D.J. Coffman - Sequential Artist, Thinker

Skipped the gym this morning. I’m feeling a little sort and ill.

Talked a lot on the phone yesterday with our pal Jorge Vega. You know, the guy who won the 2nd Comic Book Challenge with Gunplay? It’s an exciting time for him, as his winning book is now available for preorder through comic shops across the globe. (go on, click that link and preorder his book, it’s good stuff!)  — But Jorge was a bit befuddled by the timing of how things work with the distributor– I mean, we’re literally asking YOU, the people out there to preorder a book now that’s not going to ship to you or be in your shop until April. And we’re mostly doing that online, where society is use to “click and get it now” fast, fast, fast. And preorder numbers for ANY indy usually rely on good people and fans going in and preordering, because many shops can’t take many risks on new indy comics. They just don’t  have the shelf space or the budget.

So yeah, you stare at this conundrum of the direct market system. Jorge wonders why we even deal with it AT ALL. Why not skip it? I gave several reasons why not to, but I won’t get into them, because they are mostly perceptual and political and social reasons. I mean, YES, if you have a system in place where you are ready to ship things out yourself, stock your own merchandise and have an ad/promotional engine going…. DO IT!

For Hero By Night, even though we haven’t been in the top selling books in the country yet, being spread around the country in these shops with new people discovering the book has been good for us. It’s one of the reasons we’ve garnered a lot of great reviews. I guess we’re like a “sleeper hit” right now. And yet, YES, the whole preorder system is half-nutty to me. It seems the better way to get preorders wouldn’t be to lobby my readers to go buy at shops (which I wish they WILL) but to lobby instead directly to the people who are making the comic orders… the retailers. But we’re back to point A, again. Wherein, the retailers don’t have enough budgets to carry tons of indy books. They try the things they hear buzz on, or word of mouth on.  It’s not an easy system.

God bless webcomics, man. After thinking about all this Diamond stuff, and how backward the system seems in today’s day and age— and this wasn’t my first dealing with them either, and I do actually LIKE Diamond, mind  you, but after thinking about all these issues, I’m reminded of why when I put my own book out, I decided to do it direct to the readers online at Yirmumah.net. It went over pretty well, but YES, it was taxing. I always thought to myself though, if a BIG company caught onto this model somehow? But there are mutliple problems then there too… the more people, the more budgets go up…the more time and other resources… it doesn’t really become WORTH it to a big company to do any kind of POD or direct ship deal. They want to sell the 20k deals, the 100k deals, not the 4 figure deals. Understandable.

My prediction has always been that I believe the “web” will replace the monthly comic book editions. Which is ironic, because right now we’re doing the print editions. People said I was crazy 5 years ago. But you see that Marvel and DC have seen the writing on the wall. And just about everyone I’ve talked to, and I’ve talked to some very important people who know their stuff, they make their money off the bigger trade collections.  And hey, no one will argue… when I handed people the HBN hardcover, their eyes lit up and they usually say “Wow!”– the same people just saw monthly print comics as “Oh, neat.”  — From an “oh, neat” to a “Wow!” — hah.

I sometimes wonder if people like myself, Jorge and a few others… are we just thinking too fast. Are we TOO innovative? Is there such a thing? I often wonder if I drive the people at my publisher, Platinum Studios, a bit crazy with my business ideas and suggestions, consulting… My paranoid mind thinks that they must sometimes sit back and think… “This dude is insane. Who would want to do ALL THAT?” — But hey, I like sharing ideas and helping other creators and publishers.

I’m rambling… but I’m sore and feeling a bit ill, so I’m procrastinating from going over to draw for a bit by clearing my head here… back again to those haunting thoughts…

If we could bend time and space… and somehow fold in today’s technology with the late 1930s hustle and bustle of creators from back then… what would COMICS look like? How can that not be an inspiring and motivating thought. You think they’d just use the internet, email, blogs, online stores, just to talk to their friends or put up previews, or start flame wars on forums under pen names? — I don’t think so. I think a lot of those POOR guys from the tenement buildings would be finding innovative ways to distribute their comics. I also don’t believe comics would cost so much… heck I think those guys would have found a way to make all comics FREE, and be backed by big companies… remember the MUSCLE BUILDING ads and X-ray specs?  They were pretty much DOING all of that back then.  Go read a book like Kavalier and Clay, or “Tales to Astonish” or The Comic Book Makers…. and see how those guys wheeled and dealed… and worked their friggin asses off.  Sometimes it was only TWO GUYS doing all the work. They’d draw 5 or 6 different stories, all with different pen names, and then sell themselves as a “studio” that could produce ANYTHING a big company wanted to put out.

Why did they work like that? Some say it was desperation– I think now it might be the fact that those guys were full of so many ideas, so much innovation… they couldn’t contain themselves. And they all built what we have now. No. Wait… they built something else that’s been sort of a bit decayed and destroyed.  They built a “house of ideas” — no, They built a mansion of ideas that’s now a bit dilapidated. Wait– even better. They moved out of the poor neighborhoods… built a mansion, retired. For many years people leased it, rented it, sometimes there were uproarious frat parties there, a few families came in and took care of it– but now it’s been abandoned. Punks come in and party, piss on the floors. Homeless drifters wander in and out– developers stop by to evaluate and access the situation– every now and then the door gets kicked in by the DEA looking to bust crackheads. Either way you slice it, that house that they built, is in a sad state of disrepair.

Some see that old dilapidated mansion as just a LOSS. Why even try to rebuild it? Tear it down. Don’t dump more money into it. It’s too hard. We don’t have the right guys for the job. — but then there are guys out there who see that old building and what it could become again. They get out their hammer and nails…and gumption. And they get to work. Board by board… brick by brick.

I’m going to go get my hammer.