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.<\/p>\n
Artists have been telling me that comics sell okay, or more likely they don’t sell very well at all. <\/font>But when you put out your trade paperbacks, that’s where you can make your money back. <\/font>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. <\/font>I’ve heard of artists who just give away their comics when the trades come out.<\/p>\n I hate this idea. <\/font>I never cared particularly for trades. <\/font>I love the feel and size of comics.<\/p>\n Sure, I understand why people would prefer to just buy a trade, and have the complete story all in one package. <\/font>But it’s always disappointed me, the thought that trades are better loved by everyone than the format I love most.<\/p>\n 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. <\/font>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.<\/p>\n Of course marketing played into this. <\/font>I had learned now, that people weren’t interested in an anthology. <\/font>Or at least, they weren’t interested in my anthology. <\/font>I wanted to see if making each trade a specific, unique character was more popular to readers.<\/p>\n 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. <\/font>Why Doris? <\/font>Because I already had five five-page stories, one from each of my Tabloia issues, inked by Dick Ayers. <\/font>I had fifteen pin-ups of giant monsters, three per issue, from these comics as well. <\/font>That meant Sam Kieth, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, Los Bros Hernandez, Tony Millionaire, Gene Colan, John Severin, and everybody. <\/font>How tempting that would have to be for people to want to buy!<\/p>\n 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. <\/font>Why not? <\/font>Not just to insure the book would be a financial failure. <\/font>These were stories of giant monsters in the Jack Kirby style. <\/font>Jack Kirby used to draw these stories on HUGE sheets of paper. <\/font>And the subject matter, in my opinion, deserved a huge style. <\/font>I wanted those giant monsters to REALLY BE GIANT! <\/font>I looked at old 1970’s treasury editions that Marvel and DC used to put out, and I loved how big the pages were. <\/font>I loved that, proportionately the page-to-reader ration made you feel like you were a little kid and comics were so big. <\/font>Looking at these treasuries as well as the Kirby Collector volumes, I thought the size proportions were weirdly shaped. <\/font>I looked at the size of Love and Rockets, and Daniel Clowes’ Eightball featuring the Deathray, and they seemed a little too small. <\/font>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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/font>I spent a month or so cleaning up the images of every page, so that every line would be as crisp as possible. <\/font>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. <\/font>I did this because I always thought the Doris Danger stories looked kind of sloppy in Tabloia. <\/font>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. <\/font>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.<\/p>\n 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.” <\/font>My original idea was to publish two or three regular comics of Doris Danger, and then collect those comics with the Tabloia stories. <\/font>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. <\/font>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.<\/p>\n It turned out, first of all, that the Marvel monster books didn’t make that big a splash. <\/font>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. <\/font>Ah well, my motives were pure…<\/p>\n For this book, I didn’t do any advertising. <\/font>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. <\/font>I had run a number of ads here and there, and couldn’t see much difference in sales. <\/font>If my numbers dropped this issue, which I considered the cream of Tabloia’s crop, then I would consider advertising. <\/font>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.<\/p>\n I was hopeful that my orders would do better. <\/font>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. <\/font>The distributor takes 60% of that, which means I make $4 a book, instead of $1.40.<\/p>\n I was, as usual, disappointed to see the numbers come in. <\/font>I got 336 sales of that book, which got me $1336 from my distributor. <\/font>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. <\/font>My second best issue was the first issue of Tabloia, which sold 613 and made me $968. <\/font>So Doris Danger looked considerably successful, compared to my other books…at first glance.<\/p>\n 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. <\/font>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. <\/font>Granted, I have extra Doris Danger books which I can theoretically sell over time. <\/font>But Jesus, what an industry, if my most successful book is my biggest financial failure.<\/p>\n I wasn’t as concerned at this, however, because I was so proud of this book. <\/font>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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