True Stories: Volume 2 coming in July!

At last! The second volume of my True Stories series will be released in July by the fine folks at Alternative Comics. A fat 48-page floppy. $5.99 cover price.

Volume 2 is comprised of stories from 2009 to 2014. These were, of course, the heart and soul of my long-running comic strip, The City. I often am asked if there will be a complete collection of all 24 years of The City. The answer is.... no. A lot of those strips simply don't hold up. Too topical, too of their time. But the True Stories are timeless. That's why I'm collecting these. A lot of my old work make me wince, but not my true stories. I read these, even the ones that aren't very well drawn, and I remember the moment I observed them, and what I was doing in my life and career. I'm very fond of these things.

Volume 1 contained stories from 2002 to 2008. I wanted to start with some of my strongest work, but not too stylistically removed from my books. Volume 2 covers the last five years of The City. Then I'll work my backwards in subsequent volumes from 2002 to the strip's beginning in 1990. Yeah, yeah, it's all whacked up chronologically, but who cares?

Those next volumes will come out more rapidly. The year-long gap between Volumes 1 and 2 is due to the Fall release of Trashed. Couldn't have anything else on the shelves.

I'm planning a trip down to the Ohio State Cartoon Museum, where most of my City originals are housed, to scan all the early True Stories I don't have copies of.

When it's all over, we'll collect all the volumes in one big trade.

Interesting analysis by Heidi. 

"Comics +18.6%: This figure is rather misleading. Most of that increase was before the ongoing collapse of DC and Marvel’s rather mundane relaunch." 

"Graphic Novels +38.1%: Graphic Novels have exploded. I believe it is due to the treasure trove of creator owned properties. That, coupled with the unprecedented amount of new readers of all types and genders, makes 2016 look really exciting! Most of these new readers are not that interested in single issues."

That's exactly what I've been saying for a couple years now and have been called a fool by certain parties. 

But these numbers have also been my observation from the ground, at the festivals and cons, and talking to fans. The Millennials, ESPECIALLY women, who are reading and making comics in numbers I've never seen before, want something new. The superdude stuff still has its audience, it's not going anywhere, certainly not with those billions in corporate marketing behind it, but there are simply too many superdude floppies on the market for a stagnant, largely male readership. The superdude books are a lot better than they were 25 years ago, but I think they're simply played out. How many times can you regurgitate the same 10 storylines? It’s all about movies and tv for the Big Two now anyways, and rumors abound that both publishing entitities lose money. But, of course, their film studios make billion, even if they’re simply adapting old material. And that’s all they’re doing. Deadpool is 25 years old. Capt. America: Civil War is a decade old. I quickly lost interest in Netflix’s lauded Daredevil because it’s straight out of Frank Miller’s run of 36 years ago! 

And Marvel and DC right now simply have NO clue how attract this vast new female readership (hint: pretty much the opposite of what you're doing). Both companies seem hellbent on pissing off their loyal readership with lame cross-title events that either flop or simply peter out, and the variant cover nonsense. The latter especially drives the poor shop owners crazy. More importantly, if your business model is convincing your customers to buy multiple copies of the same damn comic book, I don’t think that’s sustainable.

It's especially grim when you see how many Marvel & DC titles sell under 10,000 copies. Ouch. Why even bother? To saturate the newsstand, that's why. It's straight out of Martin Goodman's playbook back in the Atlas Comics heyday. Fill the racks with junk to keep competitors out. In the case of the Big Two, apparently they're mostly worried about Image, which is doing some very interesting books and of course, since it's creator owned, not work for hire, attracts the best talent with the best ideas. 

What we're seeing here is the death of the floppy. I think five years from now, the Big Two will be publishing half of their current titles, if that.

The big growth is in other forms of comics, outside of the Disney-Warner-Diamond stranglehold, and away from the floppy. Disney and Warner Bros. will thrive, of course, no matter how much their comic publishing wing falters. Diamond, I think, is on shaky ground. I know many will be pleased about that. 

It's an exciting time to be in the game. And to be a fan!

Home again

Didn't post as much from my grand 5-week-long tour through France and Belgium as I had planned. I didn't have a lot of down time, frankly. What a tour! Four days at the Angoulême International Comics festival, followed by a month traveling from bookstore to bookstore all over France (with three side trips to Brussels). Twenty-two signings in all! My only day off was Sunday.

Hanging with friends, old and new,  at the Angoulême Comics Fest.Gregory Benton leers his approval.

The Green Party of France pick Trashed as their book of the year!

The ceremony was great fun. They gave me a flag and

several rounds of shots! Now THAT'S an award!

The tradition in France and Belgium is to give fans a "dedicace," a drawing on the title page. Including the long lines at Angoulême, I estimate I did over 1,200 of these things on the tour! That's a LOT of drawing. 

It wasn't as grueling as it sounds. I have four standard poses I used for Trashed dedicaces, and I could swap in the different characters. Got pretty tired of drawing garbagemen, to be honest. For My Friend Dahmer I have two poses. The Punk Rock & Trailer Parks ones are more wide open. I usually ask for a request. Joe Strummer is the most popular, followed by Joey Ramone. A typical signing usually last three hours and around 35 dedicaces. Once in awhile, I'd get a weird request. "Draw me as a garbageman. Draw Joey Ramone as a garbageman." Those were fun. One guy, a classics prof, wanted the Greek philosopher Dionysius as a punk rocker! 

A typical dedicace in an English edition of PR&TP. In the States, I'd charge for a

drawing like this and no one would complain. In France and Belgium, it's expected and it's free. The price I pay for all those fabulous free meals!

Window display at Au Grande Nulle Part  comic shop in Rouen.

Everywhere I went the fans were great. Big smiles and warm greetings. I was amazed at how many had boned up on my career and biography. At times, I just shook my head and wondered "how the hell did this happen?"

My French publisher couldn't be happier, of course. "Your sales are right up there with Clowes and Burns and Ware, he told me." Again, I shook my head and laughed. Heck, all of us dream of being an A-lister. Here in the US, I've managed to claw my way up to B-minus-lister, but in Europe, I'm living large. That dipshit smile plastered on my face in these photos isn't fake. I'm well aware how fate has smiled on me here.

Hanging with the mighty Jen Vaughn!

If this turns out to be my career highlight, yeah, I can live with that. I've had a new book come out every year in French since 2013. It'll be a while before I have a one, so maybe I'll fade from view. If that's the case, man, it's been a helluva ride.

So what's up for the rest of 2016? Well, I have my little side project, The Baron of Prospect Avenue webcomic. I'll be posting new pages throughout the year. I wrote the rest of it, mostly on trains. It needs a little tightening, and maybe some rewrites, but I know where it's going. Originally I started it without having it plotted out, as a storytelling experiment. I scrapped that. Just wasn't comfortable working that way. So now it's another three-act plot. But it's a labor of love and I plan to have fun with it. Eventually, this will be a book, probably sooner than later. Trashed started as a webcomic side project, too, remember, and I only got 50 pages in before Abrams snatched it up. The Baron, however, is too bawdy for them, I think. And I want to keep it bawdy. 

Next up is a new project for Abrams. Don't know what yet, but I'll be devoting some serious reflection this Spring to this. I have some ideas.

......................

As for cons and fests, I plan to limit the travel this year so I can concentrate on work. Here's the list so far. Subject to change, of course:

PIX: Pittsburgh Indy Expo. Saturday, April 2.

Comicon: San Diego, July 20 to 24.

The American Book Festival: Paris, September 8 to 11.

SPX: Betheda, MD, September 17 & 18.

CXC: Columbus, OH, October 13 to 16.

Genghis Con, Cleveland, Sunday November 27.

Some new Baron of Prospect Avenue pages

I've been posting these from the road while crisscrossing France, if you haven't noticed. I'm up to page 17. I'm weeding out the bugs today. Didn't have Dreamweaver on the MacAir I travel with. Read it all HERE

Another post from the road.

Jaw drop.

Punk Rock and Trailer Parks gets a HUGE shoutout in the French national newspaper Le Monde today, in the frontpage story on the first return, since the terrorist attacks, of The Eagles of Death Metal, who played last night.

"On the stairs, past the bar, J., headphones on ears, is immersed in a graphic novel, Derf Backderf's Punk Rock & Trailer Parks (Çá et Lá, 2014). She is 26 years old. "

Yeah, here in France, people take comix to concerts to pass the time! Like everyone else here, I heard about this concert and thought about what an emotional affair it would be, and admired the defiance of the Parisians. I never expected PR&TP to be connected to this triumphant event! (Actually, I feel a twinge of the guilt of the unworthy there).

PR&TP is a hit book here, which it was not in the US. In fact, it turns out, it never really left the warehouse in the States! My publisher in 2010, SLG, ran face first into the financial and distribution troubles that would spell its end, just as the book was released. SLG, of course, a pioneer of indy comics, was the largest victim of the corporate conspiracy of the Big Two and Diamond Distribution, which essentially barred smaller publishers from mainstream comic shops. This unfolded just as PR&TP came out. I spent over two years making that book and no one could find it. It was very frustrating. I busted my ass and sold as many copies as I could at various cons. I sold tons of them and couldn't understand why it wasn't selling in the shops. Turns out the shops couldn't get copies, that's why, thsnks to SLG's troubles. And then a roof leak at the warehouse destroyed most of the copies.
But I was very happy with it, and it got great reviews. PR&TP did what wanted: put me on the graphic novel map and, more importantly, I taught me how to make a book. There would have been no My Friend Dahmer without PR&TP. It's the book I needed to do first.

PR&TP, for those of you who haven't read it, is still available. You can grab a copy on Amazon, which SLG re-supplies, or the digital download on Comixlogy.





As my wife told me before I left, "You're leading a charmed life."

Greetings from the road.

The Angoulême Festival. 

A few random thoughts  from the road.

I’m halfway into my 5-week tour of France and Belgium. I’m writing this from a Brussels hotel. A cold, driving rain is, unfortunately, keeping me from enjoying the city today, before I hop a train back to Paris this afternoon. This is my 12th trip to France since Mon Ami Dahmer was released here in 2014. As my wife says, I'm living a charmed life.

To sum up so far, I appeared at my third (straight) Angoulême Comics Festival and am now skipping all over the country for signings and interviews. Angoulême was exhausting, frankly. I signed at my publisher's booth for six or seven hours a day, four days in a row. It's great meeting fans, don't get me wrong, and I had a big line right up to the closing bell. The tradition here is a dedicace, a drawing on the title page of every book. It's great for the fans, but that's a LOT of drawing. I didn't even try to keep count.

One of my nicer dedicaces.

The many screw ups of the Angoulême Fest bureaucrats made it something of a bummer affair. Maybe because I started on such a high note, winning a prize for My Friend Dahmer at my first Angoulême, but they get a little worse every year. Last year it was mere weeks after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and this year, well... a round-up of the disastrous awards ceremony, where a French shockjock handed out fake awards to humiliated comix creators and then mocked and insulted them is HERE. I've commented on this at length on social media. Suffice it to say I've never seen such a nauseating, cruel trick pulled on creators. French comix folk are FURIOUS, horrified and ashamed. I wasn't even involved in the ceremony and people have been apologizing to me at every stop!

• Every French comics shop has at least three people working in it, no matter how small. And they all appear to get along splendidly. They are happy places. So are the surviving US shops, although we all well remember the creepy stores run by swindling assholes. The difference is the French shops are thriving. There is no Amazon here. France outlaws book discounts greater than 20%, a move made to cut off Amazon at the gate, prevent its  infamous predatory capitalism and protect French bookstores. As a result, Paris alone has over 400 independent bookstores, and almost 100 comic book shops! Socialism works!

• Yesterday evening was laundry night. O, the glamorous life of a traveling author! There’s a 24/7 laundromat conveniently located right across the street from my Paris hotel. Right in the middle of the spin cycle, a fuse blew and the laundromat went dead and dark. I was left with an armload of dripping clothes at midnight, and with a morning train to Brussels. Thank God for a friendly hotel clerk and their industrial clothes dryer!

• The Paris Metro cops have checkpoints in station all over the city. Don’t have a ticket? Fifty euro fine on the spot. They even have credit card devices to process the fine right there. It’s a total money grab, and it’s a mob scene of stern-faced cops and angry, yelling passengers. I always keep my ticket in my back pocket and just wave it at them. They look disappointed as I march on.

• French trains knock me out, especially the fast intercity ones. I don’t know if it’s the rocking motion or the weak train coffee, but I sleep like the dead. Great way to catch up on snooze time. 

• The Metro station I was in this morning smelled like baking bread, thanks to the bakery in the lobby. A slight improvement over the smell of stale pee one enjoys at a Cleveland train stop.

• At Angoulême my publisher, Editions Çá et Lá, brings in a dozen creators from all over the world. A highlight of these trips is hanging out with old friends and making new ones. The week after the fest, we all spend in Paris doing signings and interviews. We stay in the same hotel, share meals and hang out at a legendary comics shop across the street, or at a nice corner cafe next door. All of my colleagues have gone home now. It’s sad bidding them farewell. 

In Le Troc comics shop (and tea house) in Paris. Peter Kuper works on a sketch, as
(from left) Gregory Benton, Tom Daly, Joshua Cotter and
Swedish creator Henrik Lange relax.

• On the plus side, it looks like I dodged the Angoulême Plague that felled many of my fellow scribblers. Angoulême was packed and the sound of hacking and coughing filled the air, along with germs. Add to that, the custom of cheek kissing and bugs spread like wildfire here. You can easily understand how the Black Death wiped out half the country.

• I’ve met a few French garbagemen who want signed copies of Trashed. One told me he coaxed everyone on his crew to read it, too and some of them “have never read a book in their life.” One garbageman used to work at the comics shop in Toulone, on France's southern coast! He left “to make more money.” I, of course, left the garbage biz for the same reason (among others, as readers of Trashed know), so we passed going in opposite comix-garbage directions!

• Every shop owner wants to give me a free book as a token of appreciation. I don’t get squat at US signings, so that’s great, except with 20-some signings, my bag will weigh as much as a Buick.

I eat meals like this every day! Fuck off!!

• Dining out here is a national tradition, and dinners last HOURS. A round of drinks, followed by three (or sometimes four) courses, then coffee and perhaps ANOTHER round of drinks. Everything is fabulous, of course, and my various hosts take great care in picking their favorite local eateries, places no tourist would find. The French are all clean platers, too, right down to wiping up every ounce of sauce with bread. I seldom finish, which gets me disappointed looks. I don’t know how they do it! They’re all pretty trim, too. The benefit of good ingredients and great cooking, I guess. 

• Comic creators are treated like visiting rock stars here. Everyone is SO glad to see you, and there’s a superfan or two at every signing. One woman practically burst into tears when I handed her my finished dedicace! It’s great fun. I have no explanation why my books have resonated here, while other (far better) American books have not. My publisher, Serge, will chalk that up to the brilliance of the publisher. I won’t dispute that. I lucked out landing at Çà et Là.  And I just found out I’ll be back in Sept. for a big book festival, plus possible additional trips to Amsterdam and Denmark. It’s all completely unexpected. I walk around Paris smiling to myself. I simply can’t believe this has happened to me, especially after 20 years toiling in weekly newspapers. I enjoyed my time in that genre, don’t get me wrong, but lavish... or even unlavish... benefits of any kind were unthinkable. Once in awhile a weekly editor would buy me a beer, that's about it. Half the time I got stuck with the tab!

More from the road on the next rainy day.

New Baron of Prospect Ave. page posted!

The saga continues HERE