Haha hello what is up? How’s it going?
Big news time: I’m married yeehaw.
Ok second big news time: Frog Farm Fair II and Frog Farm 9 are imminent.
MARK IT: Saturday, June 14 at LIFE WORLD!
Posters are done, and promotion has begun on that...
Here is the full lineup (early) for all my humble newsletter subscribers:
Tickets for Frog Farm 9 are available here: https://frogfarm.online/frogfarm9andFFF2
We will have all the info about all the exhibitors and comic readers by next week. The show is $12 and of course the fair is free to attend.
Also! We are looking for volunteers to help with set up, break down and everything in between. If that interests you, please sign up on the form here: VOLUNTEER FORM SIGNUP
Thank you to everyone who has applied. I’m sorry we couldn’t fit everyone. We nearly doubled the amount of tablers we had from last time because of how much bigger the space is, but we got nearly four times the amount of applicants. Good problem to have. Hopefully we can continue to grow.
A few notes: a very good portion of applicants seemed to be more geared towards animation work, and although your work does not work in a comic fair setting we will have open applications to submit animated shorts for future events, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
Also, in future for people who applied with just digital PDFs, please send pictures of your zines and comics. It helps to see what the comic will look like on a table. Even better? Send a picture of what your table looks like.
Ok thanks that’s all for now in terms of fair stuff. I’m gonna circle back around a week before the show with more info.
Ok aside from FFF II and FF9, we’re going to TCAF the week before on June 7-8. I have been told there is a comic reading happening and that I may be co-hosting but that is all the word I’ve got on that currently.
I hope to do my first live reading of SHNORK, and I believe Alex will be doing their first reading of THE CONNOISSEURS.
Which speaking of: THE CONNOISSEURS will be having their official FESTIVAL DEBUT in Toronto. Alex will be with me selling new prints, stickers, and of course this excellent book.
Once all this Frog Farm Fair promo has been pushed out, we’ll be posting a bit of this comic. It’s so incredibly funny and good. Alex really cranked out a banger.
Please come say hello to us in Toronto!
BTW I have officially shipped out all of the pre-orders, so for those of you who have ordered early: thank you! Hope you enjoy. Leave your thoughts on the book below :)
If you would like to order SHNORK or THE CONNOISSEURS, check out ye ole Frog Farm web shop :) → https://frogfarm.bigcartel.com/
Ok what else?
Oh well I had a little guest appearance on my new favorite comics podcast “The Miami Review of Comics” hosted by Drew Lerman (an excellent cartoonist)
It was a mailbag episode and I wrote in and it was long and convoluted enough that Drew asked me to call in and talk about it a bit. Basically I asked if he thinks comics is getting too niche and if he agreed that everyone seems to hate eachother. We basically agreed, and concluded it’s probably because the economy is doggie doodoo caca max. Listen to the chat, it was fun. Drew is an awesome guy.
But yeah speaking of everyone in comics hating each other, if you don’t know…there’s been a lot of comics drama this past month and a bit. A lot of intra-scene bad faith beef in a lot of different corners of comics right now. I’m gonna put aside the Alex Graham stuff because it’s not directly related to what I’m interested in talking about, and zoom in on Silver Sprocket.
I’ve seen a lot of bad takes and a few good takes about that whole Silver Sprocket situation but I think a general positive takeaway I’m seeing that I like is that more people should be self-publishing then there currently are. This is good and true!
If you’re serious about being a cartoonist, you need to learn how to put a book together. You can’t just draw a comic, post it online and expect accolades. I know this sounds mean, but I’ve met plenty of people in comics who refuse to do the backend stuff because they think they’re above it. It’s annoying - but honestly, most of them are just 19-20. They don’t know any better yet.
That same inexperience is what leads to putting publishers on pedestals - imagining they have some built-in power or prestige. But that power only exists because we collectively hand it to them. People in comics love turning mid-level organizers into villains, as if they’re running Disney. In reality, it’s usually just one person trying their best. Sometimes they screw up (sometimes badly), but the huge takedowns just inflate the illusion imo.
There’s been a lot of that lately. Feels like we’re channeling some bigger frustrations about the current state of things into easier targets. Just me? No? Ok.
Was what happened at Silver Sprocket bad? Yeah. There was poor communication around contracts and very sketchy accounting. Really lame. But maybe it’s also a good time to ask: what do we want from publishers anyway? What were they offering that you couldn’t find - or build - in self-publishing?
What is the value that publishers present? Well, they provide production, distribution and marketing. These are thing that a lot of people, especially artists, don’t want to do! There’s a potentially endless pit of time and resources to put into these things. But as you and I both know, it’s something we as artists are being forced to do more and more of.
I started Frog Farm because I was already doing all of this stuff for myself and I wanted to help a few artists I believed in who didn’t want to do this backend stuff as much. Importantly though: a lot of the people I work with have already had experience with self-publishing and understand the process. They just don’t gel with it for one reason or another.
One big example is that almost everyone I work with especially don’t seem to like distribution. Trying to do consignment all over the place really sucks, and building confidence with shops enough to do wholesale takes a bit of time and trust. It’s tricky, because it’s something you realistically need a few years to build up. These are things you could do as an individual if you want to put in the time, and it’s what I did - almost by accident, but it’s also a serious skillset/knowledge base I can provide for the artist I help publish, and am happy to do.
I only decided I wanted to publish and help other people after like 8-9 years of self-publishing. It was a process to get there, that was built up from learning from other people and from a significant amount of learned experience from my own successes and failures. Frog Farm is my third effort at running a creative collective of some sort.
But ok practical reasons aside there are, in my opinion, more culturally valuable and esoteric reasons for a publisher existing that I think people were missing the point on a few weeks ago. My idea goes like this: a publisher should be a focal point for types of work, points of views, groups of people etc. At least for me I see it as “worldbuilding” - I am opening up a realm for the work I want to see more of. So not just the work, but a place for that work to thrive and experiment in.
If I’m being honest this idea doesn’t even need to be a publisher, it’s really more about getting people together with a purpose. But since we are talking about “Comics,” - a publisher becomes the logical focal point for these efforts. But for Frog Farm, it goes beyond publishing sometimes: I’m running different types of events, continually trying other types of projects, but I love comics, and so publishing is the resting focus for Frog Farm often. The more it grows, the more I’d like to see it expand in new ways. I would be lying to say this was not the main reason I started doing Frog Farm. I had bigger ideas I wanted to test out that I could see myself developing because of the aforementioned practical skills and community knowledge I had acquired. There was a way I wanted things to be, that I didn't see being done elsewhere. I was hoping expanding in new directions would open new creative avenues for myself and others.
I think providing the context for the work is almost as important as making the work, but you can’t forget about the work ever. I honestly think Silver Sprocket was more successful in creating a context for that work then their actual comics they released sometimes. All to say, obviously they had some huge hits and from this there was an audience they quickly zeroed in on, in a way that’s not really prevalent in the rest of comics with other publishers. Like it or not, that audience was pretty engaged in the idea of Silver Sprocket. I have to give props to them for that. This is kinda beside the point, but I think that cultivated audience of their’s also maybe led to the vitriolic firestorm as well, when they let that audience down.
The problem came from them trying to do too much, too fast, all at once. My brain would explode going to dozens of conventions, trying to publish 20 books a year, at print runs I cannot even begin to try and afford. Was that amount of work they were doing ever translating into any good for the “community?” A lot of the wronged cartoonists would not think so anymore, but it would be undeniable that there wasn’t something going on there.
Comics needs more medium sized publishers like that, but is it a coincidence they keep exploding or fading away? For me it makes more sense to help build an ecosystem to get artists to want to put their own work out in, and then I can help a few of them along the way, along with other small press publishers.
So is this grand scheme of mine working? Idk bro. I think the Fair is gonna be nice, and the show in the evening will be a lot of fun. The lineup is stacked across the board, and Frogghoul is still kidnapped, remember?
But also indie/alt comics is a fucking disaster right now. What attracted me to it 10-11 years ago keeps on eroding away bit by bit. A lot of bad faith morons, too much appetite for uncreative fan art-adjacent stuff, and just an obvious general malaise due to things going on in the world has got me bummed out…but the prospects for Frog Farm feels optimistic. We’re still humming along, surprisingly.
Thoughts on all the messes going on? Are we allowed to have nice things? AKA medium sized indie comic publishers who can afford to not exploit us?
This felt even more ponderous than usual, but I had it in my notes app for a bit and wanted to get it out.
Ok cheers. We’ll chat before the Fair. Thanks for reading.
Alex
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.
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!)