This is Why It's Important to Save Indie Comics

Recent Happenings in the Corporate Comics World Highlight the Need for Self-Published Comics

The highs of making one’s own comics, at least for those obsessed with the artform as I am, reach soaring heights of accomplishment, enjoyment, and self-fulfillment. Seeing new art arrive from an illustrator, opening a box of books fresh from the printer, hearing from readers how the stories impact their own lives and entertainment…these are just a few of the moments that make all the work and financial risk worthwhile.

On the flip side, there are the many and frequent headaches integral to working in a collaborative venture, and few endeavors are more interwoven with collaboration than making comics. Artists are paid an advance and never deliver a page. Printers put jobs on hold waiting for an updated file and don’t communicate any of those developments. Kickstarter persistently takes longer than their promised three days to review and approve submitted campaigns. These are the defining moments of the last couple of weeks of making comics for me, but patiently, productively working through them always pays off.

Arriving from the Printer Monday, October 2!

Remaining kind to that AWOL artist struggling with personal issues gets a cooperative refund underway, while dancing through colleagues and contacts nets a new artist with a great reputation for speed, reliabilty and style. Composing multiple, constructive messages through multiple communication modalities reveals the true problem with the delayed print job, allowing me to correct it in five little minutes and get things moving again. Getting ahead of the Kickstarter page design game and having alternate campaign schedules in my back pocket ensure I’m ready to prepare for a launch whenever the guys at Kickstarter get around to approving us.

These past few weeks frustrated me, sometimes maddened me, but the internal voice of experience kept me centered and on-task. The 2023 Vicious Circus Christmas Special has an artist. The Vicious Circus Omnibus is on the way to us from the printer. And the 2023 Vicious Circus Halloween Special launches on Kickstarter this Sunday, October 1, at 6:00 p.m. Missions accomplished. Headaches be damned!

Interior Artist Oscar Pinto’s “The Craft” Homage Cover

The Vicious Circus 2023 Halloween Special is a 24-page, self-contained tale of your favorite anti-hero killer clowns, firmly entrenched in the trappings and feel of our favorite holiday.  The Halloween Special is written by Vicious Circus co-creator Kevin LaPorte (that’s me!) and illustrated by Oscar Pinto (Heavy Metal), with colors by Vito Potenza (Vicious Circus: Satanic Panic; Scissor Sisters).

Series Co-Creator Amanda Rachels’ “Brains” Cover

When a group of goth-addled, teenage friends decide to conduct a seance on Halloween to summon the spirit of the most infamous killer clown of all time, their darkest nightmares are realized when the ritual actually works! Faced with a timeless monster, their only chance for survival lies with a clown perhaps even more violent and full of rage.

To say I’m proud of this book is an understatement. It continues our Halloween tradition with all the spooky vibes of the season and the trappings of killer clown chic, but it’s a very different type of horror tale than the first two installments. It’s been my goal to keep each story distinct while still keying on those essential elements of the real-world Halloween experience that make us love the holiday so much. This Kickstarter includes opportunities to get all three of the Vicious Circus Halloween Specials, and to get them all in Deluxe format, with inside sketches by Amanda and autographs by both of us.

The First Two Halloween Specials are Still in Print!

Of course, these 48 pages of Halloween goodness are digitally available to paid Substack subscribers now, and the 2023 edition will be made available for download just as soon as the Kickstarter is completed and digitally fulfilled.

While I’ve been navigating the aforementioned production tedium this past few weeks, comics media has been abuzz with some low-key, seemingly insular happenings that actually speak to the larger climate in the comics publishing industry. That larger climate I’m referring to involves the clutching of pearls by corporate comics entities as they see their big-money colleagues collapsing around them. The layoffs at IDW, the ceased payments to vendors and internal restructuring at Heavy Metal, and the $10-50 million bankruptcy at Aftershock are just some of the more high profile portents of the end of American comics, as they’ve existed for the past several decades.

All three of these troubled operations brand themselves as “indie”, but how truly independent can any publisher be when they’re operating with seven to eight-figure cash infusions from investors? They’re answering to the venture capitalists (and their attorneys) who were hoping to get movie money on the other end of their cash injection to a funny book maker. There’s nothing “indie” about them, and they definitely live outside the realm of self-publishing. IDW has relied primarily, though not exclusively, on licensed properties for their line. Aftershock paid huge money - living way above their means - to the usual list of big name creators, but achieved neither the book sales nor the film options to cover that spending spree on the popular kids in comics circles. And Heavy Metal…well, who knows what the hell was going on over there…

IDW made some truly epic Transformers comics for a while there.

And other corporate publishers see all this and the accompanying writing on the wall for diminishing comics media rights. They’re worried, and that includes even Marvel and DC, both wholly owned by giant media empires (Disney and Warner Bros, respectively). They’re putting up fences around their intellectual properties, and they don’t care how many devoted creators they have to leave on the other side to do it. Let’s consider a couple of cases that highlight what’s going on and what it means for the world of comics creators in 2023 and moving forward.

For years (2002-2015), DC’s now-extinct Vertigo imprint published a “creator-owned” comic called Fables written by an 80’s indie publishing legend, Bill Willingham. Willingham made creator-owned comics - Elementals - in the 1980’s, before Kickstarter, before digital presses, before the internet, before modern Adobe products, before…well, before all of the modern assets that make self-publishing so accessible in 2023. This accomplishment belies a true and devoted love of making comics, because it was neither easy nor profitable back then, unless you hit on a TMNT gold mine like Eastman and Laird. So, good for Willingham when he found a profitable home for Fables at DC/Vertigo for well more than a decade, right?

Fables enjoyed a long run of popularity and spin-offs.

Well, just a few weeks back now, Mr. Willingham posted (via his own Substack) a press release announcing that he was releasing Fables into the public domain, purporting to make his particular labeling and characterization and depictions of these legions of (already public domain) characters and stories available to literally anyone to craft their own stories and comics. He cited a litany of problems dealing with the current powers that be at DC, including unpaid royalties, lack of (contractually required) involvement in Fables licensing decisions, and even attempts to suggest that DC owned the IP outright. Ugly allegations, but not too far afield from similar experiences of creators and their “creator-owned” properties. Ask most anyone who deal with the likes of Arcana and Scout, let alone the Big 2.

So, here we have a truly successful, self-published indie creator who finally “made it” with a big-time publisher, only to now find himself on the short end of the lawyer stick and up against the corporate engine that is Warner Brothers. Without the resources to combat them on an even playing field, he chose, instead, to simply release his intellectual holdings into the wild. Naturally, it took mere hours for Warner Bros legal to issue a statement announcing that Fables is unequivocally NOT in the public domain. So, Willingham says it is. The folks with the money and the army of attorneys says it’s not. Jump into that fray and make a Fables spin-off comic at your peril.

Bill Willingham’s truly independent Elementals comic from the 80’s.

From a different angle, another high-level comics writer, Rick Remender, announced that he was re-signing to publish his creator-owned line at Image Comics, throwing in that he turned down gigs on Batman and X-Men in order to focus down on his own creations. I’ve followed Remender’s career for better than a decade, ever since he crafted that exquisite run on Uncanny X-Force around 2010, easily the best mutant storyline between Claremont and Hickman, at least for my money. He did some other (occasionally controversial) work on Avengers and Captain America before moving on to acclaimed indie series like Black Science, Low, and Seven to Eternity published via Image, which has a much-touted creator-owned deal that seems to be the thing it actually purports to be.

Remender’s indie properties boast some amazing art, inside and art.

In comparing the plights of Messieurs Willingham and Remender, we see a case of a creative forced to disperse his intellectual property to the winds in the face of corporate legal terrorism versus one who learned quickly the risks of relying on the megacorp hand-that-feeds for payouts with no control. Willingham finds himself unable to employ his own, verifiably self-owned creations for his betterment, his income, or even self-actualization, whereas Remender doggedly kept his self-created properties within his exclusive control by sticking to the much-vaunted Image deal and even continuing it in the face of reputedly huge paydays from DC and/or Marvel.

Without the option of being able to create, own and control one’s own intellectual property, a comic creator has only the choices of: 1) working for the man for a short-term payday and no benefits, royalties or influence, or 2) not making comics at all, or, at least, not making them in such a way that readers may actually find them. And this dilemma is the exact reason that indie, self-published comics must be saved. The innovation and unique creativity of the truly independent creator, acting on their own ideas and initiative, cannot be duplicated - in either quality or style - by the corporate editorial and financial filters faced by the creatives chained to Big Comics.

By supporting the real indie creators on Substack, Patreon, Kickstarter, BackerKit, or wherever/however you choose to do so, you are empowering the driving forces in innovation for comics. You are making available the channels for writers and artists like Remender, Willingham, and, yes, even ME, to generate enough income to fund the production and publication of our very own comics, made from our brains and our hands and our relationships. Occasionally, some of us even make enough income to make a living, but, for me, making enough to keep making comics is enough.

And I thank each and every one of you for that opportunity.

Have a great weekend. I’m going to meet Chuck Palahniuk tonight!

• Kevin