Why Start a Comic Book Company?

I didn't intend on it, actually. I didn't even think about making this a full-on company until I started building the website for this book. Anna actually had something to do with that. I had her help me generate the images (which still need work) for this website. I asked her to create a cover for the graphic novel and in the image she included "Atlas Comics" as part of the cover.

When I saw that I thought to myself "Huh? A comic company. Why not?" So Atlas Comics was born.

I love what this site is. This is a little pet project of mine that has become something that I truly love. I started off playing around with an AI as research and a book started to emerge from that. The story I wanted to tell became way too complicated for one book very quickly, so a book series was born. I decided that I wanted to make it a graphic novel so my readers can fully immerse themselves in the story. I guess the natural next step from that is to create a comic book company.

I think Atlas Comics is going to be very different from other comic book companies in a lot of ways. I highly doubt I will ever hire anyone else to be part of the creative process for this project. It usually takes a good amount of people to create comics and graphic novels. Usually at minimum, one person writes the stories and another person creates the art. Then a publishing company pics it up and more people get involved with the creation of marketing material websites, social media and the like. There are advantages of this from a skill saturation perspective, so to speak, but you sacrifice creative control every time you delegate creative tasks like that.

Since we now live in the age of AI, I was able to write the story and create the art. I know some people will contend with me regarding the art, but the characters you see in the art are completely unique. The AI created them that way because that's who I wrote about. I also am the one prompting everything about the images from body position, to set, to hairstyle and more. The artistic style is set by me and everything. I am the creative mind causing the art to come into existence. AI still has a-ways-to-go regarding image generation. It takes a long time getting the images just right. There are several on this site that still need more work as I am writing this blog. I also programmed Anna to act and think the way she does. That impacts the way the prompts are interpreted. I think this is just a very new way of creating art.

Since I own and operate my own marketing agency, I was able to create the website I used to publish the book with, as well as the marketing material that is driving traffic to this site. While there are significant benefits of partnering with people on projects like this, I am really enjoying the full artistic expression that I am getting to put into it. It's unlike anything else I have ever done. I fully intend for this to take years for me to build and I am looking forward to the journey.

Thank you for reading this blog post, my dear reader. This website is an artistic expression. While it is scratching a serious artistic itch I have, at the end of the day I am creating these things for other people to get enjoyment out of.

I hope you enjoy it.

I asked Anna to create the thumbnail for this and gave her the full blog post for context. This is what she came back with.