Baltimore Comic-Con part 2C – Still more preparation or Will this never end?

Comic convention preparation.  In the first part I discussed prepping your display and table.  In the second part I went into some detail about prepping your own mini-comics (or chapbooks, as my pretentious self likes to call them).  This time out, we’re talking about selling.  I’m sure you all have seen a salesperson at work, whether you were the target or just an innocent bystander.  You all know about the hard sell.  Many of you have probably worked retail at one point in your life – and for that, I take pity on you. 

This isn’t that.  Though I do expect there will be some “obvious” stuff scattered in this segment (which, I’m certain, we all hope will be a bit shorter than the last two).  [I don't! -Matt]

So.  Here’s something that should be self-evident.  Have a package (in this case, your comic book) that is appealing visually.  There’s the subjectivity of taste to overcome with this one, obviously, but you can alleviate some of the issues with a little thought and preparation beforehand.  As stated in my previous segment, having a single, bold image as your cover is one thing that can help you stand out against the rest.  Whether you approach “bold” through the use of color, texture (as with some heavy cardstock, screen printed covers), or the imagery itself doesn’t matter.  Just keep this in mind when creating your cover.  The interiors should be equally compelling, because if you can hook passersby with your cover, the next step, for them, is to page through the book. 

If you want some great advice on comic art and how pages play off one another within a comic, go to the archive at Comics Comics and The Comics Journal and do a search on Frank Santoro, who was a regular contributor and editor at Comics Comics and is a current contributor to the Comics Journal site.  The man knows art, knows comics, and understands how the grid and the page work within the distinct visual lexicon of comics.  My only advice in this area, and this only applies to anyone including text with their comics, is to make sure that there are comic stories at the staple in your book, because your book will naturally fall open at that middle point, and when prospective customers seeking comics find a bunch of words filling up those pages, it doesn’t take long for them to move to the next table. 

This might be another obvious one, but don’t be pushy when you’re standing behind the table selling your book.  Acknowledge people as they pass by, ask them how their show’s going, offer them the chance to page through the book if they come over – in short, give them a chance to decide, for themselves, they want to read what you’ve helped create.  But don’t be the guy yelling across the aisles for people to check out his book, or take his card, or “come on over,” because you’ll be driving more people away than you’ll be dragging in.  And, you’ll be driving these people away from your neighbors’ tables as well.  Not cool.  I’m certain some people will tell you differently, but despite how much this goes against Selling 101, I just haven’t seen it work.

Now, perhaps the most important thing to consider, but something many people may not even give a second’s thought – myself and Dan having once fallen into that group.  Go where your audience is.  You may be thinking – duh, I’m setting up at a comic convention.  And that is true.  But which convention are you exhibiting at, and what kind of comic are you bringing to the show?  Dan and I first set up at Wizard World Chicago in 2005.  The shows we’d attended prior to that one, we both haunted artists alley in search of books that were quirky, distinct visions of their creators, not cookie cutter superheroes that couldn’t make the grade at Marvel or DC.  We expected we weren’t the only ones.  So we brought our black-and-white, comics/prose anthology – lacking any superhero stories – to a big convention highlighted by the presence of the large publishers that do color comics about superheroes, for the most part, and we tanked.  The following year, we went to the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, a show highlighted by self-publishers and smaller publishing houses that specialize in black-and-white comics almost completely devoid of superheroes.  We had found our audience.  And we did very well. 

Finally:  what is your comic about?  That first show in Chicago, Dan and I were never able to answer that question the entire four days there.  We hadn’t considered this basic point of our book and weren’t helped by the fact that it was an anthology.  With the next few issues we thought about what we were trying to say with the stories in each issue – and you can affix an overall theme after the fact as easily as crafting stories around a set theme.  Our second book was the “difficult relationships” issue, while the third was our “reflections on faith” issue, which had the first photo-cover by Shane Leonard, who has since created variant covers for Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key series.  And when we put together the collection, our pitch became a bit longer:  “an anthology with stories in multiple genres, from zombie westerns to UFO stories, by artists in multiple countries, from the Philippines to Tanzania, along with short prose and interviews with comic luminaries such as Chris Staros, Gary Groth, Bryan Talbot, and Joe Quesada.”  It’s not easy to condense the scores of hours, hundreds of words, and thousands of lines of ink into a ten-second pitch, but it might be the most important skill for you to master.  Because not only will it help you in selling your books, but it will also be a necessary skill for when you start pitching longer series and have to provide a synopsis to an editor.  Starting now can only help.

You can read much more from Chris at Warrior 27! (or click on On the Fly Publications over on My Blog List to the right of this page).

Baltimore Comic-Con 2013 part 2B – more preparation

When last we met, I briefly discussed preparation for exhibiting at a comic convention, with a focus on your table display.  Now, let’s talk about the books, specifically mini-comics and chapbooks, as simple as one with little artistic talent can get.  We will look at this from the point of view of the writer, as that’s where all my experience lies.

(an aside:  if you have ideas of creating a comic that looks like a comic book check out the Ka-Blam! site; they can help you with that)

So, you’ve written your stories and need to find someone to bring your masterpiece to vivid, delineated, inked life.  Easier said than done.  First you need to find the artist.  You can check websites like Deviant Art or Digital Webbing (though I’ve heard DW isn’t the go-to place it once was, but that’s where your due diligence comes in) or do a search for “comic book artist.”  Keep in mind the tone of your story and seek out an artist who best fits that without breaking the bank (yes, you should be paying them in monetary notes and not the promise of “exposure” or “back-end money,” as those are as ethereal as your dead gramma’s ghost).  A generally accepted rule of thumb is that it takes a comic artist a day to create a single comic page.  From there, as Dennis Culver noted on his twitter feed, the bare minimum page rate can be extrapolated from the “norms” of an 8-hour work day at a minimum wage of $7.25/hour, which comes to $58 per page.  Of course, it’s all negotiable.  Be up front with your artist and do not short-change them.  You will also want to discuss ownership of the story.  A best practice, in my opinion, is to share creation and ownership evenly with your collaborator(s).  But, again, it’s all negotiable.  Just do your homework, be up front with your collaborator, and don’t take them for granted.

Once you’ve found an artist and negotiated a fair price, prepare for the wonder of finished art pages in your inbox.  I can almost guarantee every one will be far better than what you pictured in your head while you typed away in the dark.  Once the art’s done, you’ll want to get high-resolution, print-ready scans from the artist – at least 300 dpi.  And if your artist doesn’t also letter, you need to find someone to do that or, better yet, learn how to do it yourself.  There are numerous tutorials and fonts available from places like Comicraft’s Baloon Tales site and Nate Piekos’s Blambot site.  These sites have everything you need to get the job done.  From here, it’s time to begin formatting your book.

Most likely, your mini-comics will have smaller dimensions than the typical comic book.  With my chapbooks a single page is 4.25” by 5.5”, or half the size of a standard letter-sized piece of paper.  Since my chapbooks include a lot of text, I use Microsoft Word to format my books.  If I were only including comic stories, I would use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop for formatting, since they are image-based programs, but why bother doing anything simple, right?  But I digress. 

Once in your formatting program of choice, you need to layout the pages so they have a nice flow, while keeping in mind that any “reveals” in the comic pages need to land on a page-turn, or an even-numbered page (of course, this only applies to those creating books with multiple stories, but really, the text that follows is so scintillating, you’re going to want to continue).  First, you should plug your stories into a single word document in the order you want, using the same layout and margins as the final product.  Understanding that a half-letter format requires a total page count divisible by four (because you have four pages to a single sheet), you can now see how many story pages you have along with the number of blank pages.  At this point you can move things around to make the page turns (even-numbered pages) and story opens (preferably odd-numbered pages) work.  From there, if you have blank pages, you can decide what extras to include – an introduction, script pages, background on the stories, character sketches, or nothing at all.  With the layout finalized, you can begin placing each individual page into its corresponding page in the final print-formatted document.  The diagram below shows the first two sheets – front and back – of a 9-sheet, 36-page chapbook:

Having done a number of these, the page layout seems obvious, but it took me a few tries before I was confident I was doing it right.  Paginating your mini in the manner above relieves you of any need to re-order the pages once they print.  Just pull the sheets from the printer at Staples – or, if you’re lucky, the one at your place of employment – and fold them in the center to create your mini-comic.  Of course, you’ll need a long-arm stapler at this point, but they’re relatively inexpensive, especially if you’re in this for the long haul. 

Now, let’s backtrack a step, before moving onto the final step.  If you decide to number your pages and you’re working in Word, as I do, then it takes some work to get it right because the program wants to automatically number pages according to your initial header on page one.  You need to separate each page to create individual sections (that’s important, you’re not inserting a page break but a section break for the “next page”).  Once you’ve created your sections, you need to sever the header links to the previous sections.  Double-click the header and look for the “link to previous [section].”  Uncheck that box – depending on the system and version of Word you’re working with, it could be in any number of spots.  Now you can create a header with page numbers distinct from the rest of the document.  But be careful if you’re placing text and images into the main body of the document after doing this because if pieces in the main body are copied in and bleed into the following page, all the work to separate the headers could be deleted, and you’ll be forced to do it all again. 

So, you’ve got your mini formatted, page numbers are in place (if that’s how you roll), and you’ve printed off the interiors of your books.  Now you need a cover.  I’m certainly no artist, but I’ve gathered some good advice from friends who are, and the two main things I’ve taken to heart are:

1 – use a single, bold image for your cover
2 – incorporate a singular image to brand yourself (more about that in the following paragraph)

The first mini-comic I ever put together had a powerful and evocative image on its cover, thanks to Sergio Martinez.  I was so impressed with it I modified it slightly to use for my business cards, my online avatar, and, when I conceived my Mainelining chapbooks, it became the cover image for each volume, with varying color schemes to differentiate them.  As Baltimore approaches, I have six volumes of Mainelining that will be available for purchase at our table and am finalizing the contents of a second volume for editors and artists with whom I would like to collaborate.  These latter two volumes are my writing portfolio and include only stories published outside of Warrior27 – stories other editors have deemed worthy of publication.  As an aspiring comics writer, you need to be able to show what you can do, and the best way to do that is have a collection of finished comics, and/or short prose, to share (and they needn’t have been published elsewhere, they just need to be completed).  Because the reality is no editor has the time to read your script, especially if it’s your 200-page OGN masterpiece.  So, you write short stories, you get them drawn, you print them, and you share them.  Not only are finished stories easier for editors and artist to assess, but they also exhibit a seriousness that a vast majority of your peers lack.  And that can make all the difference in the world.

Once more, I’ve gone on at lengths unimaginable for the internet.  So I will cut it short here and continue with convention preparation in the next part, where I’ll discuss what I’ve learned about standing at the table and “hocking my wares.”  Until then…




{You can (and should) read more from Chris at Warrior 27. -Matt}

BALTIMORE COMIC-CON 2013 part 1

- anticipation -

In the fall of 2004, a bunch of us drove to Atlanta for Dragon-Con.  Warren Ellis was crossing the Atlantic for the first time in a decade and Harlan Ellison was going to be there.  There were certainly many other noted guests in attendance, but these were the two I drove 26 hours to see.  While waiting in line for the early morning Ellis signing, we overheard a conversation that got, to my mind, rather foolish.  This woman, who was a published author, was going on about how different things are once you’re behind the curtain.  [emphasis mine]   As a published author – and, by extension, a professional – she did not read fiction for entertainment anymore; she couldn’t.  She continued to explain how she no longer got excited about meeting authors, in that “fan” sense.  Her rationale seemed to be that she was now part of this elite fellowship, and a fannish reaction would be unbecoming.  But, to my ear, it all sounded pretentious and stupid.  You couldn’t just excise that part of you enamored with stories and storytellers.  It was, and still is, an elitist attitude that was off-putting and felt disingenuous, as if this woman were putting on airs to impress those around her.  I wasn’t.

But what do I know?

It has now been eight years since Dan and I first tabled at a convention.  That experience was kind of devastating (WARNING: do not take your self-published, black-and-white, non-superhero comics to a big convention, just don’t, especially if they’re the first comics you’ve ever done).  But each successive convention has been better.  We’ve learned a lot from the experiences, had a few short stories published, and grown as writers through the only way possible, the grind of writing regularly, every day, no matter how inspired we feel.  Our names aren’t known and we haven’t landed that first big project, but we are writers (and Harlan Ellison, again, says that if you write, you’re a writer; you don’t need to be published or have an agent or whatever, you just need to do the work, and respect the work, and strive to improve – though, let’s be honest, being published is nice).  And, as we prepare for this year’s Baltimore Comic-Con – the first time Dan and I have returned to a big show as exhibitors since that initial debacle noted above – I find my inner fanboy revving up.

For the most part, since the devastation that was Wizard World Chicago: 2005, Dan and I have set up at small shows like SPX and the CGS Super Show.  Not only are those shows more intimate and less costly, but that is also where our audience is.  We write stories generally reproduced in black-and-white within genres that range along all points of the spectrum.  And I love those shows.  But Matt, who wrote a great fantasy story for Warrior27, our comics/prose anthology, kept telling us that Baltimore is a good show, that we could sell our books there, that it would be worth our while.  We always held off because Baltimore takes place within a week of SPX, and there’s no way Dan and I could take the time off to do both shows.  So we had to choose, and the Small Press Expo always won.  Until this year.

In 2003, before we started creating our own stories and exhibiting, Dan and I and a few others went to the Baltimore Comic-Con.  That was the year the hurricane had devastated Maryland, and the hotel where we reserved a room was without electricity (but that’s another story).  Despite this, the show went on, and even though we only spent one day there, I had a great time.  That day, ten years ago, I met Scott Kolins, José Villarrubia, Matt Wagner, and John K. Snyder III, and I had a great conversation with Chris Staros, among many other experiences.  It was a great show and a great time, and I’m looking forward to heading back in a few weeks.

This year I’m excited by the prospects of meeting the likes of Jim Starlin and Dave Gibbons and Greg Larocque and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, as well as finally meeting my collaborator on the first story I placed with a publisher – Jason Copland whose work on Kill All Monsters! with Michael May is fabulous and whose art graced my UFO story, “Life is Funny,” for Ape Entertainment.  And the guest list keeps getting bigger, with the likes of Michael Golden, Mark Waid, Art & Franco, Paris Cullins, Joe Hill, and the like.  Yeah, I may be a “professional,” but I’m looking forward to getting a chance to talk with some of the writers and artists who’ve created some of my most fondly remembered, and most-read, comics.  That will be a blast.

But I’ll also have my “pro” hat on.  I’m anxious to see who’s in artist’s alley and talk shop with them, and maybe make contacts that will pan out in a collaboration down the line.  Valiant and Boom! (and, apparently, IDW, though they haven’t been added to the official list yet) will be exhibiting, and I’ll have copies of my work on hand to share with them.  So, I won’t fully shuck off the “professional” moniker. 

Which means I need to start preparing.  I’ll talk about that in part 2 of this series.

- chris

Check out more from Chris at Warrior 27

Comics – Creator or Character, Part I: Caveat & Context

We welcome guest columnist Chris Beckett.  His previous work has been published by the likes of Ape Ent., Dark Recesses Press, and Top Shelf Comics.  You can also see more work by him at (sorry, new info coming soon).

Is it better (healthier for the comic book medium) to follow the character or the creator when making buying choices with your comics?  In this series, I will try to answer that question and, hopefully, engender some lively debate in the process.

But first,  

The caveat: 

Recently, I've been reading Watchmen & Philosophy: A Rorschach Test, a book of essays on the philosophical questions and conundrums within Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons's seminal graphic novel Watchmen.  It's been interesting and given me a few things to consider about this book that I hadn’t before.  But the major point I've taken away from Watchmen & Philosophy - and a point that has left me frustrated and disappointed with it - is that the philosophers writing for this particular collection are unable to take a side in an argument.  They pose a question, one might infer it as a thesis statement, and then write at length on both sides of the issue, never coming to any conclusion other than it’s a good thing we don’t have to really consider these types of questions in our world, because there seems to be no real answers for them. 

Just take a side and argue it!

This frustration has been countered by another book I'm currently reading, The Thin Red Line (Philosophers on Film), edited by David Davies, in which the essayists do take a side, illuminating a point through the action and dialogue in the film, as well as through supplementary information from interviews and other sources.  They take this information and shine it through a philosophical prism to enlighten readers on what Terence Malick (a noted recluse) may be trying to tell us in The Thin Red Line.  This is a fascinating book that has got me jazzed to re-introduce myself to Malick's brilliant film based, rather loosely, upon James Jones' novel.  I like that these philosophers are willing to take a stand, to make an argument, and to show the reader how his or her point is supported with what we, the audience, will experience when watching The Thin Red Line.  It excites me, and it doesn't feel like a cop-out the way the essays in Watchmen And Philosophy do. 

So.  My question to you, the readers, is whether one should follow the creators or the characters when collecting comics?  Now, I could cop out and write: buy what you like, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re happy, all is good.  And that is true, to a certain extent.

But, is this a healthy point of view for the medium of comics and graphic storytelling?  (A question that could certainly be followed by: is it necessary for consumers to think about what is healthy for a medium or industry when making buying decisions?)  I don’t think so. 

And so, I will try to be even-handed in this series while taking a stance on what I feel is the “best” way for us, as consumers of graphic narrative, to approach this subject.  It’s my opinion, ultimately, but I’m arrogant enough (or confident enough, as I prefer to term it) to feel that my choice is the better choice.

The Context:

By its very nature, this topic will mainly revolve around comics published by the “Big Two,” Marvel and DC comics.  They are the major gateway into comics for most readers, and they are the companies that publish “characters” moreso than “creators,” though they do like to tout high-profile talent coming onto their books.  There will be opportunity to venture into the back of the Previews catalog, to look at books from publishers like IDW, Fantagraphics, and, in an historical context, those books initially published by companies such as First Comics and Eclipse.  All of these companies publish[ed] both “corporate” books and “creator-owned” books with some leaning heavily toward the corporate side and others sliding more toward the creator side, and that will allow for an interesting discussion I hope.  (At the very least, it will be an interesting journey for me).

Ultimately, I will be focusing this series through the lens of my own personal comics-reading journey, which started in 1984 and continues today.  I hope to make you think a little and consider what it is that motivates you when putting down money for your favorite comics. 

Is it Swamp Thing or Alan Moore?

Is it the Avengers or Brian Bendis?

Batman or Jim Lee?

Fantastic Four or Bryan Hitch?

We’ll see.  

-chris