“Silent conversations” and a message from Dern

by Dern on September 15, 2010 at 12:00 am

So our adventure begins with an important message from the ninja clan – but I suck at charades. Personally, I don’t even like charades. I always find myself wondering why they don’t just write whatever it is they need to say down… I mean, isn’t that what writing is for? Besides, they just remind me too much of what a mime does – and I absolutely loathe mimes.

I do kick ass at Pictionary, though.
. . .

In case you didn’t know, a few months ago we joined forces with Mr. Dern (from Hello with Cheese) and he became something like our “marketing director”. Perhaps calling him my manager would be more accurate. I like to think of him as my pimp. Anyway, his job is basically sit down and figure out ways to make it so that COMMISSIONED here turns into a profitable venture for me so that I can take on the job of making webcomics full time and not have to worry about anything else.

Needless to say, I wish him the best of luck in this endeavor.

So today he has a message for you all, regarding his latest idea. I urge you all to give it a read and some consideration, because from your feedback we’ll both be planning out how things will go here for a while. Please keep in mind that the purpose here is to gather info and maybe even get ideas from you all, so feel free to comment and give any suggestions you might have.

And so, I leave you in the company of Dern.

Dern here.
Since I became the “marketing guy” for COMMISSIONED, I’ve had one riddle to figure out: How to turn Obsidian into a full-time artist.
A lot of this has been focused on just increasing his merchandise’s availability (like the new shirt up for preorder this week). It’s also helping arrange for him to come to shows in 2011 so that he can meet the Abnormals face-to-face (or face-to-whatever Obsidian is pushing into your face).
And after this past weekend at Intervention, I started to put together a big idea: The COMMISSIONED Ninja Clan.

What’s the CNC? Simply put, it would be a deluxe membership level onto the site. Honestly, I’ve never been a fan of straight-up memberships for comics, or a normally free comic suddenly going into a subscription model. So I want to make sure that you know this – the CNC will be different. First, I don’t want there to be a single change to the normal COMMISSIONED Comic experience. This includes the comic that updates three days a week, the rant-tastic blog posts from Obsidian, the conversations in the comments sections, the Audiorant – we won’t be changing ANY of this (except for that whole Obsidian forgetting to update the Audiorant. We’ll fix that).
Second, membership should not be just donated money. I’m stealling this idea from some other comics, but it’s brilliant – every dollar spent on membership will become store credit for COMMISSIONED merchandise.

So, what would membership into the CNC get you? We’re still ironing out the details, but these are the initial ideas:

- A Digital background every month.

-sketches and behind the scenes notes for the comic

-mini-rants (but only if we’re up-to-date on Audiorant updates first)

-video features of Obsidian working on the comic about once every two weeks

-the ability to view the comic’s art at a larger size.

And two very special, hard to bullet-point items:

-The COMMISSIONED Party. Depending on the success of this project, we should be able to get Obsidian to a LOT more conventions, starting in 2011. Each year, we’d like to pick out a special convention and hold a membership appreciation party. Being a Ninja would grant you an invitation to the party.

-Access to a special COMMISSIONED store: the Black Market. This will be a place to buy things that are very limited, like special editions of shirts, sketch-cover comics, paintings, and for the first time ever – the original art from COMMISSIONED.

So what would this cost? I’ve done some research into this. A rate of $3 (US)/month is not too high, and is about as low as we can make it where the transaction fees don’t wipe out the cash. We’d also be offering a rate of $30/year. However, this is also something that’s going to take a lot of work to set up. There’s a lot of coding to do, and some artwork that would need to be shipped stateside. Also, I’d like to know what you think of this, and if there’s anything we could do to make it better. So please take a second to vote in this poll and comment on it.

Will you join the Commissioned Ninja Clan?

  • Yes, this is awesome, and I demand all things to be awesome! (33%, 229 Votes)
  • Narwhals. (24%, 164 Votes)
  • No thanks, I'm OK not being a ninja. (24%, 162 Votes)
  • I was told there would be cake? (14%, 98 Votes)
  • Yes, but only if you add this one thing (see my comment for what that one thing is). (5%, 32 Votes)

Total Voters: 685

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