In his 1964, Bill Lear of the Lear Jet Corporation began a push to create what he felt was a technological breakthrough in music and bring that to the mass market. Up until that point, people had 2 basic options to listen to recorded music- vinyl records (which were fragile and required bulky and sensitive equipment) and Reel to Reel tapes (which had their own issues). Lear took some prior developments and refined something known as the “endless loop tape cartridge,” which allowed whole LP’s worth of material to be stored and listened to in a mobile setting. Finally, you could bring your favorite music in your car or, using headphones, you could bring a relatively small and portable device with you to listen to music on the go. Everything before it was supposed to “end” and you could blame it on… the 8 Track tape.

For years, every new development in comics has brought with it a Nostradamus like sense of gloom and doom. Black and White Indies were going to “end” Superhero comics. Trade collections were going to “end” issue sales. Web comics were going to ‘”end” print comics, then Mobile comics were going to do the same and now the iPad is going to set fire to everything.

Why do we buy into that?

Because we still have that lingering feeling that Comics are really just paper versions of 8 Track tapes. We think that Comics can easily become irrelevant because they ARE their Media and that’s all they can be. We associate holding a single issue “Comic Book” in our hands as being some holy grail, and that if “everyone” doesn’t support the same vision of what the Comics industry “should be,” then it’s going to utterly collapse.

Today’s Lesson in Failure is- “Comic Books” ARE Comic Books.

Contrary to popular mythology, every new development in Modern Comics has been spurred on by one thing- necessity. The so-called “Black and White revolution” for example was nothing more than people discovering that is was far cheaper to print small runs of books in B&W than color. Mini-Comics? Printers started making pamphlets from the early Gutenberg days- Mini Comics people just “discovered” it all over again with mimeograph machines and photocopiers because it was comics on the cheap. Digital comics? Hosting a comic is no more difficult than hosting a family photo site, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than printing 2000 “Comic Books.” Trade Paperbacks? Setup charges are ALWAYS the largest cost factor in printing, so it’s cheaper to print an 128 page paperback than 4 “Comic Books” which are 32 pages long even though the Trade is a more durable format.

Point being- if you are fixated on doing “Comic Books,” and by that you mean that you HAVE to do full color, “Modern Comic” sized pamphlets, then you are thinking waaaaaaay to small. There are tons of ways to do Comics, and all of them are valid and have their strengths and weaknesses. What is important is if you REALLY want to make Comics, then you have to get off your lazy butt and make them.

For a moment, let’s forget about having an already established publisher print your comic and talk about self publishing. To be clear, I say that not just for the sake on illustration, but because in all honesty, that probably won’t happen. While it is true that some people occasionally come out of nowhere and get their book picked up by a publisher and it’s a huge hit, it’s also true that people hit the lottery even though the odds are in the millions-to-one range. Getting your book signed, even if you are amazingly talented, is actually a much larger set of odds than hitting the lottery, so if we put that aside for a moment, we can get on to something constructive…

So, accepting the idea that we are talking about self publishing a book, it’s important to realize that “self publishing” doesn’t just mean printing “Comic Books.” It could mean that, but it could also mean that you will deliver your Comics to people in any number of ways. While what you are going to do with a Comic does matter a little in terms of how you lay it out, if you want to make comics, then make comics now and figure out what you will do with your finished work when it’s finished.

When Daniel and I went to press with Robot 13, it wasn’t the first time we had dealt with printers. In fact, Robot 13 is the third “Comic Book” format work we have done together. In 2005, we printed our first Blacklist Studios book- a B&W introduction to a Graphic Novel we were shopping around at the time called “Enlightenment.” That book was printed by someone who “specialized” in small press comics, which we found out meant he did a crappy job, printed less than half of the job we paid him for and closed up shop and literally ran out of town never to be seen again. While that book did help us get things rolling, it was an expensive lesson for us to learn.

The second book was a better experience on many levels; KING! Looked beautiful, people loved it and we sold through the whole run of books we printed. While that is all well and good, since we went to a reputable local printer and were very concerned with the quality of the book, we ended up losing money even with a 100% sell-through. Now, to be fair, we were mostly concerned with publicity and in that regard, the first KING! One-shot was a huge success. In terms of making back even what we put into the book, however, it was a loss and that is never easy to take.

As I mentioned, Robot 13 was our third shot at printing a book. We knew we needed someone who could do quality work, and we also knew that we couldn’t print locally at a loss anymore. What we ended up doing was using a Chinese printer who was recommended to us, and while we had to put down a sizable investment, we were able to print a book that looked good and was still printed cheaply enough that we could sell and actually hope to break even or better and have the money to print future issues. While there were many, many minor bumps in the road, this time around we had learned enough from our many past mistakes to go in with a plan that made sense and that had some shot at working.

Oh wait… Are you getting a sense of me giving you the old, “Do as I say, not as I do,” act? Well, you are partially right in taking it that way. While it IS true that Blacklist has printed our books as traditional “Comic Books,” it is also a lesser known fact that exponentially more people have downloaded our comics on their iPhones and Android devices than have bought paper copies. At some point, the issues will be collected into a Trade, and I am pretty confident that more people will read that collection than everyone who bought copies of the issues as well. And if you look at the hideous numbers of people who have illegally downloaded the bootleg digital versions that are floating around on the Internet of Robot 13, it’s pretty clear that had we put the book up for free as a web comic, the readership might have been insane.

In our case, we did what we did because we could. If we couldn’t have printed the book in issues, however, we still would have made Robot 13 and figured something out. Maybe it would have started as a Web comic. Maybe it would have gone straight to the iPhone. Maybe we would have done a Trade from the beginning. Hell- we might have even done the whole thing in B&W at Kinkos if we had to, because we were driven to do comics.

The key, however, is MAKING Comics. Get stuff done first, and then work on how you are going to get your stuff out there. Fixating on how you are going to print full color issues is really just an excuse. For every successful comic that is being printed today as issues, there are dozens more which are first being published in other ways. Yes, your web comic isn’t on a spinner rack next to X-Men, but there are a great many web comics with a HIGHER readership than X-Men. Sure, many web comic people would love to print their comics as issues, but by finding a Medium that was do-able for their situation, they made it work. There is no shame in that… in fact, that’s a success story.

If you want to Fail, though, fixate on floppy issues in full color on the best paper money can buy. Don’t concern yourself with alternate ways of getting your “books” to people- all those granola eating Internet hippies don’t know what’s good for them! Remember, you NEED to print your comics as “Comic Books” to validate your existence!

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