As I have mentioned here before, I am a long-time fan of the Fantastic Four. But shortly after the "Civil War" storyline, I found the title so far removed from what I liked about the team and the book that I stopped reading entirely. FF #555 was my last regular issue.

I did read a few stories after that. My brother got me a trade paperback of some of Jonathan Hickman's stories, and I picked up a few issues around Johnny Storm's death to write a piece about it for MTV. But, for the most part, I stayed away.

Once the book had been cancelled in 2015, though, I thought, "You know, I could finish my collection. I mean, I've got every issue up through #555 already and I bet I could get the rest of them fairly cheaply." So I spent a little time rooting through quarter and dollar bins, picking up stray issues. After just three months, I had gotten 36 of the 49 issues from the original title, every issue of the 2013 title, all but three of the issues from the 2014 title, 15 of the 23 issues from the 2011 FF, and 10 of the 16 issues from the 2013 FF. Plus an assortment of the one-offs and limited series like Dark Reign and Secret Invasion. It only took maybe another 6-ish months more to pick up everything else.

I never kept super-close track of how much each issue cost, but most of them came from dollar bins. A number of them from quarter bins. The most I paid for any one issue was about $1.70 (12 issues from a $2 bin, and the guy threw a thirteenth issue in for free.) For the sake of arguement, let's say the average was a dollar a book for the lot of them. It's probably a little less than that, but the math is easier if we go with a dollar.

If I would have bought those issues off the stands new, I would've paid $2.99 for each issue the first year, and $3.99 for each issue after that. Not including tax, that comes to about $387. If I bought the trade paperbacks those all came in, I would have spent $390. Essentially the same cost either way. (Though the cost per story would be cheaper if I had bought the TPBs because there are some issues included there that I already had in my collection.)

But at a dollar a book, my grand total was only around $130. That's almost exactly one-third the price of buying them new or taking a "wait for the trade" approach.

It wasn't at all difficult to find the issues I'd missed. I was clearly in no hurry to keep current since I was seven years out of date already, so I hadn't been particularly aggressive in hunting down issues. In fact, everything I purchased came from discount boxes that I happened across at a show/event that I happened to be going to for other reasons anyway. Admittedly, this was made easier by being in the Chicago area where a lot of events take place but I can guarantee you I missed plenty of issues that were in dollar bins I didn't even check. (I'm not going to spend my entire time at a convention bent over long boxes!)

My point is that in a matter of a few months, I picked up 75% of what I missed over seven years and got to 100% in less than a year, all for a third of the cost had I bought them new, with minimal effort. I actually tossed this idea out as a theoretical one several years back as a means to make your personal reading of comics a little more green and, now, putting it into practice seems to be working rather effectively.

I'm left to wonder about the financial impact on the industry. The retailers I was buying these issues from were largely just trying to recoup some costs from over-ordering the issues when they came out. In that sense, I suppose I'm helping to correct for some less-than-perfect earlier business decisions. (Which, by the way, I don't mean as a way to denigrate retailers! The pre-order system in comics is wicked complicated, and even the best retailers struggle with it every month.)

But that seems to encourage a bottom-feeder mentality for retailers. At the conventions I've been to over the past several years, even going back to pre-COVID days, there were a lot of dealers doing nothing but discount bins. I don't know how many of them have "regular" shops that do much of their business on new issue Wednesdays, but they certainly weren't bringing recent releases to these shows. Will that lead to some kind of stratification of retailers? We already have something of a distinction between new issue retailers and those who deal in the expensive Golden Age stuff; will we be getting another layer of retailers who deal in nothing but cheap, discount bin material? Or is that already in place and I'm just now noticing?

I've bought more than a few comics over the years that were... not great. Ones that I knew were not great when I bought them. Ones where the art looked sub-par, and the creator(s) pitching me the comic from across a rented table didn't make the story sound all that good either.

But, you know, I get that not every artist is going to be able to draw like Chris Samnee right out of the gate. And I'm sure that Tom Taylor's earliest stories could use more than a little polish. And I know that comics is a hard business. An astoundingly hard business. An incredibly, amazingly, profoundly hard business. So if a creator's got a good hustle, is clearly passionate about what they're doing, and it's not something I've seen tried a million times before (Listen, do we really need another straight, white, male superhero? Marvel and DC really have done that ad nauseum, and I'd wager that your version -- no matter how inspired you think it is -- is not actually covering any new ground), I'll try to help out if/where I can.

What surprises me, though, is when creators -- even these new folks who are clearly trying to make their own comic for the very first time -- make some seemingly mind-bogglingly even-rookies-should-know-these mistakes. Let's cover a few of them...

1. Credits -- Include the names of everyone who worked on the book. I just looked at two entirely different comics I picked up at convention a couple years back where no one was creditted at all anywhere in the book. Just a couple years later, and I have ZERO clue who worked on this or how to find more of their work. You want to use a pseudonum or something to protect your identity, that's fine, but put something in the book!
2. URL -- If you list a website in your book -- and you absolutely should! -- make sure it works. Yeah, I get that there can be technical glitches that can cause sites to come down unexpectedly and you might not want to keep old sites up indefinitely but, again, I found multiple books that only came out a few months ago that A) used bad web addresses or B) used none at all.
3. Website -- It's fairly easy to get a decent looking website these days even if you're not a designer or programmer. It's even fairly easy to set up an online shop. But I'm not encouraged to buy something if your website A) doesn't cite credits anywhere (see Rule #1), B) has links to pages that were set up in a template but you never bothered to fill in with actual content, or C) provides zero manner in which to contact you. Again, problems I found from recent purchases.
4. Timing -- I know you're excited about your book and you think it's going to be the next Walking Dead. And I know you've read up about world-building and transmedia and marketing. But if this is your first book, you really don't need all that yet. Just work on the comic itself for now. You work on all those angles right at the start, you'll have a lot of extra shit lying around when your comic doesn't take off right away. I've got a goodie tote bag here with a promo comic, a white paper explaining a huge backstory, a button, five wrist bands, and a poster. But their Kickstarter for a $100,000+ animation project raised less than $10,000. It may eventually be awesome, but you're doing too much, too soon, guys! Make sure you get the basics in place and establish a fan base before doing all the things.
5. Tabling -- Also, recalling where I saw some of these folks on the convention floor, I might suggest they probably paid WAAAAY too much for a booth, given their skill-set (mediocre at best) and level of notoriety (none). I don't know exactly what anyone was actually charged, of course, but I'm betting a table in Artist Alley would have been cheaper and they would've been more likely to make a profit. Or at least break even. I mean, if you see creators like Scott Snyder and Gail Simone -- who are popular and have lines of people waiting for autographs -- if you see them with just an Artist Alley table, what makes you think any random book by someone comic fans have never heard of is going to move so many copies that it warrants a full booth?
   

Like I said, I've bought a lot of books to help struggling creators out. It's a tough market, and I want their voices to be heard. But if you're not even able to get some of these fundamentals down, I definitely won't bother trying to help again.

You ever read up on how Girl Genius became a webcomic? Phil and Kaja Foglio started it as a traditional pamphlet comic in 2001. After several issues, they began putting pages up online as an incentive to get new readers. They ran both in concert for several years and noticed that they were selling just enough pamphlet issues so that they broke even on their publication, but online sales of their other stuff (t-shirts, pins, coffee mugs, etc.) always spiked when a new issue came out. So, they, thought, why not remove the pamphlet comic out of the equation -- since they weren't making money on it anyway -- and just issue the comic online? It worked, and Girl Genius soon became one of the first self-sustaining webcomics.

In this piece from not-quite-a-decade ago, Andy Oliver looked at the significance of online sales for self-publishers. It's mostly anecdotal in its approach, but I've heard a similar refrain elsewhere, including the Foglio example above -- online sales have a tendency to spike after there's a new print release of some sort. That has a common sense logic to it. If you put out a new thing, it's going to generate more interest than your old thing, and that will drive more people to your site just to check out the new thing. And in checking out the new thing, they stumble across your old thing. Then you get online sales. Maybe for the new thing, maybe for the old thing, maybe both.

I think the same holds true for web-based pieces as well. Sales are generally higher on days when you release a new installment, whether that's three tiems a week, once a week, or once a month. The premise is the same -- you're doing something that, for a brief period at least, puts your work at the forefront of readers' attentions and that gets them to thinking about seeing (i.e. purchasing) more of your work.

The trick, then, is figuring out a balance between creating free work in what frequency relative to things that need to be for. Do you need to post every day if you can sell the same number of books by only posting once a week? Do you need to come out with a new print comic every month to boost online sales? I'm sure the precise formula for every creator is different, but one worth exploring, at least periodically, so you're not doing a heck of a lot more work than you need to in order to sell a few more books.

I believe the first book that I got discussing the production of comics beyond the typical drawing/coloring/lettering of it was Kevin Tinsley's Digital Prepress for Comic Books which came out in 1999. (I could've sworn it was earlier than that, but I double-checked the publication date.) It should come as no surprise that the book lays out many of the techniques needed for producing a comic in the early age of digital comic production. (There were isolated incidents of digital comics production dating back at least a decade by then, but the widespread adoption of even digital lettering didn't really kick in until 1996/97.) Photoshop version 5 was released in 1998, and was the first version to utilize editable type and multiple undos. The "Save for Web" and vector shapes options were still down the road in future versions.

Knowing that, you have to imagine the book can't hold up well. Just flipping through it, you can see plenty of examples of extremely obsolete screen shots, and plenty of indications that the software has improved leaps and bounds in the past decade and a half. Tinsley is still talking about QuarkXPress here for cryin' out loud! But to be fair, Tinsley wrote a substantially updated version in 2009 that I understand to be vastly improved. (Although by now, that is almost certainly pretty dated as well.)

But, you know, in actually reading through some sections of the 1999 edition, it holds up surprisingly well. Sure, a lot of the specific technical references are dated, but the general ideas throughout -- even the ones that, for example, go beyond the basics of color theory -- remain viable. It doesn't work so well as a practical manual, but it does work for understanding the basic processes of going from a page of comic art to a printed comic book.

I think, though, that the book's greater importance in the long-term is that it provides a unique snapshot of comics production as it was in a period of transition. Comics had been produced essentially one way for decades and, throughout the 1990s, computers became so prolific that it was hard not to utilize them in the creative process by the end of the decade. Even so, the idea of using fonts for a comic was still viewed with suspicion, as was digital coloring. It was being done, but a large number of the old guard letterers and colorist weren't happy with these developments. For that matter, many editors were skeptical as well and were just as happy keeping their analog creators busy, thankyouverymuch.

Tinsely clearly saw where things were headed, even as early as 1993/94, as evidenced by the work he did with Marvel converting some of their processes into a digital environment. He, like I suspect many other younger creators, were eager to make their mark by utilizing the technologies that weren't previously available, and ones that older creators might be reluctant to adopt. Today, in 2024, creators have all had to adapt or they've fallen by the wayside. But in 1999, while debating the move to digital production was mostly over and done, the question of digital creation hadn't really been finalized yet.

So we have Digital Prepress for Comic Books explaining this only-a-couple-years-old digital production process before creators had really embraced the idea that a comic could be created digitally from the start. While Tinsley doesn't get on any high horses in his writing here, that background is an undercurrent throughout the book nonetheless. It makes for a fascinating look at how comics were being made in a period of great upheaval behind the scenes.

One of the earliest instances I can recall where I was conscious that a comic book publisher was creating promotional materials to sell to retailers was in the early 1990s, when I learned that they were making a six-foot tall inflateable Spider-Man that could be hung in stores or suction-cupped to windows. I'm not sure where I heard about it however. I'm pretty confident that I've never actually seen one in person. My best guess is that I saw a photo of one in Wizard or a similar fan magazine.

I also seem to recall that they were reasonably priced. Almost to the point where I could've afforded one, despite not having a job at the time. I want to say they were $100? But I had no way of getting one, since I didn't have any retailer connections at the time. There was effectively no after-market for these because none of the retailers who did buy them wanted to part with them.

Decades later, they're available on ebay with some regularity. I see three that still come with the original box at the moment. But despite having the funds to purchase one now (the cheapest of the three I'm seeing is only $129) I find that there are so many volumes more of commercially available products that are better displays of a wider variety of comic book characters, that the inflateable Spider-Man seems pretty chinsy by comparison. It was essentially made in the last days of Marvel just starting to make it big time, but just before they really developed the savvy to do really quality marketing. It's a large tchotchke, not appreciable any different than a logo-emblazened bag or stress ball.

The key to tagging this to a period before they started doing quality marketing is that some of the folks at Marvel sat down in a room and decidedly, jointly, that calling this "Inflate-O-Spidey" was a good idea.

I've seen copyright dates on these ranging from 1991-1994, so it seemed to have been a success for Marvel. Further proof that it did well was that an Inflate-O-Wolverine was also made available.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Con Coverage
https://ift.tt/4850tnS

Kleefeld on Comics: Who Draws Hägar?
https://ift.tt/9OIejKg

Kleefeld on Comics: The Last Survivors Review
https://ift.tt/Erd7Ual

Kleefeld on Comics: Draw Stronger Review
https://ift.tt/KHcCFSD

Speaking from experience, 2020 was a crappy year to have your book come out. As you may recall, there was this pandemic that had just started which confused and scared virtually everyone. And while, yes, there were a lot of people who were staying home a lot more than they used to and needed things like books to occupy their suddenly increased amoutns of free time, the news was wall-to-wall COVID coverage and trying to promote your new book that just came out was insanely difficult because you couldn't cut through everything else. I know because that's when my Webcomics book came out; it was supposed to debut at that year's ALA conference... which was canceled because of COVID concerns.

All of which I provide as context for how/why I missed hearing about Kriota Willberg's Draw Stronger: Self-Care for Cartoonists & Visual Artists until just recently. Now while I don't do nearly as much drawing and graphics work as I used to, and have long been at least nominally familiar with the necessity of posture, stretching, etc. when it comes to being an artist, I was interested to see how the subject would be handled in a comic format.

In retrospect, I'm a little surprised I haven't seen a book like this before. There are certainly books about self-care for artists, and there are comics showing how to do different exercises, but I don't recall ever seeing a comic about doing exercises specifically geared towards comic artists. I think I've seen single page or meme-type images from artists that might focus on a single exercise or something, but never an entire book. It's seems almost self-evident that it should be a thing.

The book's contents are pretty straightforward. Willberg talks about why physical health is important if you're sitting at a drawing table all day and how to recognize that you might be moving/acting in an unhealthy manner, then offers a variety of execises for different muscles groups, and finally ends on some basic first aid ideas if you do injure yourself drawing from an unhealthy position. There are a handful of minor gags throughout the book (I think someone says, "Oh, look! A dime!" every other time they do an exercise that puts their face near the floor) so it stays fairly light but the focus is squarely on the information throughout; Willberg doesn't try to force any sort of additional narratives around things. This makes it an excellent reference guide in the longer term because it's easier to skip to whichever part of the book you need to in order to address whatever issue is bothering you now. The book's use as a reference tool is also reinforced by the simplified illustrations; Willberg draws enough to let the reader know what things should look like but doesn't over-complicate anything with fiddly linework, so the art is very clear and clean.

While the book is meant to be used referentially -- where you can jump in and out of the book casually to look up specific exercises and forms -- and things progressed in a fairly straightforward fashion, I did find there were a few parts that I think could've been organized a little better. Where a topic is brought up but asterisked to say, "For more information, go check page XX." While I understand not everything can be written linearaly and that some measure of this has to happen, some of those instances struck me as ones that could've been written in such a way as to simply not even bring the subject up until later anyway, so the asterisk wouldn't even be needed. There were also a couple instances where an execise is explained in its more complicated form first with a note to say "if that's too difficult for you, you can simply it like this..." but then the more simplified version is shown in the art before the more complicated one. It didn't happen a lot, but it did happen and seemed unnecessarily confusing when it did.

If you are an artist, you've probably seen/heard at least some of these execises before. And if you're anything like the vast majority of artists I know, you've said something like, "Yeah, I know I should do more of that, but..." and then work until you've gotten a swollen wrist or back pain or something. It may not be a flashy, whiz-bang type of comic that everyone is going to flock to, but it is a solid book with solid information that most (if not all) artists should have. It's out now from Uncivilized Books and retails for $16.95 US.