By Zack Quaintance — Today I want to talk about the preview we assembled for our Kickstarter campaign for Next Door. That is, the set of completed pages we’ve been using to stoke interest in the book. We went with four specific pages that constitute one scene. You can find those pages in the gallery below, ordered as they appear in our forthcoming comic…

A natural question with these pages is, perhaps, why did we pick these? We have a book that is more crime comic than anything else, and, as such, there are beatings and gunshots and a good deal of chaos. Any of those things may have fit the more traditional sense of what a comics preview should have been. A splash page of a character firing a gun may have also pulled in more readers.

But as I talked about yesterday, we wanted our campaign page to present as pure an idea of what our book is about as possible, hinting at the darkness and action that erupts through the things that are more central to our book: relatable dynamics, shared domestic challenges, and the general tone of the story — ominous doom hanging over domesticity.

Personally, I also thought these particular pages gave our incredible artists (Pat Skott and Ellie Wright) a chance to show off the vast visual storytelling skills they are putting on display throughout the entirety of this comic. Our preview is a conversation that ends with some heavy foreshadowing, and yet the art is incredible, making evident the tense relationship dynamics at work between our central characters as they discuss the coming choices that will incite our plot. This allowed me to revise dialogue in such a way that made it entirely additive, having to do little work in proscriptive plot development. It gave me a chance to develop character through word choice, because I didn’t have to have them say things like, “We’ve been having this conversation forever and it’s so frustrating to me!” That all came through in facial expressions, body language, and the warm tones Ellie colored with.

I love it, which brings me to…

ACTIONABLE KICKSTARTER COMICS TIP: Pick the preview pages you like the most. It may fly in the face of effective marketing stratagems (a theme of this blog and project!), but if like me you’re crowdfunding more out of passion than out of financial interest, you’ll do a better job of capturing an audience that will appreciate what you’re trying to do.

Join us back with this blog again tomorrow for the next interview with a member of our creative team!

Back Next Door on Kickstarter 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.