GLYPH – A Brief History (and Ramble)

In the small corner of the internet comic book universe that I frequent I often read essays on How To Save Comics. A variety of ideas generally come up – focus on graphic novels, publish magazine rack anthologies, do webcomics, create more kid friendly material, create more “mainstream” (non-superhero) material, manage better stores and such and so forth. Good ideas, bad ideas, wishful thinking and ideas whose time has come. One idea that I’ve yet to see suggested is the free comic newspaper. That strikes me as odd, both from a historical perspective and from a practical one. And also, I’ve been part of the staff of one so it no doubt seems more obvious to me.

I love comics, the whole sequential storytelling aspect. I prefer reading the action/adventure/weird fiction genre but that’s the genre I like for my entertainment in all media, be it film, television or prose. I’m more likely to read an out-of-genre comic than I am to read an out-of-genre novel. I doubt if I’d have gotten past the first page of Berlin or Stuck Rubber Baby or Why Did Pete Duel Kill Himself if they had been prose works. When I think of telling stories I think of telling comic style stories. Even if I first envision a story as prose or as a movie sooner or later I’ll think, “Hell, this would work better as a comic!” and I’ll start revising my mental construction.

I drew my first minicomic back in ’89 and printed up 50 copies of it at the local Kinkos. This was back when Kinkos specialty was 24 hour copies and faxes. I got inspired to do minicomics after an artist sent me an envelope full of his own photocopied publications in response to a flyer I’d put up advertising myself as an illustrator. Seeing his minis was an “Aha™” moment. I’d never thought of creating minicomics, I’d never heard of them but they were obviously something I could do. My mini (Cheap Thrills #1) was twelve pages (an eight page story and a cover). The art was crude, the story a cliché but it was finished product. It was also my second finished comic. The first one I had drawn on the kitchen wall of a friend’s apartment (with their permission and encouragement). That one was a little hard to share. (Mojo Nixon later autographed their ceiling.) The minicomic I could sell or trade or give away. And I did. Over the next couple of years I did almost twenty minis (some written by Lovesettlement) on my own and contributed to minis put together by like minded folks across the country. We found each other by mail and by reviews in Factsheet Five.

This led me eventually to Brave New Words publishing and in 1991 they published five issues of Misspent Youths. Each issue was thirty-two pages in black and white with a color cover. The art was still crude and stories were rude and bizarre. I’m proud to say that Misspent Youths was BNW’s longest running series. Matt Howarth (who provided the cover for #5) did draw more comics for the company but those were one shots and miniseries and, dammit, Howarth draws faster than Jack Kirby on speed. The sales never really matched the printing costs and after the fifth issue we mutually cancelled the series. I didn’t mind the lack of pay for the work I was putting in but after the fourth issues I’d really started to notice my short comings as an artist. I took some figure drawing classes and continued working with BNW’s publisher on other projects, most of which didn’t see print (or completion).

In ’94 Nizzibet and I hooked up to work on a series. That lead to a partnership and the partnership led to the first version of the Labor of Love Cooperative. I’d been getting ready to self-publish a new version of Misspent Youths. She was wanting to create a cooperative business and working with different folks she knew from the comic book industry. We pooled our talents, found some other similarly minded folks and Glyph, version one, was the result. Glyph was an 80 page black and white anthology magazine with a color cover. I had sixteen pages of Bonecage Graffiti (the new version of Misspent Youths) in each issue. The story was weird but the art was pretty good. I’d draw it differently if I did it today but it’s nothing I wouldn’t show around. The rest of the magazine ran from really good and professional to crude but interesting. And sales never justified printing costs. The comic book industry was collapsing. Anthologies don’t sell. Whatever. We put out three issues in ’96 and ’97 then turned our attention to trying to make some money as a design studio.

The trouble is, that version of Labor of Love was composed of comic geeks. Eventually we had to do comics again. Nizzibet suggested what should have been an obvious idea – revive Glyph as GLYPH, a free, advertising supported, newsprint tabloid.

Most cities of any size in the US have at least one free weekly newspaper. Most of them are tabloids (the size of a daily newspaper folded over). Seattle had two main ones – The Stranger and the Seattle Weekly. Both of them ran a few comics but comics were hardly a focus. The majority of them were gag strips of the artsy/hip/ironic favor.

We dived in and published four issues of GLYPH in the last six months of 1998. The first three issues were twenty pages, the fourth was thirty-two and they were all black and white printed on tabloid sized newsprint. Between creating the material for each issue, selling advertising and running a design studio with office overhead we burned up and out. Number four was the last issue of GLYPH and that version of the Labor of Love Cooperative mostly disbanded soon after.

And this has to do with my original point, how?

Out of all the comics projects I’ve been involved with, the one that was most economical and reached the widest audience was the tabloid GLYPH. The minicomics were a bit of mostly private fun and never had more than 200 copies published of any one issue. Misspent Youths had a first issue printing of 2000 copies and then dropped to 1200 for each issue after that. The Glyph magazine had less than 2000 copies printed per issue. The free GLYPH? – 10,000 copies of the first three issues and 8000 of the fourth (we printed less because it was a larger issue). The cost for those 10,000 copies was pretty much the same as the cost of printing less than 2000 (I’ve forgotten the exact numbers) of the magazine. Yes, the tabloid had less pages. Yes, the tabloid was printed on cheaper paper.

The biggest difference between the tabloid GLYPH and all the other comics publishing I’ve been involved with was the market. Misspent Youths and Glyph were printed to match the orders from the direct market (basically – comic book stores). Even then there was a minimum amount that we had to print in order for a printer to take a job. The only income they generated was from sales of copies. If you wanted to buy a copy of either publication you had to go into a comic store.

GLYPH was printed to cover a market (a dozen or so neighborhoods in Seattle) and distributed to and through book and music stores, coffee shops and any other places with a spot for free publications. You didn’t have to look hard for a copy, you could find copies in businesses on every other block in most neighborhoods. And you didn’t have to think about whether you wanted to pay for an issue – it was free. If it looked like something you were interested in, you took it. Simple.

Any profit made from GLYPH would have been from the sale of advertising. Sadly, we weren’t around long enough to establish any sort of advertising base.

Our biggest mistake was not having capital to pay for a year’s worth of printing and at least a basic salary for one advertising salesperson before we went to press for our first issue. That would have allowed us to be able to reassure potential advertisers of our stability.

Our second biggest mistake was not having six months of material ready before printing that first issue. That would have allowed us to stay on schedule.

Other mistakes? That’s harder for me to gage. We probably should have started with 12 page issues instead of 20 and fewer copies distributed to fewer neighborhoods and built up the market slowly. I know selling advertising was a bitch. That’s not surprising. I’ve seen quite a few other free publications mushroom in and out of existence here in Seattle. If I were a business person I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in the longevity of a publication until I’d seen a few issues. That we were publishing comics was probably less of an objection than most potential advertisers said. Someone who says no today might say yes in six months if they think they see an opportunity. If someone is seeing an ad and responding to it the advertiser doesn’t care so much where the customer saw the ad.

These sorts of things are obvious now. At the time, well, we were trying to make things happen any way we could. Damn the torpedoes and all. Most of what we learned we learned by doing, trial and error. We were all self taught at our jobs. In the process I learned that I’m not the sort of person who should do design for a living. I’m a much better office manager than I ever was a designer or account manager. Nizzibet and Jaydogg are well suited for the current version of Labor of Love.

There’s a lot of potential in doing a free comic tabloid. The pages are bigger than a regular comic allowing for more story on the page. If distributed along with other free publications it can reach an audience that would never think of going into a comic store (or looking for comics on the internet or hunting down graphic novels in the bookstore). And since it’s printed in black and white and distributed with music magazines and hipster media you’re more likely to be able to do comics for “mature” audiences. You would want to avoid hardcore violence and pornography (legally a good idea anyway) but the folks who are likely to pick up your publication are also likely to be at least teenagers if not adults.

For the first year, at least, you’d want to keep the stories short (probably no more than four pages) and self contained. After that, when you can afford to print larger issues you can print longer stories. If you can afford to publish biweekly or weekly then you can think about running continued stories.

Does this mean that a free comics tabloid would be a financial success? I don’t know. But they would reach an audience that isn’t currently reading comics. A comics tabloid would stand out from the free traders, singles come-ons and snarky hipster papers that generally fill the free racks. And as far as I know, no one is attempting to publish one. If I were in a position to do it again, avoiding the mistakes of the first round, I’d cheerfully do it again. Since I’m not I felt a need to at least write this down. You never know who might read it and have an “Aha™” moment of their own.

Lifting of many heavy objects and boxes of books has been averted, or at least postponed, for another month. The landlord has decided that he’s “probably” not selling the house. He’s still not sure so we can’t settle in too much. If he does decide to give us another year’s lease we’ve decided to be ready to move out at the end of that lease. That means getting rid of a few of the unnecessary heavy objects over the next year. Unfortunately for anyone who assists us in moving, I doubt if we’ll be getting rid of more than a box of books.

Feh.

I add a link to Epilogue, what, yesterday? The day before? And the site goes bye-bye. I don’t think they are out of business or actually dead. They had put up warnings that they were running slow and going to be transferring to a new server. So perhaps that’s what happening. Whatever it is, as of 5:48 this morning, I couldn’t access the site. I had another piece to submit to my gallery too.

In other news, we (Jaydogg, Nizzibet and I) have been waiting for the last three and a half weeks for word from the landlord as to whether he’s going to sell our house. At the same time he’s considering trying to sell this one, he’s also trying to rent out another property that just got vacated. Why he doesn’t just sell that one I don’t know. I can guess. I think that property would require more work to make sellable and would get him more rent if he can rent it. He’s offered it to us but, for more money in rent, I’d like a place that was less work than our current one.

That place got remodeled probably back in the seventies and looks like no serious work has been done on it since. Which means we’d need to put some serious work into it to make it nice. We couldn’t count on him to do it. He’s not one to put work into a property unless absolutely necessary. This has been good in that we haven’t seen him much over the years. Bad in that, when the refrigerator started dying, we had to replace it.

I’m suspecting that he’s waiting until he rents the other property before he decides to put this one on the market. But I also think that in our current economy, and in that house’s current state of repair, he’s asking too much for it. So we wait.

Hopefully we’ll be able to stay put. None of us are excited about moving.

I haven’t seen Skook to warn him about this. With the recent heat he’s headed off for somewhere with more shade. Hopefully, if we do have to move, I’ll see him before we go. Aside from being able to tell him where we went, I’d hate for the next tenants to wake up one morning to a sasquatch sleeping in their basement. Though there’s really a slim chance of that. Skook would notice the difference in smells if someone else were living here.

B-Movie Monster Reimagination Project Number Three – It! The Terror From Beyond Space!

I must confess, I haven’t actually seen the movie that this beastie hails from. Most of the monsters that I will be “reimagining” are from films that I saw on local television back when I was a kid. Most of these movies were only watched once and, except for a few key scenes, are just fuzzy memories. Memories that are fuzzy enough that I’ve had to hunt down visual reference to remember exactly what the monsters looked like.

One of these days I’ll have to watch It and see if doing so inspires a different interpretation of the creature.

B-Movie Monster Reimagination Project Number Two –The Monster of Piedras Blancas

Hmmm. Part of the reason I have such affection for this creature is his habit of decapitating his victims and wandering around with the heads in his claws. I saw the movie as a kid and that freaked me out. We’d definitely left Scooby Doo land behind. I don’t believe the movie explains why it does this. All the victims are drained of blood so maybe he pulls off their heads, sucks the blood out of their necks and then saves the heads like a bottle cap collection? Or perhaps he stores the heads until the brains ferment and then gets all tipsy on grey matter glog?

Anyway –

The monster gets a radical redo here. Early versions in my sketchbook look pretty much like the original creature in the movie. Different aspects of it would get accentuated or adjusted but they were pretty conservative renditions. None of them satisfied me.

Unlike The Thing, the Monster of Piedras Blancas isn’t a simple design. It’s a sea creature but it’s not a fish man. It’s not the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Certainly there are similarities but once you get past the amphibious humanoid aspects of the two they start to seem pretty different. For one thing, the Creature (from the Black Lagoon, henceforth simply referred to as the Creature) is designed for swimming. He’s got fins and webbed feet and hands. He’s got gills. The Monster (of Piedras Blancas, henceforth referred to simply as the Monster), while apparently aquatic by nature, isn’t designed to swim. It can’t. And if it can’t swim it also can’t walk around too well underwater. Part of the reason that there are no bipedal sea creatures is that bipedalism isn’t that effective underwater. If you’ve got to walk it helps if you’ve got multiple legs.

But all this was the result of the Monster’s costume being a patchwork affair – its hands were originally wielded by the Mole Men and its feet were formally on the gravity ends of the Metalunan Mutant’s legs (in the film This Island Earth). The head is original but resembles no sea creature that I can think of.

I really didn’t want to make the Monster more like the Creature. I don’t expect to do a version of the Creature in this series. I don’t know that there’s much I could do with the basic design that hasn’t already been done by many others. And the original design is still pretty spiffy today.

The idea for this design came to me when two concepts collided in my mind while I was having my morning coffee. The first concept was that the light house keeper in the movie thought of the Monster as a sort of family pet, a wild dog he was feeding. The second concept was a phrase describing the Monster that I’d read somewhere – a reviewer referred to it as a “sort of a lobster man”. And the basic visual popped into my head. If the Monster was a crustacean rather than a fish then suddenly there were a lot of alterations I could make that would make the Monster more unique rather than less. Now the Monster becomes a wolfmancrab.

A wolfmancrab who keeps souveniers. Yum.

I submitted another color piece to Epilogue.net last night. Still going through approval stages this morning so I don’t want to write about it until I’m sure there’s something to link to.

Nizzibet and I will be taking next week as a second honeymoon. Not that we’re doing much of anything. We’re certainly not going anywhere, no budget for that. We’re going to hang out, catch matinees, get started working on the 2004 calendar and generally bask in each other’s company.

My plate is full projectwise. Always seems to be –

I finished the art for Chapter Three of Wild Nights in Oz and just need a script from Lovesettlement to get started on Chapter Four.

I’m lagging on art for Mandate of Heaven. Entirely my fault there.

I’ll be getting started on art for The Black Seal #3 shortly. Quickly followed by #4, the soon to be infamous Vietnam issue.

I finally started inking Arachne. I’d been intending to do the work in the computer but after finishing Wild Nights I realized that it will be faster and better looking to do it the old fashioned way.

I’ve blocked out the first chapter of Finnegan’s Brink. This is a new rendition of the graphic novel that Nizzibet and I started on back in the nineties. Like Wild Nights, I’m not worried about where we’ll publish it. Maybe we’ll put it on the web, maybe we’ll do mini-comics, maybe we’ll find a publisher. It’s going to take a few years to get it done so the emphasis right now will be on doing the work not on finding an audience.

There are also about a half a dozen projects that I’m waffling on whether I can get them done or if I need to just go ahead and say no to. I hate saying no to people. I keep hoping that somehow I’ll find the time or energy to devote to those “extra” projects.

And at the background of it all is Sentient 39. Another story all by itself.

B-Movie Monster Re-imagination Project

Doesn’t that just sound important and significant and hollywood dumb? I’m creating new designs for critters from the b-movies of yesteryear. Most of the costumes for the monsters in b-movies were designed and put together by people whose main concern was budget and speed rather than scientific plausibility. I’ve been playing around in my sketchbook, trying to make these beasts look more plausible while still retaining the basic ideas behind their original designs.

Between having a gallery up at Epilogue.net and TwoM having given me a new set of colored pencils I thought I’d do some more elaborate drawings. I can’t just post my sketches on Epilogue since one of their requirements for acceptance is that the pieces have some sort of background in them.

Here is my version of The Thing From Another World. My reworking here was fairly easy. The original monster looks a lot like the Universal Frankenstein monster and it’s supposed to be a kind of ambulatory plant. The biggest thing I had to think about was why a plant would wear clothes. And what would they be made of?

Alien spider silk. With the spiders still in residence. They even repair the outfit when it tears – take a look at the group working on The Thing’s right arm.

My gallery at Epilogue.net continues to grow. They’ve rejected a few of my pieces for reasons that make little sense to me. I think some of the pieces they’ve accepted are weaker than some of the ones they’ve rejected. And the link to the color version of “In the Woods” (February in the 2003 calendar for those of you who have that) remains broken.

Still, it is a free service and it does give me a place to send anyone who needs a sample of my art so my complaints are minor compared to my appreciation for the site’s existence.

I’ve set myself up with a gallery over at Epilogue.net. The site is set up with editors so only the “best looking” stuff gets published. I’m not quite clear how that works. I think they’ve already rejected one of my pieces, maybe two. They took the half naked zombie and rejected the 3rd Mi-Go? Whatever. At the moment I’m not picky. They’re free and easy to post to.

I’d say that having my work up on the net would force me to draw more but this site was intended to force me to write more and I think we can all see how well that’s worked. Heh.

http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/list.pl?gallery=6664

Happy Birthday to LittleM! Nizzibet, Jaydogg and TwoM were taking her to a petting zoo this morning.

This photo is a fake. So is this one. Why? Because if you’re sophisticated enough to take pictures of you shooting a real yeti then you’re the sort to tell the world about it. You’re not going to post it on some site somewhere hoping some internet geek will run across it.

And no, JERSEYdevilsCOUSIN, whoever faked this wasn’t faking a sasquatch being shot. It’s supposed to be a yeti. Those aren’t deer or elk. Those are some kind of goat or sheep or antelope. Not the sort of critters that sasquatch see much of.

Yeah, yeah. It’s all in fun.