These days, “self-publishing” is something everyone seems to do now and again. Before the Dawning of the Digital Age, you (meaning me) mostly heard about it from young comic book creators who would get carried away with their projects. It would begin with them wanting to draw Spider-Man or Batman for the big publishers and eventually the plans would turn into Self-Publishing. Meaning that the young creators would pay a local printer all the money they had in exchange for several boxes of black & white comic books. A few would get sold to neighbors and family members, and the rest would sit in their boxes until they would eventually be found years later under a light coat of mold.
If you could catch this process early enough, you could ask the young cartoonist why he or she wants to trade in doing comic book art for doing comic book press work, distribution, bill-paying, editing, shipping… y’know. Publishing.
The truth was that they DON’T want to be publishers. They want to see comic books with their art in them, and selling your work to the big publishers is a LOT of disappointment and hard work. Of course, having your own comics printed was a lot of disappointment and hard work, too, but you don’t know that until you’ve done it and started to ask just what the hell you had been thinking.
Now, of course, you can print up one or two books. Or a hundred. You don’t have to cash in a savings bond and have a printers-minimum 5000 copies made. And distribution is now all social media and Amazon and amazing stuff.
None of that has anything to do with anything. But I suspect that the ‘getting-carried-away’ that Paste is doing in todays cartoon only came to me because of being around a lot of young cartoonists. And being a young cartoonist a long time ago.
Might be more successful starting up a Whitewater Bigfoot Hunter’s blog first and then tying to a youtube channel, then cross-publishing to a local cable network that is required by the government to offer free air time to neighborhood customers…
Do you Greg, perchance have several boxes of comic books that you printed?
Nope, but it was a near thing. I was wisely asked then what I wisely ask others now.
pennywise and pound foolish, as the saying goes, for Paste and Bob.
TSOJ has it perfectly…
I did a certain amount of my own vanity press over the last fifteen or so years, easier said than done. It is relatively easy though to get a ISBN number… and I consider it easypeasy now to have a just-in-time place print’m and ship’m as they’re ordered.
What did you write about?
Rocks and new age stuff. Part of when making jewelry was the day job. Right clothes, right lingo, 10c rock is worth $10….
Um, I still have a few hundred self-published comics in my studio attic space. I consider it a wising-up part of my process. Now I mostly get ripped off by other publishers rather than handing my money over to the local printer. Sometimes I even get paid by publishers. But still there are moldy books in my attic.
And what did you write about?
KNO3, I drew a book called Escape To The Stars back in the 80s. It was written by (now) movie producer, Phil Hwang. I actually did get paid by him for the first two issues, then he ran out of lawn mowing money and I picked up the tab for issue three with a small inheritance. Issue 4 was produced on a budget of around $800 (two color cover) and I don’t know where we found the money for that. Issue 5 was similar but with a three color cover (back when that mattered). And issue 6 was when things got rocky, so we both went our own ways. (We patched things up later).
I have an old copy of the original ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ that has a two-color cover and black & white interior. Man, that was a looong time ago.
Neat. So scan it, set up a webcomic, then hawk it.
I’m sure there’s a con out there you could hit and put those oldy mouldys out and get your $ back… nice display in the dealer room and floss the stuff out of the chompers and autograph a few?
If there’s a con out there that wants them I haven’t found it in 25+ years. Given copies to a few friends, but that’s about it. I may dump a load on the freebie table some place though. The problem is that I’ve got all these years of experience beyond my abilities back then and don’t want my reputation to suffer if someone thinks these are recent releases. Not likely, but I’ve been surprised before by just how these things can be misinterpreted.
Ooh, Ooh- big display- “Antique, Rare Comic Books”and “Thirty Years Old! Ancient!” and “You won’t find these anywhere else!”
The problem with the ease of publishing nowadays is that there is nobody standing guard at the gates to the masses to filter out all the dreck. Granted the stewards of big media are easily swayed by expensive meals, social connections, backroom closed-door favors, and good old-fashioned bribery, but still, at least someone was reading the thousands of manuscripts of well worn cultural tropes to find something worth reading; or slogging through the hundreds of thousands of garage band demo tapes to find the next earworm that can be drilled into our collective heads through repetition on the radio. Jaded I am.
Even in the times of yore, there was vanity presses and drek got printed.
ah well, let the reader beware.