>>731638[3/3]
I also have to add that I signed with this company because they were publishing a few major IPs I had heard of, so I thought it would be a good place for my comic-and I would be able to focus only on making the pages while they did all the marketing and book design stuff-if only!
Anyways. after I kept asking how much money I was owed and getting no response, the publisher started being a dick to me and said he would bury the book and take it off the website when I asked for the rights back.
He sent smug asshole emails basically laughing at me. At this point I decided to fight back.
Remember my shitty university I went to? Another perk was because it was such a garbage school, it was easy to become the elected student Union vice president of the art department. After I graduated university, I was VP of art for a year and I had to go to a bunch of student union conferences meeting other student unions.
I threatened the publisher that I would use my connections to tell every single art student union and art department in the country to warn away their students from ever working with this publisher because how he treated me and my work. I said I would go to every school nearby and make speeches warning students about working with shady publishers. It was a complete bluff but it worked. Finally after 2 years the asshole publisher agreed to sell me the full rights of Oi back for $200. It was alot but I agreed.
At this point when I got the rights back, it was 3 years since I last worked on Oi, and I was mainly doing normie cat comics and coloring books. The characters in Oi always stuck with me, and I thought about their story all the time, but because other projects were in the way, it was 5 years and late 2019 before I started drawing new oi pages again-the winter solstice issue, and I've been working on it as my primary project ever since.
My final warning-beware of these shady publishers-many are assholes who don't care about screwing artists over.
