.
The first was for my buddy Cary, with The Kansas Hit. You can read more about that series at www.redhandedstudios.com. It's about a hitman, but it's a little more involved than that, and was a ton of fun to work on.
See, in Small Press Idol there are several rounds that slowly progress the creation process. The first is a synopsis and rough cover image. The second, which is where it started to get fun, is the logo and character designs. For The Kansas Hit, Cary let me tweak his existing logo to freshen it up, and it turned out pretty cool I think. But the real fun was in the character designs, which we did up as online dossiers of sorts. So lettering those was a blast. The next stage is three sequential pages, which I lettered of course. We also did some killer promotion for the story that kept us in the running for a while. And the fourth is a 12 page comic.
Kansas Hit didn't win, but it did really well. The project I still believe would have won was the other one I was lettering, Warbreed, which was a dark fantasy type story with gorgeous art and a cool story. We also did killer promotion on it, and it was the top contender for a long while. But 
unfortunately for reasons not clear to any of us, the writer, Ben Jones, pulled out of the competition. I loved working on that story, though, because it was just breathtakingly beautiful. And of course, Ross Hughes did the colors, so that was awesome as well having worked with him several times to date.
The following year I decided to try entering the contest again, this time with Wannabez. Oddly enough, I ended up lettering two other projects during that competition as well, again by Cary and Ben. Cary had entered Totem, a very cool story that seems a bit cursed, but is on track again. I really enjoyed lettering that one as I did this cool caption box for each character using the animal heads their totems represented. And I got to again tweak Cary's original logo. But alas, Totem didn't win that year either.
Ben's new project was called Advent, and again had extremely beautiful art. I never was happy with the logo I did for that one, but doing the character design lettering and stuff was a lot of fun again. Advent, for whatever reason, didn't do as well as Warbreed had for Ben, but it still did well. But Ben would again pull the title out for some reason.
But though I was lettering those with my best ability, my focus was mainly on Wannabez, which is what Scott and I decided to enter. On all three of these, I pushed promotion as much as I could, and it helped tremendously. Wannabez really started to take off, and everybody loved the concept. We made it to the third round, which meant we got to be published in the Mysterious Visions anthology, but we did not advance onto round 4. That year they started implementing something called the Judges' Veto, which also allowed them to save projects. Wannabez was a victim of another project being saved from what I recall. I'm not a fan of the veto process and thinks it devalues the voting process, but who am I?
But what we got out of that contest was a ton of exposure and something we never had before - a printed comic! Scott bought some copies of it and we moved a few at WW Chicago, just walking around.
We were excited after that as the feedback we were getting on the book was all positive. We had sent out a PDF and gotten some cool reviews and interviews out of it. So we were jazzed and wanted to try selling these for real, at a con. That con would be Mid-Ohio-Con 2008 after all the dust settled.
We tried to order more from Ian Shires of Dimestore Productions (the host of Small Press Idol) to take to MOC last year, but he didn't even answer our email until the night before. By that time we had already made arrangements to print the story ourselves with added content and make it our official #0 issue. This is where the Gonzogoose Productions label was born as we didn't have a publisher, so I became one of sorts.
I went on to letter another project or two in Small Press Idol in 2008, and even designed the new logo for it (shown above), but after that lost interest in the contest. Though Haven is carrying the four round 4 projects from this year's contest.
So Wannabez #0 was now in print, and we were about to hit our first con setting up as creators.
-B
Past Columns - Start the Journey at the beginning! Click here to check out all the past Journey of a Wannabe columns.
Brant W. Fowler / Writer, Letter, Creator, Reviewer, Columnist and Comic Related PR Coordinator
Brant W. Fowler has been a professional comic book letterer and logo designer for three years, and has been a freelance editor for the past five years. He has also worked with graphic design, writing and many other area of skills for several years honing his talents. You can learn all about what he's up to by visiting Gonzogoose
Design. Brant is also a member of the core
operations team at Comic Related.
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