The Lonely Spaceman

I want to write a short series of postsabout the new comic series I find myself working on. I hope this willprove interesting to someone other than me. Today's installment ispretty much just setting the stage and introducing the players.
Two, maybe three years ago, I stood onthe stage at a Salem Ignite event and I told the audience how much Iloved the Internet as a method of distributing... well, everything. Iconcentrated on comics and I closed with the promise that the nextcomics project I did would be published to the web.
It looks like I'm keeping that promise. I just didn't expect it to take thislong.
I made several half-hearted attempts atgetting a web comic up and running, but there were a couple of thingsthat slowed down the process. The first is that a lot of people stillsee working in web comics as less prestigious than working in printcomics. The second is that not a lot of artists want to work for nomoney up front with no guarantee of money on the back end. And, once I put it in those terms, it's not hard to see why they aren't beating down my door to work on such a project. I woulddefinitely need to find just the right artist for this.
About that: It always helps to knowpeople. In this case it helped a great deal to know Devon Devereaux.Devon is sort of a nexus of cool people (Malcolm Gladwell would call him a "maven") and when I told him that Iwanted to work on a web comic, he immediately thought of someone Ishould contact – his buddy, Matthew Hope. Matt is a designer and hedoes illustrations for concert posters and other things. Devon sentme the link to his web site, Poor Man's Bread, and after pokingaround for just a minute, I knew I wanted to work with Matt. And Iknow on which project I wanted us to join forces. A lot of Matt'swork has a SF feel to it and I've had a SF idea kicking around forseveral years. One piece in particular caught my eye and it's the piece that starts this blog entry. Often when I contact an artist about working together,I send them several ideas and let them choose which one most appealsto them. This time I sent just one idea: The Lonely Spaceman.
Next: What is The Lonely Spaceman?