By Zack Quaintance — One of the questions I’m being asked the most as I promote this campaign is how did our team of four creators come together. And, I must admit, before I started making this comic, that was the question I found myself asking other creators on Kickstarter most frequently. So, in today’s behind-the-scenes blog, I’m going to tell you how our team came together to make Next Door, and then I’m going to tell you what I think the underlying secret was to me (a writer who can’t draw) finding such talented collaborators.

As I’ll likely detail in a different entry, Next Door began as a 5-page short made by just myself and artist Pat Skott. Pat and I knew each other, essentially, from Twitter. We’d interacted around the comics content I post through Comics Bookcase, and the work-in-progress he posts of his art. When the quarantine began, we decided to use our time to work on a project together, with really the only guiding interest being that he told me he wanted some practice illustrating domesticity, with much of his work to date having been fantastical.

Colorist Ellie Wright became involved with the project after we decided we wanted to expand the book to an extra-sized one-shot. Pat and I both made a list of colorists whose work we thought would best fit his linework on the project, specifically with an eye toward capturing both warmth and impending doom. Ellie was at the top of both our lists, without us first consulting. What was especially nice was that after we reached out to her and she saw Pat’s linework, she was immediately taken with it, which I think validated our mutual assessments that we’d found a great fit.

Finally, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou is my favorite letterer working today, and if you want to see why, I think you look no further than a pair of recent books he lettered: Peter Cannon - Thunderbolt and Black Stars Above, both of which are absolute masterclasses in lettering. Moreover, I think Hassan’s immense knowledge/command of comics craft (as evidenced by his phenomenal YouTube series Strip Panel Naked) means he knows exactly how to lead readers’ eyes through the work as well as when to experiment and take risks. I simply reached out to Hassan and asked if he was free, and could I please hire him.

TODAY’S KICKSTARTER COMICS TIP: That all brings me to today’s actionable Kickstarter comics tip…which I think is to be a good comics citizen. This being “a good citizen” within the arts, so to speak, is a concept I first learned at the Tin House Summer Writing Workshop, wherein the editor of arguably the prestigious literary journal to start up over the past three decades explained it as giving back as much (if not more) to your chosen artform as you take in.

For me in comics this has meant running this website, which is something I do with a tiny bit of out-of-pocket money and a lot of dedicated time. I try to contribute everyday (both on this site and on Twitter) to ultimately making comics a better place, be it through turning readers on to new books, contributing to productive discourse, or giving new writers a platform to express themselves about comics in ways that feel more meaningful than a Tweet. As a personal benefit, that puts me in a position to be friends with an artist as talented as Pat, to know the work of unbelievable colorists like Ellie, and to understand how lucky we’d be to work with someone as knowledgeable as Hassan.

So, that’s today’s tip…be a good comics citizen. If you’re working hard to give back to comics in ways the lift up others, yourself, and the industry, you’ll be an infinitely better place to put together a team to help you make comics. Alternately, you could be independently wealthy, which hey, if that’s you, more power to you.

Tomorrow’s blog topic extreme exhaustion.

You can browse and potentially back the Next Door: Neo-Noir Comic One-Shot now!

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.