Broken Frontier

The Toronto Comic Art Festival was a big success for almost everyone involved as exhibitors struggled to fill the growing demand graphic novels.

This past weekend I was up at the Toronto Comic Art Festival (TCAF) to see what it was like.  I think anyone there this year had to have left feeling pretty positive about the future of graphic novels and creator-owned projects.

First off, the show was held at the Toronto Reference Library, an enormous but beautifully designed building. It’s six stories, with the center of the ground floor having an open ceiling that goes straight up to the top. Oh, and just inside the entrance to where the show was held is a stone pool of flowing water.

The library itself had a remarkable stock of graphic novels. I’m sure that they made an extra effort to get that stuff out there for the show, but just the fact that they had so many readily available was impressive.

And the make-up of the show supported this growing interest in graphic novels. Where an “indie” show like this would have, in the past, been filled with ashcans and small press comics, the predominant format at this show was fully published books.

And they were selling, and selling fast. It was easy to tell that the crowd came hungry for graphic novels. Many of them sold out right away, such as Skim by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki (cousins). This won the Douglas Award for best Canadian published graphic novel on Saturday evening. It sold early on Sunday, leaving Mariko and Jillian with nothing to sell, so they left their table empty and walked around the show for most of the last day. I bought my copy Skim from them on Saturday, thankfully, and would recommend it if you can find a copy.

Skim wasn’t the only book that sold out before the show was even over. And the exhibitors that had both trade collections and individual issues found that they were selling much more copies of the books than the comics.

I’m sure James Turner wished he had brought more copies of the Rex Libris trade with him and fewer of the individual comics. I stopped by to talk to him on Sunday after he had already sold out of the trade but still had a stack of comics from the series. He said that the trade went faster than he expected and that the comics were hard to push. He also had the preview of his new comic series, Warlord of IO, which Diamond Distribution has already decided not to carry. So at least James can take from this show that just because a comic doesn’t sell well doesn’t mean that the trade won’t jump off the shelves.

Another artist who at the show who wished he had his trade already for his comic series was Tom Fowler, artist of the Wildstorm series, Mysterius the Unfathomable. With only the first 3 issues of the series out so far, he was feeling the effects of not having the desired format of a graphic novel to sell. When we spoke, he said that the individual issues of Mysterius weren’t selling well at the show, or overall in comic shops and he was worried that Wildstorm would be unwilling to continue publishing the series after the first arch ended at number 6.

The problem was that they didn’t have a good system for measuring the success of a book where most of the audience was waiting for the trade. Tom felt that Mysterius was the kind of story where most readers prefer to wait for the whole thing to be collected. He said that’s what he would do, and I agreed that that was my plan for reading the series. But Wildstorm, following DC’s policy, will wait 6 months from the publication of the last issue before putting out a trade. This will be months after they will have already made a decision about whether it’s worth continuing the series based on the sales of the issue.

Tom was left wondering what it would take to buy back DC’s half of the copyright so that he could continue the series on his own or with another publishing company.

And this brings me to about the only problem that seemed to surface at the show concerning creators and their graphic novels. There were a number of creators who had published a series of book through a publisher that then canceled the series, most notably Tokyo Pop and DC’s Minx line. Some of these creators actually owned the copyrights, but because of their publishing contracts, they weren’t allowed to take their titles somewhere else. The company was going to hold onto it for some undisclosed or ambiguous time even though they didn’t want to publish it anymore.

This is something for creators to think carefully about when signing a contract. You may think it’s a great idea to go with a big company for the exposure and to be backed by someone with such a strong presence in the industry, but the flip side is that your project isn’t particularly important to them, and if it doesn’t live up to their standard of success right away, they might stop publishing it. And the funny thing is, with many of these titles, they didn’t even put a lot of effort into promoting them because they never saw them as that important to begin with. They might not have given them much more exposure than an indie creator could have drummed up for themselves.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go with bigger publishers, just keep these things in mind. I don’t see the practicality in signing publishing contracts these days that don’t let the creator maintain complete, free and clear copyrights, at least not unless the publisher is paying standard salary page rates. Then that just depends upon whether the creator wants to give up rights in order to make a healthy living. It may still come back to bite them, but at least they got paid fairly while doing what they love.

I’m sure this is something that the creators of the new series Kill Shakespeare are keeping in mind. They told me that they had offers from both IDW and Image and where deciding between the two. That’s a pretty good position to be in. I hope they use the leverage to their advantage to get the best deal they can. From what I’ve heard about the story, it sounds really interesting and the art by Andy B looks great. It won’t be out until early 2010, but remember, you heard it here first.

The last thing I wanted to mention was the strong presence of webcomics at the show. Many of them were putting into practice a business model for making money by selling the collected editions of their comic. These books also seemed to be selling well at the show.

Other webcomics didn’t have collected editions but were still promoting their websites, such as TX comics. I didn’t realize that artist Karl Kerschl had his own webcomic at that site. Here he is lighting it up on The Flash for DC, even drawing him for the upcoming, and highly anticipated Wednesday Comics project, and he still takes time to do his own webcomic called The Abominable Charles Christopher featuring some of the best drawn animals I’ve ever seen. You should check it out at www.abominable.cc.

Oh, and that may have been my last point about the show, but I’ve got one more story that ended my trip on a good note. I accidently stumbled through the set of Scott Pilgrim on my way to a comic shop. There I was, walking down a street in Toronto wondering why there was snow on the ground in May, and then I looked up and saw Michael Cera in a phone booth. Thankfully he took it better than Christian Bale would have.

Tyler Chin-Tanner started his own publishing company, A Wave Blue World, and writes and draws layouts for Adrenaline, its flagship series.
© 2009 Tyler Chin-Tanner.  All rights reserved.
Email: tyler@awaveblueworld.com

www.awaveblueworld.com