Rachelle Goguen talks with cartoonist Scott Chantler about Northwest Passage, Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen, Hawaiian Dick and more:

Q: What does the success of smaller comic publishers such as Oni Press mean for comic creators in terms of what they can offer that larger publishers can’t?

Mostly what they offer is freedom. If you want to do your thing, Marvel Comics and DC Comics are not going to let you do that. They want you to draw Spider-man, or Superman, and conform to the editorial direction for those characters, as dictated by the corporations who own them. With a company like Oni, you’ve got an operation that’s run by three guys, which has a lot more opportunity and desire to take risks. Like, say, publishing a story set in Canadian frontier history.

What’s been interesting in the last few years is that smaller companies like Oni have been just as successful selling their books in Hollywood as the bigger publishers with more recognizable characters have been. So while the immediate pay-off isn’t as great at the smaller companies, there’s still the promise of big-time financial rewards.

There’s much more at the link, of course.

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