I didn’t draw an Animus Wars strip this weekend and it’s unlikely that I will draw more Animus Wars strips in the future. It seems like a sudden decision, but I think it’s the right call.
It’s been half a year and I’m barely through a third of the movie. In theory, that means I’d need another year and a half to get through the story. That’s the realization I came to this weekend and I was left asking myself if I wanted to work on this one project for that long.
There’s only so much time I can dedicate to the site. I want to maximize my time investment and sadly Animus Wars is a product of limited return for such a big investment of time. It’s the product that I’d have the most trouble marketing given that it’s a Star Wars parody.
Scott Kurtz over at PVP once said something to the effect that he feels that the time people spend riffing off of other people’s material would be better spent working on their own material. I’m beginning to see the truth of that statement.
Working on Animus Wars has been keeping me from doing my FnF crossover, because I don’t feel I can draw more than three strips a week and have time to work on my writing. Honestly, I barely get any writing done as it is.
And then, there’s the sad fact that Animus Wars isn’t proving to be as fun as I thought it would be when I started. I didn’t think it through. There were one or two little gags that really got me jazzed about the project and I haven’t even reached them yet.
I won’t say that the work I put into the project was a total loss. Every page I draw is a learning experience as I try to figure out the best way to lay things out on a page. I also got to draw some different things I wouldn’t have tried in a normal Funnies strip. And I do like really like some of the stuff I did so far. My only regret is that I was so slow in realizing that it wasn’t such a good idea after all.
So that’s it. No more Animus Wars. Sorry. Unless you pay me. Twenty bucks a page. 😉