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I think your plan as outlined in the first post is a very good plan, GL.
My (somewhat) limited experience to date has been in preparing a pitch (usually several pages of finished sequential artwork, even more pages of script, and a plot outline for either a finite series or the first arc of an ongoing series), getting it printed up (Comixpress and Ka-Blam are great!) and then sending it out with a nice letter to about a dozen different comics publishers. (You can download a pitch for Rise, Kraken!, which will be published by Ape in 2008, here if you want to see what I usually throw in.)
And then getting rejected by a lot of people, and (luckily for me) usually accepted by one.
My goal is to "break into comics," though, and hopefully-eventually make enough money at it to eke out a living as a freelance writer. Probably never JUST on comics, but with comics as a staple in a varied writing diet.
But even if you're not trying to get into comics as a full-on thing, there's a lot to be said to finding a publisher:
- less financial risk up-front from publishing (less profit, too, if it sells, but to be honest your chances of making money off an off-label comic are so low that the no-money-down element has been very compelling for me);
- distribution and accounting taken care of for you (I hate administrative work, so it's worth it for me to -- again -- make less money off a book if it means I don't have to deal with Diamond, shops, promotional materials, accounting, yadda yadda)
- brand equity (for better or worse, having a comic with a "brand" on it is a mark of (sometimes dubious) quality, but at least it means that a publisher has already seen it and liked it enough to risk some shekels on it)
- resumé power (again, being published by somebody with a track record and established presence looks better than self-publishing, even when you're looking for writing work in other fields)
- goofy perks (you get to hang out at the publisher's table at conventions and get in for free, your comics get reviewed on comic-review sites, you can fail in broader and more spectacular ways than you could ever manage on your lonesome)
BUT!!
Self-publishing is also awesome! There are two great companies (at least) that do bang-up work with affordable comics printing: Comixpress and Ka-Blam. I've used both and both were swell. Then you get a bunch of boxes of comics, and you can also push people to direct-order some print-on-demand stuff directly from the printer if you want.
AND!!
Web publishing is a perfectly credible way of going about things. You can either slap together some InterRealEstate and just put it up yourself, or try to work with one of the portal sites (Modern Tales is good for avant-gardeish material, Graphic Smash does stellar action comics, Keenspot is invitation-only for... well, strips that are just kinda popular). The vast majority of online comics are strip-centric (yo) but there's no shortage of comic-book-comics online out there too, a lot of them just as good or better than what's being published in dead trees these days.
So yeah, try hitting up a few publishers first, because they make life easy and almost guarantee broader exposure for far, far less effort than you'd be able to accomplish yourself. If you don't care about making money off the book. The only thing I'd really recommend there is getting a short run of the book printed at Comixpress or Ka-Blam to send to the prospective publishers, because then you're sending them something that looks and feels like a comic and I think that has a lot of subconscious impact on their "yeah, we could do this" reaction.
If that doesn't work out, there's always the Web route, and run a few pages of the book as a preview on Comicspace; if it looks like you're drawing a crowd, see who would be interested in buying a printed version and gauge that to see if moving to print through Comixpress or Ka-Blam would be worthwhile.
As far as potential publishers go: are you set on black-and-white? Because that'll narrow you down right off the bat.
It looks a little SF for SLG (formerly Slave Labor), but the publisher, Dan Vado, is incredibly cool and very open-minded (people tend to pigeonhole SLG because its biggest hits have been a touch... gothy... but they also do stuff like Rex Libris). They will NOT get back to you fast about submissions, though. Well, they might, but it's a small shop and they really do read everything they get, so turnaround can be slow.
Oni doesn't take unsolicited submissions, which is too bad because they'd be my #2.
WAY too SF for Top Shelf, but the art style is very Top Shelf, so I dunno.
And I could keep listing publishers and my opinions (based on sending my pitches out in the past, the feedback I got, and what stuck to who), but honestly I'd say for the couple of extra bucks, just fire it off in all directions. You might catch Erik Larsen's assistant in an exceptionally good mood or something -- the market is shrinking and shifting constantly, so it's hard to tell when a company is going to suddenly decide to strike out in a bold new direction. |
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