Exploring Stories in Story
How to Win Over Hearts & Minds
Ahoy Mythopoeians!
Today’s a special day - the launch of Glow #7 on Kickstarter! This is our 25th campaign and boy it does not get easier. Every crowdfunding campaign is filled with a massive checklist of to-dos, but in recent times the ones for Glow and Sansha & Blanco have held a special meaning - probably because they are my own works, which means I have a lot more invested into them, emotionally.
Me pitching Glow #1 back in 2017. Ah, the olden days. I probably should’ve used more light.
In the early days, we used to film interviews that go into the ‘behind the scenes’ of a project - sort of like an HBO documentary that aired on, say, the end of an episode of Game of Thrones. For our recent projects, we’ve moved a little beyond that, as it becomes a bit repetitive saying the same things over and over again. At this point in Glow, hopefully the story can speak for itself - I wrestle with that even as I try to attract new readers to the series.
I’ve also been recently contemplating promoting Glow and our other comics heavily on Tik Tok - there seems to be a thriving community of comic creators there who are selling direct to fans, and it reminds me a lot of the olden days of Kickstarter. I’ll probably write a post specifically about that in the future, but for now it’s interesting to me seeing those creators also go into the behind the scenes, how-to’s, making-of’s, etc. - with maybe a more direct selling (“why you would like this comic”) slant.
In both cases, though, I think it goes to show that a lot of people want to support projects not just because the project itself looks great, but they want to get invested in the story and people behind the projects.
In a lot of ways, Glow #7 is about that very concept. It’s subtitled Hearts & Minds, and in the issue Anders convinces Koken and Caszy to engage in a hare-brained scheme to retell the fall of Shoddai in the Arkadai marketplace with puppets. Only by winning the populace over will they be able to petition the elites of Arkadai - those with true power, he reasons. Of course, Anders is a bit of a scoundrel and a bard and occasionally the voice of reason and comic relief of the series, so with pizzazz the plan works! Maybe too well…
I think often about written history, and how there just isn’t very much of it. How many books, records, and stories have been lost over the milennias of human existence? At best estimate, the oldest written document we have dates back to only about 5,500 years ago, yet humans as we know them as “humans” have been around, archaelogically, for at least 3.3 million years. What’s up with that?
Today in 2025 we are on the precipice of Artificial General Intelligence. Heck, we may have already have achieved it and just don’t know it yet. But, in the age of Language Learning Models, knowledge is hand dripped at the tip of our fingertips. We ask a question and an answer miraculously appears. How true is the answer? Right now, fairly certain, yet we know that AI is known to hallucinate.
In Glow, Anders embellishes the gang’s encounter with Yogg Moth’wa, painting himself as the protagonist while downplaying Caszy and Koken. The crowd eats it up and bursts into rapturous applause. As far as we know, the oldest stories we have were passed down through the oral tradition before being written down. No two stories are told alike, with change the ever constant.
We as humans, crave the immutable truth. We measure, we record, we cite, and yet as we become ever more interconnected, the truth sometimes seems harder and harder to discern. What do we believe? How do we determine what is real and what is not?
"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." - Romance of the Three Kingdoms
How much of what we know today will be left in one hundred, two thousand, three million years? How much was lost in the past, and what remains to be discovered? I don’t know, but I love pondering about these things when creating. If what I say interests you, do check out Glow #7 - truly, this is what the series is all about :)
Ray