I've been working on KYUSS for a while, and I reaching a point where I need to start communicating with an artist, a colorist, and letterer about hiring them, the project timeline, and my expectations of the project. For KYUSS specifically, that means discussing where I plan to submit this project and the possibility of going through Kickstarter.

I've also been thinking of my other concepts and projects I would love to work on post-KYUSS. However, there's a stark, limiting reality to all of this, which connects all of these thoughts together.

All of this requires money. And, despite practicing responsible spending and saving money every month, my funds are still tight. (There's a lot to be said and discuss about the current economic state of the U.S. and the world, but this isn't that kind of blog.) Plus there are future expenses I'm anticipating that I have to save for, cutting my budget for hiring collaborators even further.

So where do I get the funds from? I have options:

I could look for expenses to cut from my life, and save a little more each month. This method is slow, taking possibly years before I can afford to have KYUSS made. When I had my comic "Mental Cases" illustrated, I paid for it with money saved over a lifetime. Literally.

I could take out a personal loan. The money would be mine instantly. However, I'd have to pay it back over several years WITH INTEREST. So, in truth, I'd be paying more for KYUSS in the long run. Plus, I don't think having a large outstanding loan will make it easier to buy a house with my wife.

And then there's Kickstarter, which I mentioned before. And I mentioned it before, because that's the option I'm leaning towards. Kickstarter comes with the added bonus of being not only a mechanism for acquiring the needed funds, but also a publicity vehicle for spreading the word about KYUSS. It's a link I can share with others, that they can then share with even more people. People would be able to find it on the Kickstarter page while they're browsing objects to support.

However, the crux of Kickstarter is you only get the money if you reach an established funding goal. It's all or nothing. And Kickstarter takes its cut too. Plus, I need to consider the relationship between the funding goal I'd need to set and the amount of money I believe my name value and network could generate. I'm an amateur, pretty unknown talent, so it would be an uphill fight if I set a high funding goal for a large project. But if I broke up KYUSS into several smaller chapters, each with smaller funding goals, I could build off the (hypothetical) success of the preceding chapters to get later chapters funded more quickly.

If it works, of course.

But in any case, each of these options would be worth it because I believe in what I'm creating. When I paid for "Mental Cases", I did so with pride. In one way or another, I thought to myself, this investment will repay itself, financially or otherwise. KYUSS will be no different.