Updates on Bombshell and James' Health
I’d like to give everybody a quick update on where Hero Universe is at with our current slate of titles, which, unfortunately, requires me to give a bit of an update on my personal health.
As many of you may know (since I mentioned it in the last newsletter, and on Facebook), I was pretty ill the weekend of Chicago Comic Con this year, which was just over a month ago. I had to be taken to an ER, where they diagnosed me with dangerously low sodium levels due to drinking too much water in the hot weather without taking in enough electrolytes. They gave me some dietary advice (and a couple bags of saline while I was there), and for a couple of weeks after, everything seemed fine. Then I started to feel the same symptoms I had leading up to Chicago, even though I was following the doctors’ advice about getting enough electrolytes and sodium in my diet. It turns out that what the doctors I saw back in August failed to mention was that getting dehydrated in the way I did can lead to certain types of bacterial infections, which is what I ended up with.
Long story short, I ended up at an urgent care facility, and then my doctor’s office, and then a specialist’s office. I’ve been on antibiotics for the past couple of weeks, and I seem to be slowly but surely improving my health, but it’s a long road. These types of infections take on average 4-12 weeks to fully heal, and it’s not uncommon for them to last as long as 6 months (the specialist I saw told me he had a patient once who was on antibiotics for almost 20 years, because every time he stopped taking them, the infection came back. I’m hoping that’s not where I’m headed).
So, what does this have to do with Bombshell and our other books? HU is a small operation, and is mostly funded out-of-pocket by me personally. Due to how ill I was with the infection, I missed over a week of work at my day job, and even now have only been working half shifts for the last week or so. I’ve missed much more work than my allotted sick days will cover. Basically, I haven’t been able to earn an income, but I have had health care bills starting to pile up (I don’t care about anyone’s politics, if we had universal health care in this country, I wouldn’t have to worry about that right now).
The sad reality is, I don’t have the liquid funds at the moment to finish Bombshell, print copies, promote the book, etc. The book is painfully close to being done. All that’s really left is getting the covers colored and polishing off the back-up features for the third issue. I’d planned on having all of that done a couple weeks ago, but once I got sick and started getting doctor’s bills, I had to cancel plans to find a cover colorist (I’d also been working on a budget plan to get some coloring help for the next few issues of Victors, but that also has to be put on hold). Worse, I’ve been so fatigued the last few weeks due to the infection that I haven’t even been able to finish up the back-up features for the final issue of the series (I’d gotten the features pages done for issues 1 and 2 before my health took a turn for the worse).
So, that’s where we’re at. Instead of Bombshell being done in time to get it out to our readers by the end of the year, it looks like we’ll be launching that book early next year, at best. Victors is, unfortunately, also on hold until my health and/or our budget improve. I wish I had better news to share, but I thought I should let our loyal fans (and people who signed up for the mailing list without realizing it) know what was going on, and why it’s taking so long for us to make good on our release promises.
Hopefully, our next newsletter will contain some more positive news.
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