self-publishing
Check out the latest round of Xeric winners
We all seem to have missed this, but The Comics Reporter caught it: This year’s Xeric Grant winners were announced a little while ago. And they are…
- Nick Maandag for Streakers (possibly NSFW)
- Melissa Mendes for Freddy Stories
- John Martz for Heaven All Day
- Kevin Mutch for Fantastic Life
- Brendan Leach for The Pterodactyl Hunters (in the Guilded City)
- Steve LeCouilliard for Much the Miller’s Son
- Benjamin Rivers for Snow
Established by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Peter Laird, the Xeric Foundation gives grants to comics creators to finance self-publishing their work. Previous winners include Adrian Tomine, Megan Kelso, Jessica Abel, Linda Medley, James Sturm, Jim Ottaviani, Nick Bertozzi, Jeff Lemire, and Gene Yang, which suggests that the judges do a pretty good job of picking grant recipients.
Dylan Meconis on how she funded Family Man
Cartoonists don’t usually pop up on money blogs, but at American Express’s Currency site, Douglas Wolk talks to Dylan Meconis about how she financed the print edition of her webcomic Family Man. Basically, she says, “I asked the internet very nicely,” and her fans ponied up $11,000 to cover costs. Meconis explains why she didn’t use Kickstarter, and delves into nuts-and-bolts issues like health insurance, her next big purchase, and her other work:
What’s the biggest misconception people have about cartoonists’ finances? I’m sure some people think that we’re all just rolling in that sweet Internet money. But there’s a lot of background work that you don’t get to see as a fan, because it’s just freelance engagements: a lot of commercial illustration, a lot of educational comics and corporate comics, to explain a new business process or do a training manual or something. A lot of companies want that cool graphic-novel feel—to keep people awake during a PowerPoint.
John Allison comes out swinging with his Indie Comics Manifesto
Scary Go Round, Bad Machinery, and Giant Days webcomics impresario John Allison is throwing down the gauntlet. In his “Manifesto for UK Indie Comics in 2010″, the cartoonist offers some very blunt advice for aspiring comics creators, on everything from content to format to fandom to your personal demeanor as a creator. As is the case with most comics manifestos, there’s stuff in it I applaud, stuff in it that’s somewhere between a nasty rude awakening and a much-needed kick in the pants, and stuff that makes my skin crawl.
For example, I am generally speaking a diary-comics skeptic, and thus point #7, “Diary comics: stop it,” strikes me as advice potentially worth heeding, especially for new cartoonists looking for a way to channel their energies. On the other hand, point #3, “Make comics for people who don’t make comics,” though it sounds like a good enough idea, basically writes off vast swathes of the medium’s best work:
Why is anyone other than your comic making friends and a few select interested parties going to read an art-damaged visual tone-poem about the inside of your psyche? Learn how to engage and entertain people. It’s a profoundly useful skill.
Comics economics
Marc Bernabe has posted a short video of Japanese creator Shuho Sato discussing (with subtitles) why he chose to publish his comics online. That may not seem like much of a jump to American readers, but as Bernabe explains in the accompanying blog post, manga creators don’t routinely include digital rights in their publishing contracts, so they can cut a deal for digital distribution that leaves the original publisher out of the loop. What this means is that publishers have little incentive to go digital.
Sato, the creator of Say Hello to Black Jack, blogged a bit last year about the economics of making manga, and Canned Dogs translated the posts here and here. Continue Reading »
Sam Costello’s Tales from the Cashbox
Split Lip creator Sam Costello has written a series of four articles for iFanboy about the publishing life, and they are all worth a look, but the last one is particularly compelling because he reveals the real numbers behind his publishing operation.
Sam is the writer of Split Lip, a horror anthology comic that he describes as “along the lines of the Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt.” He hires artists to draw the comic, and he pays them up front; it starts as a webcomic, then he collects the stories into print editions, which he self-publishes. How’s that working out for him? Sam figures he lost $7,863.32 between July 2009 and June 2010. Publishing is hard, especially when you pay your artists up front (unlike, say, Bluewater Comics, which does everything on spec).
Sam spends a bit of time debating whether he should simply regard the comics thing as an expensive hobby, but he decides in the end that it’s more of an investment.
Sam Costello says: Just do it!
Sam Costello, the creator of the horror webcomic anthology site Split Lip, is a busy guy these days. He just updated the site, with a cleaner design, a larger display for the comics, and a blog. And he has just posted the first column in a four-part series at iFanboy.com about his life as an independent creator. Costello promises to bare all, including his website stats and financial info, in the final column, but the first one is more of a motivational piece about the importance of makin’ it happen rather than waiting around—and he cites his own experiences, both positive and negative. His advice in a nutshell:
If you want to be in comics, be in comics. There’s no certificate to earn, no test to pass. Comics are easy and relatively inexpensive to get into on your own. So if you want to make comics, start making them.
And because he takes his own advice (well, eventually), Sam has just released the second volume of his print anthology, a slightly less fancy version of the limited edition he debuted at MoCCA.
John Porcellino sells, talks about comics
Don't YOU want to hear what John Porcellino has to say about this comic?
Wow, this is a delightful way to spend some time this afternoon. John Porcellino, whose quietly beautiful, self-published series King-Cat is the most influential minicomic of all time, has created a blog for his DIY distribution outfit Spit and a Half. And not only is he selling hard-to-find comics, zines, photography books, and manga by Alan Moore (!), Gabrielle Bell, Minty Lewis, Zak Sally, Dave Kiersh, Lilli Carré and many more, he’s also personally writing up insightful little descriptions of each of them. Whether he’s calling Moore’s underground magazine Dodgem Logic “a weird, bright, in-your-face blast of idiosyncrasy,” dubbing Kiersh “a Great American Artist — his art addresses a uniquely American flavor of loneliness and desire, with his recurring themes of suburban, teenage anxiety, lust, ‘romance,’ and desolation,” or explaining how Kazuichi Hanawa’s Doing Time was his “gateway” manga, his thoughts on comics are as worthy as his comics themselves. Check it out!
(via Annie Koyama)