On February 5th, 2013, the folks at Aw Yeah Comics launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their new all-reader friendly comic of the same name. They asked for $15,000 to cover the incentive, production, and shipping costs of six issues of an independent comic. Ten days later, they have earned over $35K in contributions, have announced that a full year of issues will happen, and are now making even more plans for Action Cat and Adventure Bug to continue to appear at a comics venue near you. Witnessing a small group of independent creators achieve such an overwhelming success is a testament to an art form we all love, and a credit to not only creators, but fans of the medium as well.
Chris Smits and Art Baltazar took some time from their wonderfully hectic schedules to answer a few of my questions, and in an interview peppered with love, endearment and air guitar noises (don’t even pretend like you don’t make them, too), I learned about the conceptualization and future of Aw Yeah Comics.
How fast was your initial goal funded, and how surprised were you?
AB: Yeah, we totally got it in less than eight hours, between seven and eight, and I didn’t think we would get the goal for at least two weeks. I thought the fastest, at minimum, would be at least two weeks. So yes, it was crazy because I saw after eleven minutes we had a thousand dollars so I knew it was going to be crazy. Everybody here was kind of just like… “OH.”
CS: The first day was awesome. I’ll never forget that day.
Will your books be available in Big Chain bookstores as well as local comic shops? Are you distributing through Diamond?
AB: Eventually we’ll be all over the place.
CS: But not in the near future.
AB: We were originally going to make the books exclusive to our store but the more we started to do this, the list just got bigger so we just kept adding things. They were just going to be sold at the store in our kids section so kids could get books at Aw Yeah Comics. So, all the options of distributing became… Yeah, the Kickstarter put that on the table.
CS: There’s so much that we weren’t even thinking about when we started this and we were just very content to go smaller and local. And somebody could just get a hold of us if they want the books and we’re still doing that, but we’re sending books to more people that we thought we would be doing right off the bat. But the initial run isn’t going through Diamond, it’s going through us. Anybody who wants a copy of these books can get a hold of us and we will make it happen.
AB: With that Kickstarter hitting in eight hours, all of our plans were suddenly able to get planned. So we’re still in the middle of the planning stages.
Based on the success, do you have plans to continue this series – these characters and this format of rotating creators – into the future?
AB: We launched this series to be a platform for mine and Franco’s characters, and when we did it, I wanted to do this really bad but I knew that to draw another monthly book would be tough. Because I was working on Tiny Titans and Super Pets for DC, and my original thought was “why don’t we make comics but have other creators. Let’s see what they can do with the characters,” like I wanted to treat them the was Superman and Spiderman are treated, where different artists and writers add to the mythos and the longevity and the history of the characters, so I thought it would be really cool to do that with Action Cat and Adventure Bug.
CS: I think one of the truest reasons to do it at this point has become to see every body else react so positively to that idea as well. We threw it out there and everybody jumped. I’ve been involved in this for a while and I don’t think anybody saw it hitting where it’s hit, with some of the people involved and the show of support from everybody from creators to fans. It’s been amazing.
It’s hard to deny, especially when you walk in your local comic shop, that the comics world we grew up in isn’t there anymore. I’m hard pressed to remember the last time I walked into a comics shop that had an all ages reader section, and if a child is in the store, s/he is buying toys – not books. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it makes the comics fans of my generation wonder (and we tend to be a fairly pessimistic bunch to begin with)… will our grandchildren have comic shops? Will they want them? How do we sustain this medium that we love and not only keep it interesting, but make it more interesting to kids who are completely bombarded by entertainment options? I asked Art and Chris a little bit about their motivation, their plans to keep it contemporary, and how the tectonics of the comic industry has affected their decisions.
Was your success with adding some of the “big names” based on a shared ideal on what comics can/should be, and how do you all define what you love most about the medium?
AB: Most of the big name guys, most of them are writing these stories with their kids, so I think that’s what attracted them to the comic.
CS: For those that don’t know, Brad Meltzer wrote with his son, Chris Roberson wrote with his daughter and Jason Aaron is writing with his son. It’s just like, when that started happening… You can’t get better than that. But it’s not just kids’ comics, I keep calling them “all-readers” comics but they’re definitely very safe for children and when you’ve got creators working with their children for children, that’s pretty sweet.
AB: Yeah, and I think most of the creators working on this don’t really write all ages books, So for them to get involved with their kids on this is pretty special for everybody. Makes me happy. We just wanna make comics!
So why did you guys go with a comic and not an actual children’s book?
AB: Because comics are awesome. It’s our strength. I’ve done both and I love comics, I love the sequential storytelling and I love writing words in word balloons.
Do you think that projects like this can not only add new, young readers, but sustain them into their teen/adult years?
AB: That’s my job. I’m targeting the six year olds, the first graders learning to read and nurture them so they can be comic readers forever. At my first meeting they told me that’s my job – to get new readers, because the people that are already reading comics aren’t going to read the [kids’] books anyway, so I need to get the new ones who want to read books and comics and are interested in all kinds of characters. So I work on both so I see it already happening, where I see kids drawing Action Car right next to Krypto, they don’t see the difference, [they don’t care about] the companies, the universes. It’s like when we were kids we played with Spiderman and Batman together. We see kids come in and buy the books I make for the first time, a lot of them, that’s their first comic and so for them to see Patrick the Wolf Boy and Action Cat and Tiny Titans and Super Pets, they see that they’re all one world which is kind of what we want to do.
Are you going to distribute digitally as well? Is that something that is more difficult as an independent producer?
AB: We will distribute digitally at some point. It’s not more difficult. That’s the beauty of digital – everybody can do it. There’s a bit of satisfaction when you do your own thing.
CS: I’d say as an independent it’s all just getting your name out there. I mean, I’m sitting in my office right now and I have just as much capability of putting out a digital comic as Marvel does. They may have more resources, but you have just as much ability.
In 2011, Louis C.K. released a digital copy of his performance at the Beacon Theater without the use of any marketing, production, or distribution companies. It was hugely successful, but what most of us took away from the experience was that we could afford to (and maybe should) raise a middle finger at the people that had always been “in charge” of such things. It started a new DIY fan mentality, but one could argue that the new momentum was built on disappointment of the Ways of Old. As such, it would be easy to use Action Cat and Adventure Bug as mascots in a war on crossovers and costume changes, as representatives of the Little Guy and his power against The Man. It seems like many of my contemporaries are removing books from their files and, as mentioned before, wondering about the future of the medium. But that, in fact, is a sentiment that is completely contrary to the ideals behind the project.
Did any of this come about because it’s so easy to be disgruntled with the comics industry?
AB: We’re not doing it because other books are disappearing, and we’re not doing it to challenge anyody or to make a statement in the industry. We’re doing this because, if I don’t do this… This is all I know in life. I’ll just explode. I don’t know what else I would do. I see it in my daughter. Every piece of homework she brings home, every worksheet, she has drawings on it. She just doodles and draws and every sheet of paper has a picture that she drew, and she does that because she feels that’s what she does. She does it naturally, she has to do that, so it’s kind of that same feeling. If I don’t make comic books I have no idea what I’d be doing. I’d be painting something, I’d still be making something colorful or drawing on something. I still draw the way I did in the fifth grade. I still use crayons. I’ve added the computer but for the most part it’s still the same.
We want people to read our stories, and there’s big satisfaction when somebody buys your book and they ask you to draw your character. And there’s fans that I met when I first started 20 yeras ago, people that have bought those first published books and I meet them now and they’re men and women, and they’re in college and married, they have kids now, and it’s kind of cool when they know more about your universe than you do! So it’s kind of, you just have to do it. You have to tell stories. It’s inside, our soul is on paper and we have to get it out there and if it doesn’t, I don’t know. It’s like you kind of want to leave your mark on the Earth and it’s not a challenge to anybody, we just want to be on the same shelf as Spiderman.
CS: If readers do end up shifting around, that has nothing to do with the incentive to put your story on to paper. We’re just telling stories because it’s fun and it goes back to what we were saying earlier about “why comics.” And it’s because we all love comic books, we love the format, we love what they are, adn this is where we want to tell our stoories. So it’s not trying to reinvent or even compete with the wheel, we just want to tell our stories honestly and people will come.
AB: It’s kind of like we’re throwing a party and we want as many people there to make it an awesome party.
If there is any “message” to take away from the Aw Yeah Comics project, it is this: Shake things up, but do it out of love and whimsy. Make more comics. Add a local artist’s books to your pull. Remember why you fell in love with comics in the first place. But ultimately? Just have more fun!
You can see a list of Art Baltazar’s upcoming appearances here, and the Kickstarter is open until March 7th, 2013,