2012 Zac gorman: online comic artist

6/6/12 Bill Fischer

BIO:

Zac graduated from Kendall in 2006, worked as a Graphic designer for a couple of years then started free-lancing. Recently, he has built a large following for his comic Magicalgametime.com. The majority of his income is now from merchandise sales... posters and shirts based on his comics.

Zac's work has been working mainly in the fan-art genre which has been a great way to build audience. He is now leveraging his own fan-base to introduce some original concepts into the mix.
Focusing his content on game culture (often auto-biographical) he has tapped into a large and passionate audience.
He developed his product partly by paying attention to comments on his blogs, merchandise sales and reposts of his work. But he also stays genuine to his own gaming experiences and fandom.
He was an early adopter of Tumblr and his website/blog is actually a Tumblr site.
His work has been popular on Reddit, although he does not participate in that.
He also started integrating animated gifs near the beginning of that trend.
Thru networking (primarily on Twitter) he has met people that have helped him at conventions, reposting his comics, and merchandise order fulfillment.
He met the people at fangamer.com and they set up their first dedicated artist's storefront using him as a test case.
He has found more success selling posters... shirts are harder to sell due to their overwhelming quantity and variety available on-line.

This list hints that Zac had some kind of grand scheme... a business plan... but I think it is more accurate to say that he just paid attention to new tools and trends as they appeared and leveraged them in ways that made sense for his art, helped him get his work out there and meet people that shared his interests. More organic then planned.

Zac also does some contract work:

Magazine illustration
Comic book production
Band posters (many times through event promotors)(he resells some of these in his store and is looking into gigposters.com)
Story boards for advertising agencies

Zac works in Photoshop (cs3) and has recently been breaking out the pens and paints to mix things up a bit. He puts the gif animations together using Photoshop's frame by frame animation timeline.

Zac's recipe for success:

- Be nice

- Post often

- Keep developing your product

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