I had finished a five-issue run of my comic, Tabloia, and now that I’d had two official years of failing business under my belt, I wanted to try and publish as much as I could, and preferably some books that might sell a little better.
Artists have been telling me that comics sell okay, or more likely they don’t sell very well at all. But when you put out your trade paperbacks, that’s where you can make your money back. Trades have the higher cover price, so they don’t sell as many copies, but the higher price creates a higher income, and this is your bread and butter. I’ve heard of artists who just give away their comics when the trades come out.
I hate this idea. I never cared particularly for trades. I love the feel and size of comics.
Sure, I understand why people would prefer to just buy a trade, and have the complete story all in one package. But it’s always disappointed me, the thought that trades are better loved by everyone than the format I love most.
And what’s worse, to me, is that the comics market is such that many self-publishers wind up doing only trades or graphic novels, and not even bothering with the comics, because they just simply can’t make money at it. But I thought, now that I had four different characters from my Tabloia comics, that it would be fun, rather than packaging the five issues of Tabloia as a trade, if I packaged each character from Tabloia as a separate trade.
Of course marketing played into this. I had learned now, that people weren’t interested in an anthology. Or at least, they weren’t interested in my anthology. I wanted to see if making each trade a specific, unique character was more popular to readers.
Collecting my Doris Danger stories was of course my first choice for trying to put together a decent, marketable product that people might actually buy. Why Doris? Because I already had five five-page stories, one from each of my Tabloia issues, inked by Dick Ayers. I had fifteen pin-ups of giant monsters, three per issue, from these comics as well. That meant Sam Kieth, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, Los Bros Hernandez, Tony Millionaire, Gene Colan, John Severin, and everybody. How tempting that would have to be for people to want to buy!
But similar to how, with Tabloia, I began with issue #572, because I thought it was more interesting artistically, I decided with this comic that I didn’t want it to be standard-sized. Why not? Not just to insure the book would be a financial failure. These were stories of giant monsters in the Jack Kirby style. Jack Kirby used to draw these stories on HUGE sheets of paper. And the subject matter, in my opinion, deserved a huge style. I wanted those giant monsters to REALLY BE GIANT! I looked at old 1970’s treasury editions that Marvel and DC used to put out, and I loved how big the pages were. I loved that, proportionately the page-to-reader ration made you feel like you were a little kid and comics were so big. Looking at these treasuries as well as the Kirby Collector volumes, I thought the size proportions were weirdly shaped. I looked at the size of Love and Rockets, and Daniel Clowes’ Eightball featuring the Deathray, and they seemed a little too small. I finally decided on 9″ x 13,” because it was round, unfractioned numbers, but a solid 2 to 3 ratio for the image size, with a solid 1/2″ around each side of the image.
Whenever I do a project, while I’m working on it, I assume it’s going to be my masterpiece, and the book that will catch on, and that people will remember. I spent a month or so cleaning up the images of every page, so that every line would be as crisp as possible. I especially did this, knowing each page would be blown up larger than standard size, and that it would be so much easier to see the blemishes. I did this because I always thought the Doris Danger stories looked kind of sloppy in Tabloia. This was my fault, because Dick inked them and returned them without erasing my pencils, and for some reason I thought it would have more depth with the pencils still visible underneath. Once they were printed, I realized it just looked sloppy to me, and I didn’t want this Doris Danger project to look sloppy in that way.
Just the five stories and fifteen pin-ups would only get my page count to forty, and I didn’t think this was enough for a “trade paperback.” My original idea was to publish two or three regular comics of Doris Danger, and then collect those comics with the Tabloia stories. I changed my mind after San Diego 2005, because I learned that Marvel was going to release a series of Kirby-style monster comics for Halloween. When I found out, I cranked out one new six page story, and five pages of new monster splash pages, a couple pages of new text about the fake history of Doris Danger in the fifties, and a collection of all the fake letters I’d posted about Doris in the Tabloias, and I called this package a 56-page spectacular, hoping I could ride on any potential waves Marvel made with their monster-pushing agenda.
It turned out, first of all, that the Marvel monster books didn’t make that big a splash. But the other problem was that by the time I got my Doris Danger book listed in Previews, it was a month or so after the Marvel monster books came out, so I didn’t really have any waves to catch, and I was too late for them anyways. Ah well, my motives were pure…
For this book, I didn’t do any advertising. I thought it would be an experiment to see if there’s really any big difference in my numbers without spending the extra money on advertising. I had run a number of ads here and there, and couldn’t see much difference in sales. If my numbers dropped this issue, which I considered the cream of Tabloia’s crop, then I would consider advertising. I would also consider advertising next book, and including this one as “still available,” thereby getting two ads out of one payment for an ad.
I was hopeful that my orders would do better. I knew that I would be better off, even if the numbers were smaller, because the book had a higher cover price – $10 instead of the $4 I’d been publishing. The distributor takes 60% of that, which means I make $4 a book, instead of $1.40.
I was, as usual, disappointed to see the numbers come in. I got 336 sales of that book, which got me $1336 from my distributor. Even though it wasn’t my highest numbers of sales, and even though I was still disappointed with these numbers, it was my highest income from any of my books. My second best issue was the first issue of Tabloia, which sold 613 and made me $968. So Doris Danger looked considerably successful, compared to my other books…at first glance.
Then I realized my Tabloias cost fifteen to eighteen hundred dollars to print (depending on just how many I grossly overprinted), and this Doris Danger book cost me $3500. So if I wanted to be literally realistic (which always hurts too much to actually do), this was my least successful book, because subtracting what I made from the cost, I had lost practically two thousand dollars, instead of my usual eighteen hundred. Granted, I have extra Doris Danger books which I can theoretically sell over time. But Jesus, what an industry, if my most successful book is my biggest financial failure.
I wasn’t as concerned at this, however, because I was so proud of this book. I thought it turned out so damn well, it was just a gorgeous package, and I was so pleased with it, and confident that it would sell if people saw it, and saw how many fucking great artists were contained in it.