Ah, the trials and tribulations of being a boutique comics publisher. We recently had two articles that peered into that issue. First up, Doug Wolk offers a profile of relative newcomer Secret Acres, who had a strong buzz going on at MoCCA this year:
Secret Acres is still working out the details on how it’s going to distribute its books beyond the convention circuit and Web site—the publishers are still in the early stages of talking to Diamond and “trying to have a very concerted marketing effort,” according to Matthews. “We advertise, we send out press kits…. We’re also trying to figure out which shows make the most sense to attend. Obviously, we can’t go to all of them, but we’re trying to get a sense of which ones are the best fit for our books.”
Secret Acres also has an Avelino-designed Web site, secretacres.com, which sells it’s books and artists’ minicomics, and also includes critical theory about comics as well as serialized strips. “I liked what Tom was doing with the Highwater Web site, where he had small installments of the books he was selling,” Avelino said. “It’s such a cheap and good opportunity to get people looking forward to seeing things. And comics criticism is a big deal to me. It’s important to me for those conversations to happen.”
Then Brian Heater interviews Sparkplug publisher Dylan Williams about his ever-burgeoning line of books:
Was that sense of dismay that you expressed toward some of the larger indies based on their output?
Well, for me [laughs]—I’ll go on record with this. One of the bigger ones was Fantagraphics, and the problem there was that they weren’t taking any chances on smaller people when I started. They were basically just publishing their own people that they’d had experience with. Within a few years of that, they actually have started changing. They’re doing Mome now. The whole point of Mome is to give some exposure to smaller artists.
I think that, through all of us smaller publishers, we’ve actually shown the bigger publishers that there are a whole bunch of artists worth investigating who may not be well-known, but can be just as appealing to people. Drawn and Quarterly—I never really had problems with them, it was just that they never expanded because they had a really tight aesthetic. It was very much about their personal taste. I really admire Chris [Oliveros] and Tom Devlin. They’re just amazing, in my book.
