AMA: EiAD's effect on Evil Inc

Q.: How much do the Evil Inc After Dark scenes (or the possibility of them) drive the plot of the main series?

A.: Surprisingly, not much at all! Evil Inc is very story based. To make the story work, I need to stay focused on a general path. I know this from experience. Many of the Greystone Inn stories — and a fair amount of the pre-reboot Evil Inc storytelling — meandered all over the place.

My writing credo back then was "when you come to a fork in the road... take it." To be honest, when you're writing a comic strip, that's not a bad game plan. When you're filling 52 weeks a year, five strips at a time, you kinda need to meander! But writing graphic novels requires a little more focus.

So Evil Inc follows a path. However, over the past several chapters, I've really tried to generate more EiAD tie-ins to the central story. I'm doing this for a number of reasons. First off, it allows me to provide extra incentive for readers to join us on Patreon. I'll often place a tag at the end of an Evil Inc page that continues in EiAD. That is an extra way of indicating how the EI/EiAD relationship works to a newer reader.

Secondly, for the next publishing run, I'm leaning heavily towards printing an Evil Inc collection and a second version of that book that incorporates the corresponding EiAD content. In my mind, the After Dark edition would be one, big (mostly) seamless reading experience. Some of the commissions could possibly be incorporated as well!

My biggest problem has been working out the branding. Both books need to indicate that they feature the same core content, but they need to have different titles and cover art so someone doesn't buy the NSFW version by mistake on Amazon!

With that in mind, I've added a new step to my writing process. After I plot out the next chapter, I go back and make notes where the potential EiAD crossovers could occur.

You may remember I offered two versions of the eComic that collected the previous chapter. There was an Evil Inc version...

... and an After Dark version...

That was as much for me as it was for you. I wanted a real-world trial in which Isaw how those storylines meshed together. Overall, I was pretty happy with the results.

So... there's a definite relationship between EI and EiAD, but it doesn't affect the EI story.

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