Can I ask admins and good, helpful people for reply or to contact me? - GC Forums
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Can I ask admins and good, helpful people for reply or to contact me?
Good evening.
I visited comic con last week and had a good chat with one creator who is publishing his works here. He advised me that GlobalComix is a good place for beginners to self publish their first piece of art.
The opportunity to create a comic was unexpected to me, but we already made quite a lot of work for our history-fantasy story. The big part of scenario is ready, so we can start producing as quick as secure money big enough to pay the graphic artist we will cooperate with.
The problem we face is lack of big enough sum to pay him today. That's why we need some support from outside and we wish to ask good people to support as as soon as the artist prepares concept images, so we can present a little teaser of our work. Or even full 1st chapter as that should be still affordable for our current financial condition.
What we want to ask about:
- How to organize fundraising to avoid any possible legal troubles
- Do we need to register as company if we want to seek for support from outside
- Can we seek for support in other places at the same time. For expample GlobalComix and kickstarter at once, or we have to stay in one place.
- Is it legal to accept support from fundraising and from city council, if the one would be interested to help.
I ask about it all because I don't want to make any silly mistake that will end with account here being closed or even worse legal troubles. I live in the UK, so I'm asking about British perspective.
Thank you very much and have a good evening.
I'm not entirely sure of the British legalities to be completely honest before I say anything else. I think Neil Gibson of Neil's Twisted Comics could be a valuable resource to you. He's also from the UK and runs a publisher. He also has a discord where folks are welcome to ask questions like this. Neil also regularly runs kickstarters, so he'd also be very helpful on how all of that works in the UK system.
Here's his Twitter page if you'd like to send him a DM or ask him for some help: https://x.com/TwistedNeil
Outside of that, I know a lot of folks utilize crowdfunding to raise money for a comic, however, typically, you'll have a small amount of pages drawn in advance to be able to use in your campaign. So you might want to look into paying for a handful of pages to give the viewers something to use as a "If I give my money to these guys, this is what I can expect in return". Being able to fulfil campaigns that you offer is very important and so asking others, in general, who have done campaigns in the past for advice on what pitfalls to look out for in campaigning is pretty critical. So do your research on that as well, though I'm sure you already know that part.
Pat Shand and Charlie Stickney (both very active on twitter) often have streams, twitter threads, and more talking about campaigning, so they could also be very valuable resources to you. I might also look into an IP lawyer or financial advisor specializing in UK laws both might be helpful to talk to to understand the financial implications of working with someone overseas (if your creator in questions isn't from the UK).
For example, I do freelance work for a company in Japan. I have to pay a tax to Japan because I'm a freelancer and then pay my US taxes as well! I lose about 53% of that income, which really affects how much they have to pay me to keep working for them. So depending on your artist's situation, there might be other snags you need to be aware of financially.
Hope this helps and gives you some places to start. Good luck with it all!
Thank you for answer and mentioning few new people. I'm completely new in the world of comic and still don't know many basic things.
Definitely we'll do as you said and create some of the work (either a samples of our images or one full chapter) by ourselves to do not ask anyone for support without presenting how it is going to look like.
We could finance all of our comic for our own money, but it's way to big for us to afford it. Sooner or later we will be dependant on outside support. We wish it to quickly become popular, so income from selling our work would be good enough, but we can't be sure about it. We know the beginning will be tough.
Thank you again for your comment!