This is part 2 of my interview with Justin Hall, the fantastic author and illustrator of “True Travel Tales,” “Glamazonia,” and “Hard to Swallow” among other titles. Last time, we talked about his background, and how his world travels shaped his work.
In this installment, we’ll get into the nitty gritty of the comics biz: selling your comic, what to expect at conventions, and why the comic community is the best in the world.
What happens after the authoring of a comic is finished? What’s the next step?
Some of it depends on the format of what you want to have made. So if you have a piece that you need to get professionally printed, your next step would be to find a printer and farm that out to a printer. Or get a publisher for it. So you find one of these printers, then you find a distributor, you work out a deal with them, and then you start working out deals with retailers and doing shows and book signings and bringing it to conventions.
There’s a big network of conventions, especially in the bay area. We’re lucky to have that here in SF with APE and Zine Fest and stuff like that. You get it out that way.
What about smaller projects?
If you’re doing minicomics, which are completely handmade and self-printed and you basically get a photocopier and a stapler. Or you can silk-screen; it can be book art objects as well. Then there’s a slightly different process: you don’t go to a professional printer, obviously. You physically craft the books yourself, and there’s a network of a very few distributors for minicomics. They do exist. A couple of them, but they’re very limited. So you’d have to do even more of the conventions and zine fest stuff.
How do you balance your time between creating and marketing?
It’s an interesting balancing act for sure. On one hand, you want to promote your work so that people can see it; on the other hand, if you spend too much time promoting it you don’t spend enough time making it.
Not to stereotype my people, but a lot of cartoonists tend to have social anxiety problems or tend to be awkward socially in certain ways. For whatever reason, I’m actually pretty comfortable being extroverted, so I have that advantage.
I’ve been trying to feed that back to the community in some way: I’m on the board of this group called PRISM Comics, which is an LGBT comics resource group. And I’m on the board of a group called Our Books, which supports Cambodian/Khmer language comics. It’s nice to be able to use those social networking abilities to help out.
But it’s always a battle to be productive. Comics require a lot of concentrated time; they’re a very time-consuming medium. And ultimately the best cartoonists are misanthropes, people who are not bothered to be chained to a drawing table for ten hours a day because they need people. I love people and am actually quite extroverted, so I know I’ll never be a Robert Crumb, because a Robert Crumb — all he can do is draw. That’s what he’s said, and he’s one of the greatest storytelling geniuses on the planet. And I’m not willing to sacrifice what it would take to be there.
On the other hand, I can continue to constantly find time to do my balancing act of doing my art and having something to say. A lot of my kind of narratives come from my interactions with the world. So if I sequester myself too much, then my stories would probably not be as good, because the material comes from my interactions with other people, other places; that’s how I generate my stories.
How is marketing your work as a comic book author different from other art forms?
Underground comics and independent comic books, there’s certain scenes involved. And they tend to be a little esoteric in the sense that they’re not necessarily that recognizable by the mainstream.
But once you’re in that community, it’s actually very supportive, probably precisely because there’s no money in it. One the one hand it’s very frustrating that there’s no money in that art form, because it’s a very difficult and time consuming medium, and it would be really lovely if we could actually make some money at it.
But the benefit to that is that unlike film or a lot of music, you can make you piece and then go and get help and criticism from other people and helpful strategies from other people. So I can come up to a major creator that I love and say, ‘I love your work, here’s my comic that I made.’ And they’ll almost always be excited and supportive for you. Whereas if I was a filmmaker, it would be hard to imagine walking up to Francis Ford Coppola and being like ‘I love your work, here’s my video.’
So there’s a kind of camaraderie to an underground art form that is under-appreciated and underfunded.
People who are into comics are REALLY into it.
It’s no surprise that the conversation returned to the topic of obsession: when it comes to comics, Justin lives, eats, and sleeps them.
The third and final installment of our interview looks ahead to the future of the comics publishing industry. What’s changing, why are book publishers suddenly paying attention to little comic book authors, and what will the iPad change?
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Related posts:
- The Future of Comic Books, Publishers, and the iPad: Interview with Justin Hall, Part 3 of 3
- How to Write Comics from the Mekong River to San Francisco: Interview with Justin Hall, Part 1 of 3
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I'm a writer and photographer in San Francisco, curious about how people can get away with writing all day while also being able to afford to buy groceries. 