Tripwire
(UK fanzine) Spring Special 2000
10 Questions With... Gary Spencer Millidge
Tripwire premieres a new feature, which asks an indepent comic creator questions which will hopefully shed some light of the world of independent and self publishing. First up is Gary Spencer Millidge, creator of Strangehaven, an enigmatic mystery series, which began in 1995 and issues have been published consistently ever since...
1) How does it feel now that you've been publishing Strangehaven for a few years?
I love it. I only wish I could devote more of my time to it.
2) Do you feel jinxed sometimes, as it seems that you're very prone to colds, personal disasters and generally things that throw you off schedule? Or do you think that's just the price you pay for publishing yourself?
Until you called me to arrange this
interview I hadn't actually had a cold or flu for about twelve years - but I
take your point. I'm sure everyone - including other self-publishers - have
two or three "personal disasters" in any given year, but if you're
only putting out two or three issues per year, it's going to cause disruption
to your schedule.
Having said that, over the past five years or so since I've been producing Strangehaven
my home has been broken into twice (burgled once, vandalised once), I've been
in hospital with a kidney stone and my mother died after a long period in hospital.
I'm also in the middle of moving house. Maybe it's something to do with my age
and the added responsibilities that brings.
I do have a rather patchy record for frequency and reliability and that has
definitely been *the* biggest drawback in my efforts to make a success of self-publishing.
But the sales levels of Strangehaven do not allow me the luxury of working on
it full-time. Unlike some other self-publishers, I do not employ assistant artists
or secretaries, nor do I rely on parental support by living in a family home,
nor am I married with a working spouse - I have had to attempt to earn enough
money in an assortment of (non-comics) part-time jobs and businesses in order
to pay the essential bills and yet leave myself enough spare time to continue
to work on Strangehaven. This would help explain the erratic nature of my actual
publication dates, and I've no doubt a more frequent and reliable schedule would
have made Strangehaven a bigger success than it has been already.
3) Do you ever wish that you were published by a company, so that your days wouldn't be so dominated with business matters? Or do you feel that the trade-off is worth it as long as you have your independence?
The longer I self-publish, the less
desire I have for any kind of tie-up with another publisher. Originally I did
send out photocopies of a prototype of the first issue to all the publishers
who I thought might express an interest - out of curiosity more than anything
- but I didn't receive any replies. Once the first couple of issues were published
however, several of those same publishers contacted me offering their services
should I decide to stop self-publishing.
The business side of things can certainly take up a lot of valuable time - especially
promotional work (which *is* an essential part of self-publishing) - but it's
rewarding in its own right. My father created more businesses than I can remember,
I grew up in an entrepreneurial environment, so I always had an idea of the
business side of things like accounting and dealing with suppliers and customers.
I also ran my own comics retail shop and mail order for a while and published
a comics news fanzine too, so I had some experience of what the business side
of the comics industry entailed.
And there is something very satisfying about packing and posting off individual
back orders. I sometimes wonder if I enjoy the business side of things a little
too much.
4) Do you still feel that the British indy section is big enough to give someone a regular income?
If by that you mean, "is the
British independent comics market large enough for a creator to earn a living
from?" the answer is no. There's no creator to my knowledge making a living
from the British market alone - there's not too many domestic news-stand comics
actually making a profit either. It would be interesting to know how many creators
actually earn a reasonable wage from drawing and/or writing British comics at
all. Of course, the American market is the key to any English language comics
creator, and there's certainly still opportunities for well marketed good quality
independent material to sell reasonable quantities. Strangehaven's sales are
good and holding up, and the sales levels would be sufficient to earn a modest
living if it were a monthly book, which it's patently never going to be.
But there are other avenues to explore - foreign reprint rights, trade paperback
collections and media and merchandising options if you're lucky enough to have
created an attractive enough product. Even selling original art can supplement
a modest income. But the key to all this is that you own your own work. Every
time you reprint or repackage your inventory, you're earning money for work
already completed. After a number of years you can have several books which
you can keep in print and earn money from continuously, so your income theoretically
builds year on year. Kyle Baker was talking a lot about this in a recent Comics
Journal. Eddie Campbell is a perfect example - he's reprinted some of his stuff
three or four or five times now - and with his Bacchus trades, his Alec trades,
the new From Hell collection, the From Hell movie deal and his artwork sales,
he's finally making a good living at this business after 20 years - but he could
not support a family of four from sales of the Bacchus monthly alone.
5) Some people have criticised Strangehaven for being unfocused and too meandering. How do you respond to criticisms like this?
I can't really respond to this criticism
as that's more or less exactly what my intention was. I never wanted Strangehaven
to follow the format of a regular comicbook, or adhere to any storytelling conventions
in general. It was my original intention to create as realistic an environment
as possible, with believable characters, but to portray the mystery and wonder
of real life, and to examine the different ways in which different people interpret
the world around us.
In fact I first designed the series as almost an anthology of short stories
unified by their taking place in the same small geographical area. As I started
working on ways of overlapping the plots and using some of the characters in
more than one story, the whole thing gradually became more complex - unplanned
connections and parallels became more apparent and Strangehaven became something
other than what was originally intended.
The character Alex for example was almost an afterthought - a convenient way
of introducing the village itself and its inhabitants through the eyes of a
newcomer to the village. Alex - and his relationship with Janey - has seemingly
become the focus of most readers' main interest in the series, but is actually
only one ingredient in large and intentionally lumpy mixture.
6) How extensively do you rely on photo reference for your artwork?
More than I would like to, but many
renowned illustrators and comics artists make extensive use of photo reference
- Alex Ross and Dave McKean being two contemporary examples - and there have
been numerous others since photography itself began - even turn of the century
political cartoonists made use of photo reference. I think that early issues
of Strangehaven were making use of photos *too obviously*, and that's possibly
a more valid criticism.
Other comics artists from Frank Hampson to Bryan Talbot have used photo reference,
successfully integrating it into a more traditional comics style, whereas I'm
still in the process of thrashing out my own technique.
Of course, it would make life easier if I could just sit at a drawing board
and draw like Alan Davis or Barry Smith - Strangehaven would certainly be more
frequent as a result - but very few people are blessed with that kind of talent.
If you ask me to identify where my strengths lie, I'd say design and storytelling;
and anything that can help me achieve higher quality artwork - be it photo reference
or type of drawing materials or computer image processing - is fair game. The
end justifies the means I think.
Although I make extensive use of photos, I strive to create all my own reference
materials, be they props, posed photos or whatever. I've even occasionally incorporated
actual photographs within the comic - albeit processed by some method or other
- as well as gouache, watercolours, pencil and the traditional pen and ink.
Purists may argue that a heavily rendered, illustrative style is counter-productive
to a free-flowing comic, and that the best comics are simply drawn - the less
lines the better. And I certainly agree that in a lot of cases that's true -
but I've always enjoyed the sheer variety of different comics styles from Schultz
to Sienkiewicz - there is no one *right* way to do comics . I believe that to
be successful you should be sincere in what you do - and you should play to
your own strengths.
In order to create the right atmosphere for the book, I needed the artwork to
be fairly representational. I believe that my strength as an illustrator lies
in photo-realism - there would be no point in my trying to draw a superhero
story as it would not complement the subject matter - although I am constantly
looking for new solutions and trying to evolve my art.
7) How far ahead do you plot the title? Is there a end in sight for Strangehaven?
At Strangehaven's inception, there
was no end in sight, there wasn't even intended to *be* an end. But there has
been a number of things since then which have influenced me to think again to
a certain extent. The market for ongoing series definitely appears to have been
superseded by the limited series in recent years, and it has gradually become
apparent to me that a finite end for Strangehaven might not be such a bad idea.
These days, it's not likely you're going to pick up too many readers after 20
issues or so.
What started me thinking about it was when I realised that it was very difficult
to find a convenient break point for the first collection. The cliff-hanger
at the end of issue #12 was a intentional, planned conclusion (of sorts) to
book two - and future collections will have a little more thought to the overall
shape of the eventual collected book, rather than on individual issues. At the
moment, I envisage probably two further Strangehaven books beyond the second,
but every time I sit down and start writing the issues out in full, the story
seems to keep growing, so who knows? The trouble with having an "unfinished"
work-in-progress means that a lot of potential marketing revenues are closed
off to you - again, the foreign reprint rights, TV and movie adaptations (all
of which I've had initial discussions about with various parties).
The other factor is that I'm keen to do things other than Strangehaven in comics
- the original intention behind the concept of Strangehaven was that it would
allow me to tell any kind of story in any kind of illustrative style - for better
or worse, it's become a much more focussed story - a kind of romantic supernatural
murder mystery, and I think readers would find it hard to accept me bolting
on totally unrelated kinds of stuff within the major thrust of the story at
this stage, so I think it would better to start afresh on something new.
8) Do you think that American independent creators have an edge over British in terms of access to distribution, e.g. Diamond US and readership, e.g. San Diego Comic Con?
In terms of promotion, there probably
*is* an advantage in living in the US if you're selling primarily to an American
market - and if you're distributing a comicbook-sized publication through Diamond,
that's where the guts of your market will be. But San Diego (and other large
cons like Chicago) is an expensive promotion even if you're an American. America
is a big country and it's difficult to make an impact wherever in the world
you live without spending huge wads of cash. You can take out full-page ads
in Previews and do all the cons, but you then need to sell a lot of comics to
cover your outlay.
I had the bright idea of printing the first issue of Strangehaven in the US
to save transatlantic shipping costs - this was when there were several other
distributors besides Diamond - but the cost of shipping the reorders back to
the US negated the additional profit. These days you can print in the UK and
just ship to Diamond UK who will do the rest for you. I was lucky enough to
hook up with Chris Staros when I reprinted my first three issues - having a
US-based storage facility has been a real boon, but Chris has been so much more
besides, I would never do without him (despite his cut of the profits), he's
a real star.
Any self-publisher shouldn't overlook alternative methods of distribution either.
There are back order specialists like Cold Cut and Red Route, and FM sell a
worthwhile number of Strangehaven also. Then once you have a trade collection
and an ISBN, it opens up possible bookstore distribution (although you need
to put effort into researching the market properly) - I've even had some success
selling to libraries in the UK.
9) What's the most important piece
of advice that you'd give to someone planning to self publish?
One of the most appealing things about self-publishing is the sheer variety
of titles being produced. Self-publishing is a single question with an infinite
number of solutions, everyone approaches it from a different standpoint and
you always end up with a unique vision. A proportion of these are really terrible,
but a least they're terrible in their own unique way. A terrible Marvel comic
is just another terrible Marvel comic. So the advice I would give to any potential
self-publisher is to find out as much as you possibly can before you start (read
Dave Sim's Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing for chrissakes!) and then do it
your own way. Follow your own vision, be true to yourself.
When I was starting out, everyone was saying how difficult it was to start at
that time and how much better it was when they started. And all I can do is
say the same. Most new titles small press solicited in Diamond's Previews catalogue
these days fail even to reach the dreaded cut-off point, and that makes life
very tough for newcomers. They need to invest in a good deal of pre-solicitation
publicity aimed at retailers to get a decent shot at success.
Many many self-publishers start off under-prepared in my view. So, be prepared.
10) Do you still enjoy writing and drawing Strangehaven?
I love it. I only wish I could devote
more of my time to it.
©2000
Joel Meadows/Tripwire
If you've read any notable pieces concerning Strangehaven that may have escaped
our attention and does not appear here, we'd like to hear about them! E-mail
us at webmonkey@millidge.com
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All
text and images (c) copyright Gary
Spencer Millidge/Abiogenesis Press All rights reserved.
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