On charting your course

You started crowdfunding in 2009 and were the pioneer in the comic space. You paved the way for a lot of other folks to do it themselves. And I’m wondering, how has your approach to crowdfunding and publishing at large changed since then?

I still consider crowdfunding integral to how Iron Circus functions because, while comics has changed a lot, the scene in comics has just grown exponentially since 2009. There are millions more comics readers in the world, but more specifically in the North American market, than there were back then. They’re kind of disproportionately skewed younger, and a lot of that is the influence of the Scholastic Book Fairs.

Without getting too deep in the weeds on comics history, comics were very much isolated. They were sequestered to comic shops for decades and decades and decades until Scholastic took a chance on comics and published Bone and Raina Telgemeier’s Smile. And those went over huge at the Scholastic Book Fairs and kind of set the tone for where graphic novels and comics went in the future.

Simultaneously coming in from the outside is the influence of manga, Tokyopop back in the day, and these days more VIZ, Seven Seas, and other translation houses. And because of their influence, they determine the market. As a result, while comics has blown up, it’s gained double-digit percentages in market share, it is still mostly considered for twelve-year-olds on the outside.

Adult graphic novels are still a very small percentage of the market, and it’s very hard to reach adult readership if you rely on the traditional way books are marketed in the United States. We don’t have the shelf space allotted to us that other more well-established formats and genres get. But if you crowdfund your book, and you establish a reputation that I make graphic novels for adults, that is going to have a better chance of reaching people who might be interested in it if you go online.

And one of the powers of Kickstarter that it’s always had, even back in the day, even 2009 when I got started, is that a lot of people treat it like a shopfront. They go there and they browse, and there is no biased sales force between you and your potential readership. There’s no one who scratches their chin and goes, “Oh, that’s an interesting graphic novel idea. But Barnes and Noble only has slots for five more graphic novels on their shelf this season. We know that most of the graphic novels being sold are being sold to twelve-year-olds. So we have to give those spots to these books aimed at twelve-year-olds, even though your idea is good,” because it’s not about the book quality, it’s kind of about hard cold economics.

But that’s a non-factor when you’re selling through Kickstarter, and that’s why Iron Circus still uses Kickstarter. It is a great way to access audiences, and with that foothold that we can get using Kickstarter, we can launch the book into the standard-issue book market from a much secure standing.

It’s interesting to bring up manga because one thing about manga and the way that it’s consumed in Japan, which I think is so drastically different than America, is you’ll have books come out in your weekly magazines. People will then vote on the chapters or the books, and that rise in popularity helps carry them to the book market. Kickstarter has almost taken that place, where people are able to vote with their dollar directly to help bring something to life. There’s less of that slow-build of readership over time, but it is interesting to see it has really just become this direct to consumer distribution channel in so many different ways that I think other cultures have maybe already figured out many, many years ago.

And comics are especially well-suited to this because they’ve been treated so differently from every other book market in North America for decades now, and I’m talking at least since the ’60s. There has been zero shame attached to self-publishing, whereas that was this hurdle that prose publishing had to really work to get over the past 50 years or so. There was a lot of, “Oh, it’s boutique, it’s vanity press.” That was the term, vanity press, when you self-published a prose novel.

But when it came to comics, because of the influence of the Comics Code Authority—everybody feel free to Google that if you want a wild ride. If you wanted to make a comic that wasn’t like Bugs Bunny or Superman, for decades, your only option was making it yourself. And so, there was never any sort of shame attached to self-publishing. So when Kickstarter came along, I always tell people it formalized what comics, alternative comics anyway, was doing anyway. It just made it transparent, automated and much more organized than keeping track of people in PayPal, which is what we were doing first.

I watched a previous interview you did, and you said that your ethos for creating has always been to own your cool and produce work that you genuinely care about rather than creating content that follows pop culture trends. Now that you’ve made a career really owning your cool and producing work that you genuinely care about, has any of that ethos changed or morphed or evolved at all?

I’ve had a lot of experience now with engaging with legacy media. Surviving comics is this sort of war of attrition. It’s last person standing. And Iron Circus has been around so long at this point that it’s kind of unavoidable. It’s this thing that won’t go away. As a result, I’ve started to interface a lot more with people who are part of legacy media.

But the really nice thing is that with the 17 years of work I’ve put into establishing what we are and what we do and what we like, the kind of legacy media that is starting to show up in our inbox are the people who feel the same way. And I have to admit, maybe 10 years ago, I would’ve thought people like that didn’t exist. I really, dismissively referred to “Hollywood” stuff as “The Machine,” and I was convinced they weren’t interested.

My perspective’s shifted because it’s not so much that people who are part of legacy media aren’t interested in the kind of things that Iron Circus puts out, it’s that they’re beholden to a hit-driven environment. This is true for a lot of media, but it needs to be as appealing to as many people as possible because everything now costs so much that it needs to make a hundred million dollars before it breaks even.

One thing Matt Damon said that stuck with me is how some movies would not get made in the modern environment. He said, for example, Boondock Saints would not get made in the modern environment because it was too weird. There was a time where people would be brought weird scripts, and they would be like, “Oh, okay. How much would this cost? Oh, all right, we can try it.” And when that happened, of course a lot of them didn’t pop off, but every once in a while, one did, and it would sort of change the paradigm.

Nowadays, there is no space for that. It’s just like we’re living in a land of extremes. We’re living in the land of 300 million dollar Marvel movies or A24 making these little million dollar movies, churning them out factory style, and hoping one pops off. There’s no middle ground left, and that is something I’ve been made aware of now. And I am really eager to see what the people I’ve talked to now, the people who also want more Boondock Saints in the world, figure out and what I could do to be a part of that.

I hear you on the land of extremes. I’m a big Tokusatsu fan, Power Rangers and Super Sentai, and one thing I found is that the internet gives a lot of space for those niche communities to work outside of the system.

Where I’ve created, I make role-playing games, and I made a game that is solely focused on the emotional journey of a Super Sentai hero or a Power Rangers hero. The game is not combat focused at all, and so it is, in a way, not what people expect of that media, but I have a very dedicated community of people who actively want that kind of content. And while it’s not on the same scale as where those legacy media or those higher level movies are, there’s still a lot of life out in that ecosphere.

It’s kind of funny. It reminds me of those early Wild West days of the internet where you had the people who would take the time to painstakingly make GeoCities pages or web pages for something they were hyper-focused on. I think we’re getting back to that a little bit, which is great.

Yeah, I honestly think we are, too, because people are coming to understand the extreme nature of “mainstream media.” And I want to clarify: tThere’s no shame in liking the super-duper giganto Marvel Disney popular stuff. Quite frankly, it is grown in a lab for you to like it, so it’s weirder if you don’t. That’s their entire perspective.

But when all that energy is put into, “Will it Play in Peoria,” which is a thing they used to say in stage shows like vaudeville and stuff when there was an act that was maybe a little off the beaten path, a little weird. They’re like, “Okay, I like it, but will it play in Peoria,” which is shorthand or slang for, Peoria is the most bog-standard, Plain Jane city in the United States. Peoria, Illinois is a cross section of America. Will Peoria like it? Because if it plays in Peoria, that means we can play it anywhere. And everybody’s super concerned now if movies, if television, if it’ll play in Peoria. And when that’s where all the money and attention is focused, if you have a little kind of a weird interest, kind of a niche interest like Tokusatsu, you’re not necessarily going to be catered to by the people with the bottomless pockets.

And of the things, when you talk about early internet, I refer to that period of the internet as the Simpson Shrine period because I remember people would make whatever X Shrine on their Geocities page like, “This is my Buffy Shrine. This is my Simpson Shrine.” And nowadays, people are having to sort of remake those little communities because there’s almost a drought of really, really big ticket, big dollar investment in anything that won’t play in Peoria. And I think that is where all the most interesting stuff is happening right now when it comes to video games and film and television, people who, they don’t have the budget, but they have the ideas. And they are willing to take a risk in a way no one at Disney or Warner or Paramount or Discovery, I don’t even know, the giant media octopus can really afford to, quite frankly.

In your professional opinion, when we’re looking at comics specifically, what makes a book worth bringing to crowdfunding?

I do get questions a lot when I do my onboarding of creators who I’ve decided to publish. They’re like, “Do I have to run a crowdfund?” No, no. If I haven’t brought it up, you won’t be having one, and I mean that respectfully.

I think that’s a great call if it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. There are projects that make sense and projects that don’t.

I think books that just happened to fit into the mold that the mainstream market has built for the graphic novel right now. [For instance], I don’t typically crowdfund middle-grade reader things. I just send those direct to market because they do fine without the added complication, and it is a complication of crowdfunding. But if a creator has a pre-established online audience that is used to buying from them, that’s usually a really big indicator that we’re going to send it to crowdfund. If it is an adult audience graphic novel, especially if it’s had a webcomic presence, if it has been updating online for three or four years and has a readership that already knows what it is, that’s usually a pretty good indicator we’re going to send it to crowdfund.

Or if it’s something that is just wildly expensive that I simply do not have the pockets for, that’s when we send it to Crowdfund, which is where Lackadaisy comes in. Our first animation project where animation is so expensive. It’s so ridiculously, horrifyingly expensive, especially if you want to do it the way we are doing it, which is kind of high end and with a crew. You can make an animation by yourself in a room, absolutely. But if you decided to do that with Lackadaisy, two minutes would take you a year, and we need to have a better production schedule than that.

In the future, we would love to run more animation projects. And we are looking into it because animation is just as subject to what I’ve been talking about with live action. There’s a lot of cowardice involved in animation right now, where people don’t want to try new things. I grew up during the phase where MTV was throwing a whole bunch of stuff against the wall seeing what would stick. There are shows that were on MTV when I was a teen that I still think about all the time, like Æon Flux. That was incredible to be able to turn on the TV and see something like that, this incredibly weird animation that’s clearly, strongly the vision of this one creator.

There will always be creatives with strong visions, but right now most of them are on YouTube, and most of them can do maybe two minutes every couple of months unless they make a ton of compromises and are basically doing stick figure animatics, and then they can do it pretty regularly. But if they don’t want to make those compromises, again, if they want to make something that looks like Lackadaisy, if they want to make prestige animation, they’re kind of hamstrung. I want to be able to work with people who have a vision of that level of quality, that level of love, that level of craft involved in their project. And I want to be able to figure out a way to make that happen because pardon my language, but Hollywood sure as shit isn’t interested anymore.

Again, it’s finding niche communities who are willing to support and really wait to see the end product. That’s the community you need to keep tapping into to be able to make the things the way you want. As someone who has a lot of irons in the fire, what keeps you going? What keeps you publishing?

Spite, a lot of spite. My road to where I am now and my road in the future to where I would like to be, quite frankly, are lined with the trodden-upon bodies of people who were trying really, really hard to insist I could not do it. And I feel like one of those cheesy anime villains where it’s just like, “Don’t you know that only makes me stronger?” I have a passion for comics, I have a passion for cartoons, and I love what I do. I love making what I make, and I love seeing that stuff out there in the world, entertaining people and influencing people. But I also love knowing there were people who told me I couldn’t.

I’ve experienced that in my creative career. For me and my games, there are people who are overly critical about how they think things should operate, and my response is usually like, “Well, just go make it yourself.” I think you and I are of a similar build where we are passionate about something in a very particular way and we’re not seeing that done through other regular channels, so it’s up to us to go out and do it. And if people tell us we can’t, or it’s met with un-constructive criticism, it’s better to just continue to push on and be true to yourself. Because ultimately, I think it’ll find the right audiences and reach the right people.

Absolutely, and one of the things that’s always nice to consider is that we are standing on the shoulders of giants in every way. And that’s especially true in trying to figure out a pathway these days because one of the things I tell people sometimes with a slightly sour and annoyed note in my voice is, I feel crowdfunding is a really American idea because our funding for the arts in this country is so terrible. I work with creators who live in other countries, and sometimes I buy their books, and on the back page of each book it’s all, “Made with a grant from the Finnish government.” And I’m just like, wow. Must be nice. That’s something that’s not there in the US.

Something like Kickstarter where you are forced to appeal to the people and say, “Hey, I want to make this thing, and you’re kind of my only chance of ever making this thing. So how about it? What do you say?” is something that happened here first because this was the perfect environment to create a platform like that. Dedicated work has been put in to make sure artists get no funding in this country.

Absolutely true. It’s born out of a need for just more direct support. And yeah, it’s an American problem in the way that we don’t have good funding, but it’s a very American solution in a way that it’s people self organizing, speaking their truth and finding ways to get the things made that they want to get made.

Part of me is like, I love that. But at the same time, part of me is like, I wish that that barrier wasn’t there. But since, what do they say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, we kind of need to work with what we’re given.

Looking forward, what stones are left unturned for you? What do you want to try next? What haven’t you done in your career that you would still like to do?

Oh, gosh. I want to make more cartoons. I want to make more graphic novels. We experimented a little bit with video game making, and I think that was a good tentative first step. My problem is I kind of always want to do everything, and that has been both a strength and a weakness, where I spread myself too thin, but also I make a lot of friends and I open a lot of doors. And this sounds bizarre coming from someone like me, but I’d like to make more inroads with legacy media because like I said, in the last few years, it’s been enlightening. They are clearly frustrated. There are a lot of frustrated people over there, and I don’t know what else to say other than, “Hey, if you see this interview, and you’ve got some ideas, what’s up? Hi, let’s talk.” I have a very sort of in-the-weeds way of doing things, a very sort of lo-fi Radio Free Europe way of doing things, and maybe you have some ideas that would be well-suited. My email is public. Hi.