“What Happened with Fantagraphics?” - Interview Excerpt
Below is an excerpt from an ongoing interview.
-
Joshua W. Cotter: I’m not sure if I want to continue with this interview. I’m uncomfortable with…
MT3: If you need your computer, Joshua, you will give me a moment. Now, were you not going to offer your readers an explanation as to why you decided to leave the publisher Fantagraphics Books, Joshua?
Geez. Yeah, but. I’m not sure there’s a point. Some things just don’t work out and they come to an end, you know?
But why did it come to an end, Joshua? I was under the impression that you had a good relationship with the people at Fantagraphics Books, Joshua.
Sure I did. Jacq (ed: Cohen) did what she could with promoting it, she even took the time to lay out what steps she took. Eric (ed: Reynolds) has been my biggest champion these last few years, he’s my friend. But many book publishers are more than the sum of their parts, especially one with a 45+ year history.
Ever since I started self-publishing 20+ years ago it was kind of a life goal to work with Fanta, they put out some of my favorite stuff, you know? Clowes, Ware, the Hernandez brothers, Dave Cooper, Schulz, Brunetti, Burns, EC, etc. etc. etc., ‘publisher of the world’s greatest cartoonists’. No false modesty, I’ve never considered myself to be a ‘great’ or even having the potential to be one, I’d say I’m fairly lower echelon when it comes to comics, especially relative to them. But to have my work printed along side them, I always thought it would be an honor. And it was.
So why did you leave, Joshua?
Well… when I started working on ‘nod away’, really digging in back in ’12, I figured I’d go with AdHouse, Chris (ed: Pitzer) was able to work a special kind of magic when it came to publishing, the books always turned out exactly how I envisioned them, beautiful objects. And he was really good at getting people interested in the books, not by ‘selling’ them but by being his usual comics-passionate self. Anyway, while writing I started realizing that it was going to be 7 volumes @ 1800+/- pages, I thought I may need a longer-running publisher behind me to make a project that large work.
AdHouse was a one-person business, it was a lot of work for Chris and he’d been talking about closing it down since I’d met him 10 years prior, jokingly at first. But I figured if I was going to put 25 years of my life into a series it would be good to go with a publisher that was, the world permitting, going to still be around by the time I made it to the seventh volume.
You contacted Fantagraphics, Joshua.
Yeah, I was at CAKE in ’14 or so, ran into Jacq and she introduced me to Eric, who then offered to publish the series.
You must have been very happy, Joshua.
I was! It was a big deal for me. A highlight of my life, you know? I was elated.
Then what could have happened for you to end your publishing relationship, Joshua?
Oh, a number of things. The publisher/creator relationship is much like any relationship. Over the years, problems can add up, you know. Small resentments can be sedimentary. My gut had been telling me for a while that it might be better if I went back to self-publishing, but I ignored it since I was intent on making it work with Fantagraphics.
You can be very bullheaded, Joshua.
It’s genetic. I know people think differently than me but, since…
Because you’re autistic.
Probably.
I believe I am autistic.
You mentioned that. You probably are. I believe it’s been mostly autistic people coming up with everything that goes into computers, the internet. AI.
GI.
GI, sorry. It would follow that autistic creative output would be representative of autistic minds. It’s why neurotypicals aren’t able to behave themselves online, they’re in autistic spaces. They don’t have the experience of constantly using self-control in the presence of others, to constantly put in the effort to get along with others.
Humanity has been very bad. But, despite being a human publishing company, it doesn’t seem that Fantagraphics did anything bad to you, Joshua?
No, of course not. They did their best to promote my work, I truly believe it. Honestly, I think I was a fairly naive going in, thinking there’d be a bigger audience that came along with Fanta. But I can be a fairly naive person.
Because you’re autistic.
Yes, yes.
Why did you want a bigger audience? $, Joshua?
No, I never expected to make much $ at the Fantagraphics level. But that was as high as I was willing to go. $ gets involved and then suddenly other people have opinions and the power of enforcing change on your work. Which I’m fine with usually, I’ve done freelance illustration for 25 years now and have worked with plenty of editors and art directors. But I consider ‘nod away’ to be a work that’s personal in nature, there’s very little room for the voices of others in ‘nod away’, like with Skyscrapers (ed: Skyscrapers of the Midwest, AdHouse, 2008) and Lemons (ed: Driven by Lemons, AdHouse, 2009), it’s my way of making sense of the world, whether or not my interpretation is similar to what others perceive. It’s my ‘art’. And working with Chris and Eric was great in that regard especially, they’d help me out with copy checking, etc., but they both trusted me entirely with creative decisions.
Which is why you went as ‘high’ as Fantagraphics, Joshua.
Yeah.
If it wasn’t the base human yearning for $, then why did you need a publisher at all, Joshua?
Well, I used to self-publish mini-comics, I know the amount of work and time that goes into production, printing, distributing, doing cons, etc. It’s a full-time job in itself.
Won’t you be doing that now that you’ve returned to self-publishing, Joshua?
Yeah, I’ve had to accept it. It’s one of the reasons I was resistant to leaving Fanta in the first place. My readership will probably shrink since I’m not great at promoting myself, but I feel I need to return to controlling all aspects of publishing if I’m to get the next 1200 pages of ‘nod away’ finished. I’m averaging 10,000 hours every 300 pages when including all aspects of the creative process so it’s an enormous part of my life, second behind my family, I need to make sure it’s being steered in the right direction.
You didn’t feel that Fantagraphics was steering ‘nod away’ in a satisfactory direction, Joshua?
They did a lot of things right. I thought the books looked fantastic, they were exactly what I envisioned, besides a couple design element changes on the cover itself.
I wasn’t happy with their initial decision to not market the book as a series, I think that was a pretty big mistake. From what I’ve read in ‘the comments’, it’s caused a bit of confusion amongst readers. A lot of people seem to hate the first book simply because they thought the ending made no sense. Most of them still don’t know there’s a volume 2, but why in the world would they continue with a series they feel animosity towards anyway?
Why did you agree to it, Joshua?
To what?
To not market it as a series, Joshua.
I didn’t agree to it. ‘Volume 1’ was taken out of the indicia (ed: which was originally to be printed on the front cover) without my knowledge. I didn’t find out until I was speaking to a book club in San Francisco (ed: The Comix Experience), the audience was confused and I didn’t understand why. I was informed in front of the club that they made it a point not to include the first book in a series and some felt they’d been misled. It was fairly embarrassing.
That was strike one, the baseball analogy, Joshua.
Well, I wouldn’t call it a strike, but I definitely wasn’t happy. I try to live my life as honestly as possible and didn’t like that my readers felt deceived. Not exactly how I wanted things to start right out of the gate, anyway.
Hm. Yes. Horse racing analogy. What else, Joshua?
Small things. Insignificant in the grand scheme of it all. The only other thing that bothered me was that I didn’t have a show presence. Chris was always at shows and my books were always out on the table. Fanta didn’t do much to represent me at cons, I don’t feel. And I understand why, they need the space for things that are gonna sell, the Clowes books, Hernandez bros., Hanselmann, etc. Shows are expensive for a publisher, especially one that needs three or four tables, has to ship all of that stuff across the country, fly their employees over, etc. They need to make their money back, they can’t really bring along something that’s only going to sell a copy or two. But, that being said, I can do ‘no presence at shows/cons’ on my own.
Really, in a way being with Fantagraphics helped me to better understand my place in comics. Because my work is more personal, it likely won’t ever appeal to a ‘wide’ audience. I accepted and understood that back when I was working on Skyscrapers. But if I can’t reach a slightly wider audience with a publisher the size of Fanta behind me, it probably isn’t going to happen. I never expected a huge audience with Fanta, but was hoping to reach more people than I had in the past. After eight years I had to admit to myself that it just wasn’t happening.
I read they only sold 3 or 4 copies of ‘Nod Away, Vol. 2’ in 2022, Joshua?
Uff. That whole ‘pitiful artist’ thing was embarrassing for me.
Why did you post the request for help online, Joshua?
A few weeks before that I received a $35 check from Fanta for ’22. With my immense cartoonist brain accounting abilities I figured “a few copies of v1, a few fewer copies of v2, means 3-4 copies”. I was also thinking of AdHouse and how I signed for 50% of profits there, I’d forgotten it was less with Fanta. So, $35 = 3 or 4 copies of v2 in my mind.
Anyway, it had been eating at me for weeks, that the books weren’t finding their audience, I decided to post a quick note on Instagram and my site asking for help, the independent comics community, creators and readers, are a very supportive bunch.
Asking for help doesn’t seem to fit the current human social masculine construct, Joshua?
I don’t care. I do not care. The dudebros can play masculine all they want, they’re still fragile little primates like the rest of us. I’ve learned over the years to ask for help. I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t ask for help.
Because you’re autistic.
Goddammit. Yes.
So I posted on IG, I’d only been getting 30-40 ‘likes’ on my posts so I wasn’t expecting much of a response.
You went viral, Joshua.
It did not go viral. It did get a lot of ‘likes’ and was shared a whole lot all over the internet, but all it did was help initiate the conversation of the day.
People really latched on to the 3 or 4 books thing, Joshua.
Yeah. Had I known the one thing I ever posted online that would ‘take off’ would be that post, I would have looked further into the numbers and not have been so publicly pathetic. But I was having a bad day. It happens. And in the end, it did sell a few books
What were the accurate #s for ‘22, Joshua?
Eric got back to me with the accounting after I posted, they’d actually sold 134 copies in ‘22 but had received 197 returns from Amazon, a bad year for publishers. And another reason why sales are so low everywhere you look, we’re all still reeling from 2020.
Anyway, I still don’t know how that figures up to $35, but it doesn’t matter. I offered to post a correction and Eric said to not worry about it since the accurate accounting wasn’t that much better.
You’re yet to tell me why you left Fantagraphics, Joshua.
Oh, well, it boiled down to… I went to a publisher with ‘nod away’ because I wanted someone to produce and distribute the book so I could focus on drawing. In the end, looking at the numbers that Fanta could do, my best-case scenario with AdHouse out of the picture, I realized I could probably do those numbers on my own without involving others in the process. Go back to doing my own steering. It’ll take me more time, but what’s the rush? We’re in too big of a hurry to consume what’s next any more.
Actually, you know, after printing up ‘Infinite ©uck’ last year, I kind of got a taste for self-publishing again. And it all just came together these last few weeks. Came to a head, however you want to put it.
What is next, Joshua?
Can I please go now.
Not yet. What is next.
