Dan Vado has lasted longer in the trenches of independent comics publishing than almost anyone else. He launched Slave Labor Graphics (now known as SLG) in 1986 and has spent the past two decades building a catalogue that includes such popular works as Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese, Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Roman Dirge's Lenore. Vado raised some eyebrows at an SLG panel at this year's WonderCon in San Francisco: asked what he would do differently if he could do it all over again, he answered that he wouldn't publish creator-owned work—"I'd own it all." The specter of work made for hire—comics publishing's longtime strategy in which publishers own cartoonists' creations outright, now mostly limited to big mainstream publishers like DC and Marvel and a few licensed properties—is exactly what the independent comics revolution of the '80s was meant to banish. So it was startling to hear one of the longest-established indie publishers invoke it. But Vado argues that there are compelling reasons to consider some form of work for hire as a publishing model, and he's also got some strong opinions about both the direct comics market and comics in bookstores.
PW Comics Week: What's indie publishing like in 2007?
Dan Vado: It's a little bit of heaven and a little bit of hell. The upside is that within the book market, as a smaller publisher, you have the ability to get your books at least seen by buyers who can put your product in front of a large audience. The downside is that, much like the comic book market, the book market is pretty much dominated by a couple of players who deal in one genre—manga—and unless you've got something with a strong tie-in to something outside of comics or graphic novels, like 300, it's difficult to get significant shelf space.
PWCW: What does an indie publisher need to know about dealing with the bookstore market now?
DV: The first thing—and creators in particular need to know this—is that the book market is a returnable market. In the direct market, if you get orders for 800 copies, which is admittedly pretty low, you can just print a thousand copies and then not worry about it ever again. But with the book market, you're ultimately going to be responsible for the books that are on the shelf, and you're going to take them back, and in a lot of cases they won't be resellable, so there's a giant financial risk.
The second thing is that the timing and the amount of work that the book market expects to see is a lot more than what the direct market asks you for. It's not unusual for a book buyer to want to see an entire book, or at least a big chunk of it, and they're going to take less kindly to something that comes out late. If somebody's ordered 10 copies of a book expecting to sell it, and it doesn't come in that month or within a reasonable amount of time, that's lost sales for them.
There have been books we've published where, interestingly enough, the [sales] numbers weren't that great to begin with in the book market, but a lot of them came back. With something like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, where there's a consistent flow and people know what to order and what to sell, and they can count on it, the returns are kind of minimal. But there are a couple of things where we've sold probably less than 300 copies into the book market, and out of those 300 copies over half of them will have come back. You become grateful that they didn't order 3,000 of them.
PWCW: Do you think SLG's going to be publishing more licensed properties in the future?
DV: Probably not. If we did, it'd probably be more like the Bill & Ted book, where we take someone's existing product and repackage it. Checker Books seems to be doing pretty well with that kind of thing. It's a pretty good model. Unless you've got a really, really hot brand somewhere, something like Star Wars, it becomes difficult to create original content. And I don't really see that we're going to be able to compete for that top-level property.
PWCW: Is there a future for work for hire in comics?
DV: As long as Marvel and DC are around, and people are willing to draw Superman or whatever, sure.
PWCW: But what about indie comics, as you suggested at WonderCon?
DV: When I made the comment I did at WonderCon about wanting to own it all, it wasn't a joke—it was a serious answer to a hypothetical question. When you end up with a model like we have, where we're investing the money and the time and the effort to put someone's projects out in front of an audience, and most of them are not even moderately successful, there needs to be some greater sense of partnership, long-term, between the creator and publisher. If the publisher's money isn't worth anything, then the creator would self-publish. That's my attitude toward that.
We may end up seeing a move toward publishers offering their companies up as service companies, so that if a creator said, "I've got a graphic novel I want to publish"—I almost hate to use this term, but it becomes sort of a vanity press thing. A publisher could say, "Well, we can make this all work, I'm going to take X amount of the gross right off the top, and then the rest of the money comes to you, but then you're going to be ultimately responsible for any unpaid bill."
Obviously, you don't want to start tossing stuff out there willy-nilly, because that just hurts your brand as a publisher. At the same time, it's kind of weird sometimes when creators come to you with work that you obviously don't have any interest in publishing, and they really pitch you hard, and their expectation is that you're going to publish their work and take all the financial risk, and somehow provide them with a living. I don't know what to make of it sometimes.
Once, I explained to one of our creators, who was sitting behind a table in San Diego at Comic-Con, what would happen [if we operated as a service company]. I said, "Let me frame this in a dollars and cents kind of way: that chair you're sitting in cost me 1,100 bucks. The amount this booth space cost, getting my staff down here, paying for all the stuff to come down here, having that book sit there in a pile in front of you, the table, the chair, the electricity within our booth, the whole bit: if I break it down to each chair I have available for people to sign at, that chair cost me 1,100 bucks. So if I were a service company, I'd be saying, “We'd love to have you in our booth in San Diego; it's going to cost you 1,500 bucks to sit there.” Or, conversely, “Here's what my expectation is: you're sitting there, you need to make me 1,500 bucks in order to pay for being right here. And when you don't make me $1,500, who pays for that? I pay for that!" I think, when faced with the reality that this stuff has an actual real out-of-pocket cost that continues even after you print something, a lot of people would just back off of it. And I think you're going to end up seeing a lot more stuff go out to the Web, growing audiences that way and taking baby steps toward being in print.
PWCW: What would you like to see change about the way comics publishing works?
DV: In the direct market, I think we need to see a dramatic change in the way that the relationship between the publisher and the retailer is handled. I think the nonreturnable [comics shops typically buy nonreturnable at wholesale], high-discount model no longer works for small publishers. I think small publishers need to be willing to take more financial risks for putting their book on comic stores' shelves. At the same time, there's got to be more incentive for retailers to take those chances and put that stuff there, and that incentive might actually cost them some money. They may end up having to take 5% or 10% less to take the books in the same fashion that a chain bookstore takes them. And we've got to start almost from the ground up, rebuilding the way the business is handled.
We need to move people away from "Previews" [Diamond Comics monthly catalogue, used by comics shops to order upcoming comics]. We need to move comic shops away from depending on one day a week to make their entire rent for the month. We need to turn them into something where the average person who walks into them can get a better experience than they can going to a bookstore, in terms of choice of material and environment. And I think that we have to improve even the technology that services comic shops so that it's easier for them to look up something right in the shop while the customer's in front of them, and maybe take a special order the way a bookstore would check Books in Print and take a special order. The comic shop needs its own version of a STOP plan, the Single Title Order Plan that bookstores have.
Until we signed with Diamond Books [the trade book distribution unit of Diamond Comics], the number of chain stores that were using STOP to actually stock our books, on the shelves, was incredible. We were sending out single copies of all kinds of our bestselling books to various chain stores all over the place, one copy at a time. We'd hired a consultant to help us penetrate the book market a little bit better; I printed him a list of Barnes & Noble single-title orders that we had filled over the past year, and it was hundreds of copies. And I said, "Take that to the buyer and point out that they lost money on every single one of these."
It's interesting, when you think about it, that thousands of bookstores are being stocked and purchased by less than five people. So on the one hand, it should be really easy, but on the other hand it isn't. Something as simple as building a decent relationship with a buyer at one of the chains can really make a difference. I'd actually love to see some of the chain store markets develop graphic novel sections that look more like their children's book sections, completely top-to-bottom merchandised areas that look visually different and appealing to people who walk in. I think that if they did that, they might actually find that they can sell even more stuff than they're currently selling, within the confines of the three or four shelves they devote to graphic novels right now. That whole marketplace, as explosive as it has been for people who publish graphic novels, particularly manga publishers, nobody can be certain where the future lies with it.
