A Mess: Self Publishing & Publishing

Well, it's been a bit of a week for the world of indie comics.


I won't go deep into the Silver Sprocket drama here. There's too much and most of the story is not mine to tell. Regardless, it has taxed the spirit — comics are already a hard thing to do for a living. A “radical” and “queer” publisher burning cartoonists and their employees? It’s hard not to be left with the hollow feeling that commerce really does poison everything it touches.

These past months, I’ve done a lot of reflecting on this “career”*.

I owe my career to the fact that I’ve not stopped making comics. I’ve joked that becoming successful in comics is just about refusing to leave. In university I was told that I would never be published if I didn’t first make the books that I wanted to make. I took this to heart and it has proven to be true. Self-publishing allowed me to make The Gulf.

I don’t endorse the advice I’ve followed to get here. It’s too much of a gamble. It requires an immense amount of security and privilege to put aside the hours needed to make a comic, let alone produce a book. It also requires a shonen protagonists level of bullheadedness (see also: delusion). It requires confidence. Confidence not only — and certainly not primarily — in ones ability, but in ones desire to keep making the damned thing.

It’s a taxing delusion, to say the least.

I love what I do. I get a thrill out of looking back on comics I’ve made and recognising I sometimes achieve what I’ve set out to do. I think there are things that are uniquely me about my body of work and I am proud of that. And yet I am on occasion randomly struck, as I lean back from the drafting the table, with the force of the delusion that holds this all together.

It’s an old story, but no level of outside accolades or success seems to really appease the fact that there are things one hasn’t achieved. There are audiences left just beyond your reach. There are always more books that could be sold. There is always something more secure elsewhere. I suppose this is the sickness that infects us all. I suppose it’s the thing that makes publishers burn themselves down. I suppose it’s the thing I am trying to write out of my veins. It is, with certainty, the thing my delusions are a bulwark against.

I pay rent with comics. I pay for my groceries with comics. For now, that is enough. The fears around my future will be reckoned with later. Naively, I hope that I’ll be in a different, more secure, place as concepts like “having a kid” become less theoretical. Perhaps.

Comics require patience. They are a slow-thing that reflect the care put into them. The same goes for publishing. Maybe that’s actually just the way of all things that have any worth.

Self Publishing was my way into making comics as a “professional”. Printing small runs of comics and selling them directly at festivals is the bedrock of what I do. I’ve gone from the photocopier to working with professional presses. The scale has increased with my audience. I started with twenty copies of a photocopied zine and I am now printing a thousand perfect bound copies of Mutt Mag.

Logistically, one-thousand copies represents the scope of what I am fairly certain I will sell within a two year period. It’s also at the perimeter of what I can monetarily justify in terms of costs. That there’s an audience for this work and that I can afford to continue this is more owed to luck than skill.

Self publishing has a clear benefits:

• I own my work completely.

• All of the money, aside from that which I use to pay a designer, the printer, and now a promoter, enters my pocket.

• I usually make more money than I would expect to get from a publisher.

• It's exactly the book that I want to make.

The drawbacks are obvious and more numerous:

• I have limited reach.

• I am tired.

• Distribution is expensive.

• I have to make the thing.

• I have to pay for other peoples labour.

• Printing is expensive.

• I have to spend time shipping books.

• I have to spend time managing an online store.

• I have to spend time organizing manufacturing.

• This is a lot of time spent not drwaing comics.

• It's exactly the book that I want to make.

These drawbacks are what lead me to think it was time to work with Silver Sprocket on Mutt Mag. Working with a publisher means I can spend time doing the thing I want to do; drawing comics.

Despite the fact that Sprocket offered me a better than their standard advance, working with them also meant I’ll make significantly less money. That’s fine, as referenced above, that comes with the tradeoff of having my work available at shows that I will not be attending. Comic shops will stock my book independent of my capacity to coordinate, wholesale, and ship the book. Hopefully that translates into new readers who maybe tune in for whatever it is I do next.

Comics is slow.

It must be. It’s something I always remind myself when I compare myself to other, more accoladed or better selling, cartoonists. For better and worse, comics is always about the thing I will make next. It’d be fair to call this the fuel that powers the engine of my bullheaded delusion.

Arriving back at the decision to self publish Mutt Mag wasn’t an easy one. If you want to sift through the wreckage, you can find the posts on social media.

Working with a publisher should ideally be a mutual exchange. With an indie publisher, what I do not receive as money in my pocket, hopefully lends materials to whatever it is that I am building more broadly; be it some ephermal thing like clout or something more solid like reach. It’s a delicate balance and that exchange can very easily be thrown. That's often the nature of working with an institution. However, a contract codifies the balance; it’s why I felt the need to draw attention to the contract Sprocket uses when they tweeted out an ill-conceived illustrated description of their practices in their contract. No amount of bloviating or explaining can remove that dynamic of a contract. Publishers are given power by the contracts we sign. There’s no reason to assume a contract won’t be exercised to its full extent by both parties. I digress.

The differences between publishing and self publishing are starker after walking this silly path back home to self publishing. The print run is maybe a third of what would have been planned with Sprocket. The book will not be at any festivals this year. The book will not be at any American festivals for the foreseeable future. The book will only be available at a few comic stores. I will spend a few weeks packing and shipping orders instead of drawing comics. It’s just me and the audience I have already grown.

Again — comics are slow.

I find myself now looking at the Sprocket situation, and believing their speed is what’s at the heart of what went wrong. It requires dedication to move slowly in a world that values quickness. In many respects, it’s a privilege to move at a tortoises pace in a world devised by and for hares.

So far, much of the response to the Sprocket situation, in regards to the future of comics, has circled two topics:

• This is just the way of things in comics. 


• Self publishing is the future of comics.

I do not find it particularly helpful to shrug and just allow for a world where publishers must take advantage of cartoonists. This narrative is true, but as always, there's a cynicism in it is unhelpful. It's an abdication of the role we play in this "industry" as cartoonists. It’s allowing our terms to be defined for us; if you want to make comics you just have to put up with it. Sure, a bit. I have no illusions and do not expect that comics will change over night. I also am not expecting that we will live in a world where we all make 80k a year off of comic books. If that's our primary concern, we're probably better off investing in a hot dog stand.

It's important to remember that publishers want our work. We have the power to collectively define terms. It's why understanding the contracts we sign matters. It's why conversations amongst cartoonists are integral to the future of comics. If you take being a cartoonist seriously, sharing the terms you get and how you've been treated should be viewed as part of your job.

The comics market is wide and strange. The old way of doing things has been dying for decades. The new way shows promise, but is still a narrow reflection of the creative capacity of the form. Is there money here? Not really. Not yet. But I, maybe naively, believe there’s something to be found if we take more care in assessing how the business of comics should be run as opposed to treating it like any other business.

There’s room for me to be wrong here — I am just a cartoonist.

As for self publishing being the future, it’s something I am practicing but am skeptical of. Perhaps the future is that we each have our own little garden we tend. Perhaps that is actually the better way. However, it is not easy to tend this garden. It requires patience, care, dedication, delusion, and, worst of all, money and time. It is not an easy thing to do. It is not an open thing to foster.

Worst of all, self publishing requires the cartoonist to be many things. It requires them to spend time elsewhere. It requires them to learn and make mistakes. There’s more money here but it is still not professional money. It requires an entire recalibration of the individual — a move from thousands to hundreds. It requires an alchemizing of the poison that laces our blood into something else; what is success? What does it look like? Is it a public facing thing or something shared amongst friends at a private garden party? Can it be small?

This is the perimeter of where these thoughts have lead. I know the current model that necessitates the cartoonist at the bottom of an agreement is no future for us as cartoonists.

I can gesture at things, but I don't have answers. I'm trying to get comfortable with that.

On good days, I am content. I tell stories that matter to me. I owe much of this to a middle class upbringing and a lack of student debt. I cannot advise anyone to pursue self publishing. I move slow and it has mostly worked for me. I am aware that it is precarious and I could wake up tomorrow and find that this is no longer sustainble for me to pursue.

For now, I remain extremely grateful to those that show up for my books and to those that give me a few dollars a month on patreon. Thank you for making this garden a place worth spending time.

*citation needed