One of the BD I picked up in Belgium was Le Reflet (the Reflection) by Marc-Renier and Yvan Hasse. One of the things I was specifically looking for as I browsed the European comic markets was metafictional works. I picked it up because Le Reflet is one such work – obviously so. My French is…Read more
Comics theory
Publishing
To me, publishing is three distinct pieces: production, marketing and distribution. Production is basically everything up to and including printing. Marketing is telling people about your product, which you can actually do while it is in production. And distribution is about getting your product to people. An easy way to think of it is that…Read more
Watch for patterns
For some reason, I’ve always seen post-modernism, slipstream and metafiction as different facets of a single premise. There’s also a distinct Dadaist/collage thing going on there, too. An echo of the “modernism” bit, perhaps? Warren Ellis once described Iain banks as being a man “who writes across genre boundaries as if they did not exist.”…Read more
On audience
Several months ago, I was asked “what is your audience?” and I didn’t have a ready answer. The other day, I was asked “what are you trying to tell your audience [with your cover design]?” which I felt begged the question of what my audience is. Again. This time, I had my marketing specialist at…Read more
Are you here to make money or are you here to make comics?
I would say that one of the good things about the new Diamond policy is that it removes the necessity of having to worry if my product is commercial or not because it will now start from a default state of non-commercial. If I want to make something commercial, I have to work very hard…Read more
Thinking out loud about the attention economy
For those that have not been paying attention (which would be most of you, because it really doesn’t affect you directly), diamond comics distributor has raised the sales limits on the books that it will allow in their catalogs. This is huge, because diamond is the only distributor for comic books in North America, period….Read more