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Will Cardini's avatar

I’ve had a couple comics picked up and printed by a couple medium-sized publishers (Vortex with Sparkplug and Tales from the Hyperverse with Retrofit) but they both ceased operations pretty soon after so I keep returning to self-publishing. Both of those operations were run by only one or two people and unfortunately the economics of comics makes it difficult for people to sustain these businesses. They’re not making enough to do it full time so they’re trying to juggle their day job and publishing. It’s hard enough for me to juggle my day job, fam life, and my comics career, but to try and do all that plus grow other people’s careers??

In Sparkplug’s case, the original publisher, Dylan Williams, sadly passed away from cancer. Virginia Paine took over for several years after and ran the Kickstarter that funded Vortex, but eventually passed the Sparkplug stock to Marc Arsenault of Alternative Comics. In Retrofit’s case, it was started by Box Brown, and he partnered with and eventually passed the reins to Jared Smith of Big Planet. Big Planet is a successful DC area comics chain, which I know is a ton of work in and of itself from watching my brother run two stores in San Antonio.

Anyway I think the current reality, which we can live with or try to change, is that you need to be able to self-publish if you want to participate in the indie / art comics community.

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Drew's avatar

A proliferation of medium-sized publishers would be incredible. The problem, as you're saying, is that the economics of publishing comics is so precarious, and once you go beyond a few titles a year it seems like a tailspin is almost inevitable. But medium-sized publishers like Sprocket and Uncivilized are able to get books to trade publications like Kirkus/Booklist/Library Journal as well as for sale on Amazon, etc. Obviously Amazon sucks and we shouldn't buy books from them, but creating more opportunities for alternative/literary/art comics to get into the "mainstream" (i.e., non-comics people who are fans of art and literature) means being available in these channels and venues, and to do that you need to be operating at a certain size. I don't know what the solution is, other than government grants and funding, institutions which are obviously now being hacked apart with even more relish than usual. The fact seems to be that vanishingly few North American readers are aware that this stuff exists. How do we convert art and literature enthusiasts into comics enthusiasts? Not by showing them Andy Samberg's dorky new supehero comic book, which Jake Tapper recently recommended on the Ezra Klein Show, maybe the first graphic novel ever recommended on that show, don't ask me how I know! (Anyway, Alex, thank you so much for talking to me on the podcast -- it was a blast!)

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