Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1203639
12 KEYFRAME The world of ROADQUEEN: Eternal Road Trip to Love, a romantic comedy manga by Adventure Time: Distant Lands Storyboard Director Mira Ong Chua, is fast and furious. Leo is the most popular girl in school who would rather spend time with her beloved motorcycle Bethany than with any of her many admirers. But when Bethany gets taken hostage, Leo has no choice but to accept the kidnapper's strange demand—prove she can be a good girlfriend or lose Bethany forever. What follows is a riff on western rom- com and Japanese manga tropes tied together with a charming sense of humor and genuine emotional heft, creating a package that's remarkably specific in its focus, which Chua believes contributed to the book's massive success on Kickstarter in 2018. ROADQUEEN surpassed its $5,500 funding goal in the first hour and raised more than $70k by the time it closed. "I wasn't trying to pretend it was anything other than what it was," says Chua. "I was promoting it under the guise that it would only appeal to just a few people but I think the more specific you are, somehow that taps into more people than if you just try to appeal to everyone." Chua started ROADQUEEN as a personal challenge while working as a board artist and writer for OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes. "I was working in animation for so long that I wanted to do something outside what I would be able to do in that medium," she says. "I mostly wanted to try drawing bikes." When asked why, she laughs: "They're just hard to draw." Something as simple as a challenge to draw a new object was coupled with another incentive: "I had tied in this love story with girls that I wanted to draw so it wasn't completely a slog. A fun part of making comics is making those incentives for myself." Chua got right to work on ROADQUEEN, writing and drawing the entire graphic novel in six months, describing her home office as a cave she could withdraw into without being disturbed by the outside world. This passion had produced something she was proud of, but Chua wasn't sure how to share such a personal project with the outside world. It was fellow writer and TAG member Taneka Stotts who suggested Kickstarter as a possible venue because it allows creators to find an audience for their most personal works, but it turns out that running a Kickstarter takes just as much time as making the book itself. Another six months were invested into the 30-day Kickstarter campaign with the bulk of that time in preproduction, creating the exclusive rewards that draw attention like stickers and pins. If all that wasn't enough, the next step was self-promotion, which never comes easy for introverted artists. Her advice is straightforward and direct: "Be yourself is so trite that I don't want to say it, but I think more so be confident in the things you like and the things you want to make. And don't devalue yourself either…for people to believe that the work has value, you have to believe it yourself as well." Self-promotion can be an exhausting process, but Chua says that "it did get a little easier. I realized I had to talk about this thing, and there was no way to talk about it without being truthful to what it was, so there wasn't any room for me to be embarrassed by that point." Posting sketches and jokes every day laid the groundwork for the campaign, raising awareness as well as providing an opportunity to preview the tone, style, and themes of ROADQUEEN to her prospective audience. "I thought I'd be fortunate to hit the goal, but we far exceeded [it], which was amazing," she says. Now ROADQUEEN is out after getting published by Seventh Seas Publishing for retail, and Chua makes a point to retweet and reshare photos fans send her of the book. After packaging and shipping out the books herself, it's exciting to see fans from all over the world receiving their copies. "If they're taking the time out of their day to send [a photo to me], and say 'Look! I got it!' that's really sweet and I want to acknowledge that," says Chua. — Rusteen Honardoost HOW STORYBOARD DIRECTOR MIRA ONG CHUA TURNED A PERSONAL CHALLENGE INTO A KICKSTARTER SUCCESS KICKSTART MY HEART F R A M E X F R A M E