Q&A: Elijah Brubaker

Here’s some weekend reading for you. I talked to Elijah Brubaker last week, before San Diego Comic Con, about his current project, Reich at Sparkplug. The series is a fantastic historical fiction comic about the notorious psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Now that the SDCC news floodgates are closed I feel like I can post this without it getting lost in the shuffle.

Check it out!

Interview: Dash Shaw

Please check out my interview with Dash Shaw over at Wizard proper.

Dash just released his massive book, The Bottomless Belly Button through Fantagraphics. We talk about that and his fantastic web comic BodyWorld.

Please take the time to go read this! Dash is a super interesting guy and his work is really top notch.

Interview: JASON

Please take a second of your time and go read my interview with Norwegian cartoonist, Jason!
Over the past few years Jason has seriously become one of my favorite comic creators. I’d say that Hey, Wait…, his first translated release from Fantagraphics, is probably one of my top ten favorite comic books. The rest of his body of work isn’t so bad either (understatement). It holds a certain charm you really won’t find anywhere else. His sense of humor is incredible and his cartooning is truly one of a kind. You’d be doing yourself a favor by plowing through the many U.S. releases he has to offer. For those of you in the New York area, try to make your way down to MoCCA Art Festival this weekend. Jason is making a rare appearance courtesy of Fantagraphics, and MoCCA is still pretty rad otherwise.

This interview was conducted via e-mail this past week while Jason was traveling in Paris.

Enjoy!

A Week of Rad Interviews: Tuesday: Lars Brown

It’s day two, fools, and that means my talk with North World creator Lars Brown is up for your perusal. I spoke to Lars about a month back and apologize to him for the delay in posting but think everyone’ll agree that the results were well worth the wait.

And for anyone who hasn’t yet seen Oni Press’ print edition of Brown’s first major North World long form story “The Epic of Conrad,” I should note that you can read most of it online right now at www.north-world.com.

A Week of Rad Interviews: Monday: Jeff Smith

Hey gang!

Welcome to Indie Jones’ week of rad interviews. See, of late Dave and I have been making a lot of phone calls to a bunch of comic creators and professionals that are, well, radical. You can scroll down below to see Dave’s chat with Eric Reynolds about Fantagraphics’ move to exclusivity in the direct market with Diamond, and over at the Big WU, you can see my interview with Bone and RASL creator Jeff Smith. about his art show at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Center.

And from here on out, each day of this week, I’ll post another link to a new rad interview with another face from the world of independent comics, including talks with:

Tuesday: A young creator behind one of the more buzzed about new titles of 2008.
Wednesday: A brand new face to the comics scene.
Thursday: A mainstream superhero artist getting accolades for his indie web comic.
Friday: An acclaimed cartoonist bringing back a fan favorite series in a new format.

If all goes to plan, I think by the end of the week we’ll all learn about some cool comic books, and I’ll possibly teach myself to post before 10:43 pm and wean myself off my overuse of the words “rad” and “radical” (ah who am I kidding…there’s no such thing as overuse of those words).

– KP

Eric Reynolds on Fantagraphics/Diamond exclusive

Last week news hit that alternative comics powerhouse Fantagraphics signed an exclusive direct market distribution deal with Diamond Distributors, effectively ending their longstanding wholesaling practices. Indie Jones checked in with Fantagraphics’ own Eric Reynolds to get a little insight on this move.

So what does this deal mean for Fantagraphics? What’s going to be changing?

The very simple big change is that we will not be wholesaling directly to retailers as we have for as long as I can remember. That frees us up considerably here to do more things other than just pushing paper and invoicing. It also will improve the bottom line in so far as we won’t have to chase bad account. Which is unfortunately a problem more often than anybody probably wants to admit in this business. But that’s the real basic thing. The press release with the headline, “Diamond signs Fantagraphics exclusive,” it almost sounds a little more dramatic than I really think it is. But exclusive is almost as an amorphous term at this point in comics as graphic novel is.

Do you see this as a chance to change Fantagraphics’ overall presence in the direct market?

I do, yeah. The bottom line is that we’ve had pretty steady year-to-year growth, overall, for probably going on about seven years now. Since about 2001 I think. Not giant growth. In fact we had giant growth in the early part of this decade when we moved to WW Norton [Fantagraphics' book trade distributor]. Since then it’s taken on a much more normal pattern of growth now that Norton has been dealing with us for seven years. They’ve ramped up our sales really hard, really fast and then they’ve slowly tapered to a very comfortable level that we’re very happy with. The direct market on the other hand on the other hand has sort of consistently gone down throughout that same time. And you could argue why that is, whether or not the book trade’s siphon off the direct market or whether the direct market is just not meeting demand with supply and ultimately I believe it’s somewhere in between those two things. Being Fantagraphics, being a publisher with less than 1% market share in the direct market, being probably the largest publisher left that didn’t have some sort of exclusivity or contractual arrangement with Diamond really made it tough for us to penetrate the direct market in any meaningful way. We had less access to the sales information and where our books were going, and who was buying them than every other publisher in the industry that did have an arrangement with Diamond. And we frankly got a lot of crap for not serving the direct market better. I’m routinely on the CBIA [Come Book Industry Alliance] retailer message boards and I would find myself often in a position, over the last ten years, where you’re defending yourself in regards to the direct market trying to tell people that, “no we actually too value the direct market,” in a way that’s frankly sort of absurd to me. Why would we not want to sell books to a market that wants to buy our books? But my point being that there’s been this sort of weirdly contentious relationship with the direct market that I don’t completely understand myself, particularly since we’ve started to have more and more success in the book trade. And, you know our success in the book trade was very much something we desperately needed. It wasn’t something we were seeking out at the expense of the direct market. It was something we sought out because we needed it to stay viable, because we were not surviving on the direct market. So to make a long story short, I really do think this will solidify the way that we work with the direct market. It will provide us with better information and it will help retailers. It will help our authors. There’s really no downside aside from the more abstract concerns about whether you’re contributing to the increasing hegemony of corporate America in the comic book industry. And that’s a fair question, but on the other hand sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

What do you think of some of the other criticisms out there? Like stocking issues?

Well, there’s sort of this weird chicken egg relationship going on with some of the criticisms I’ve heard about people saying, “Well right now I tried to order Ghost World from Diamond and they’re telling me they don’t have it. This is screwed up, why are you going to work with these guys?” But that’s sort of the whole point. By doing this we can control our inventory levels with Diamond. We can have access to that data and make sure that they are constantly stocked. It’s very much incumbent upon us to look after them and make sure that they’re doing a good job, and to a certain extent it’s incumbent upon retailers as well to communicate with us if there are any hiccups or bumps in the road. But having every single item of Fantagraphics in stock, in inventory, available for immediate order at a better discount where you can combine your shipping expenses with other reorders you’re placing with other distributors—I guess I just don’t completely understand some of the fears, because some of this is just like nuts and bolts. It’s like, you have inventory in a warehouse, it’s in the system, you order it, you ship it and if there are problems you work them out and you hammer them out, but this isn’t rocket science. I feel like we’ve done such a good job on the book trade and the direct market’s definitely the place that have needed to be shorn up a bit, and if we can do that we’ve got all of our bases covered, and how can that be a bad thing? I feel like between WW Norton and the book trade and now with this relationship with Diamond in the direct market, we really have our bases covered as well or better than any other publisher in comics. We’re positioned to be well saturated in the pop culture specialty market and also the more book reading literary market and those are good things.

Inside “Bone & Beyond”

Hey, children!

I don’t know how many of you are spending your Wednesday afternoon’s hanging out at the Big WU, but for those of you that have other priorities in life, you should totally check out the intrepid Robert Taylor’s comprehensive coverage of Jeff Smith’s “Bone & Beyond” art exhibit at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. Included are:

– A newsy report from the show’s opening weekend letting you know what all the fuss is about.

– A transcript of the live interview of Smith conducted by Scott McCloud.

– A fact-filled review of the show itself.

If that ain’t quite enough, the whole shebang comes with Robert’s photos (one of which is above), and later this week, I’ll be following up by talking to Smith about the opening and what else is going on with the show later this summer.

– KP

Two Rob Schrab Interviews

This past Wednesday, Middle School Kiel’s favorite comic book finally came to an end when Image Comics published Scud: The Disposable Assassin #24. With a completely subjective mindset, I have to say that it was awesome, and I highly recommend it to anyone who ever loved the series when creator Rob Schrab originally self-published it in the mid ’90s (if you’re unfamiliar, wait a few more weeks until the giant trade of the whole series hits on June 25th).

I don’t know if I could sum up in words how much I love this damn comic, and I don’t think anyone would care to read that anyway. But I thought maybe someone might want to read the two interviews I did with Schrab during the production of the final four issues (one was for the old site, the other for the mag’s Edge section), so here they are. The first interview took place just after the relaunch of Scud was announced in March of last year, and the second happened early this year in advance of the book’s February return. Enjoy.

Continue reading Two Rob Schrab Interviews…

Please go read: Kiel talks to the Bone curators

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a very in depth showcase of Bone creator Jeff Smith’s comics work opening up this weekend at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio on the campus of The Ohio State University. I can’t make it down for the opening, but luckily I got the chance to talk to the curators behind the exhibit Lucy Caswell & David Filipi. The pair were extremely nice and got me really excited for the show (fingers crossed I’ll make it before they close up shop in August), and you can read the interview the big WU.

For anyone in the Ohio area, I highly recommend heading down and seeing the exhibit. All the info for the show can be found here. If you can’t head there just yet, worry not. We’re having the intrepid Robert Taylor stop in to review the show, talk to all involved and snap as many photos as he can, so check back to the blog next week for all the details!

ALSO: Vaneta Rogers talks to Smith about the show over at Newsarama.

Not to miss: Dave interviews Todd Depastino

With all the New York Con news hitting the Big WU, I’m awful afraid some of you might miss Dave’s very in depth interview with Todd Depastino, editor of Willie & Joe: The World War Two Years a collection of Bill Mauldin’s WWII strips and biographer of Mauldin himself.

So, please go look at that before you read about the new Secret Invasion tie-ins or whatever.

The cartoons are really quite good, and they make you think: