interview 003: ryan sands

by Shawn Starr

I interviewed Ryan Sands months back on my column but for those who are not familiar, he co-edited the erotic comics anthology 'Thickness' and created/writes for the influential manga blog Same Hat. He does other stuff too. In particular Youth In Decline, which is his new publishing company and the focus of our talk.

You have both edited and printed comics and zines before, independent of a publishing house, what made you want to transition to becoming a formal publisher?

I've been making zines the past seven years, and the scope and size of my projects has been changing recently -- from self-published anthologies full of contributors and crazy ideas to monographs and longer releases with a special attention to their printing and production. I'm still planning to continue on that trajectory with the same editorial impulses.

One problem with doing lots of random projects under disparate names is that it becomes hard for folks who like your work to find you or keep track of it all. A main goal for becoming a "formal publisher" is to simply have all these editing/translating/publishing projects under one name, and actually accumulate whatever goodwill or reputation they garner. The general theme for the first year is to do less projects better, by investing a lot of time in the individual creators we publish, as well as in the website and retailer relationships.

What do you hope to accomplish through Youth in Decline? Is there something that you see lacking in comics that you want to fill?

It's a pretty amazing time for comics and art, and there are many fantastic small publishers that I admire and am excited to call peers. My goals for Youth in Decline are to continue to create opportunities for the artists and writers I'm excited about, to tell their stories, to experiment with production and format, and to directly and aggressively compensate artists for their work.

There is a lot of challenging independent work happening now (and much of it outside North America, and on Tumblr) and I'm hoping my weird curiosity and tastes combined with the connections I have made in various scenes like science fiction, European comics, and indie Manga will make for an exciting slate of releases over the next few years.

Youth in Decline is an interesting name for a publisher, I can see it reading a couple of different ways, does it have any greater meaning to you or is it just a cool name?

The best and worst part about undertaking a new venture is coming up with the name!  I have a GoogleDoc full of SO MANY embarrassing ideas I kicked around with friends... puns, non-English words, and some awful ideas that sound like a twee britpop band or the name of a weird hipster barber shop.

The name is mostly just something I think sounds nice, but I did turn 30 in the past year, so perhaps it has a special meaning to me. Really simply, I like that it reminds me of a punk fanzine or Japanese New Wave film title, and that it doesn't have the word "Books" or "Press" in the name.

You have been a big proponent of paying artists for their work, has this idea held through to Youth In Decline or did you shift to a royalty or pay-via-free-books system. Also has your views shifted at all, now that you’re a publisher, about the current models for paying/not paying artists in comics?

The challenging and fun part of becoming a "real" publisher is that it both gives me stronger footing from which to push for fair creator compensation and also forces me to put my money where my mouth is, in a really real way.  I've been paying some form of compensation to creators since 'Electric Ant' #2, but I'm excited to continue experimenting in consultation with creators on page rates and royalties, and other ways to get to fair compensation.

The hardest part of publishing, and this is obvious Publisher 101 stuff to anyone that's done it, is anticipating the possible sales of a book. From that stems everything on the budget -- the unit cost of printing the books, how much you can compensate the creator, prices for wholesalers and retailers. I'm assuming I'll make some major miscalculations along the way, but hope to learn quickly how to budget and forecast in a way that previous projects had not forced upon me yet.

In your and Michael DeForge’s anthology 'Thickness', each artist had between ten and twenty pages to work with, a noticeable increase from the traditional eight page entries in most anthologies, with 'Frontier' you’re now giving the entire issue over to a single contributor. What lead you to this format?  

My tastes have been moving this way for a while -- as much as I love many anthology-style books and zines, I think the total impact you can have from a 1-page / 1-artist book has a ceiling on it. I'm not excited about the possibilities that much (after doing quite a few of those zines myself) and am more interested in the "monograph" approach that folks like SSE Project in South Korea and the 'Solo' series from DC Comics played with in the past.

It also makes it easier to pay closer to a fair rate when you're working with a single creator. I'm extremely excited to collaborate directly with a single artists on a holistic way and design the entire book together as one thematic object.

Uno Moralez has a very specific style and tone, what made you choose him as your debut contributor to 'Frontier'?

I've been obsessed with Uno Moralez's work for a few years now, and he's been at the top of my list of folks I've been dying to publish for a long time. If you've seen his work before online you know how shockingly fresh, mysterious, and 100% contemporary it is -- there's no one quite like him, and his work appeals to all types of comics, art, and video game fans. The impact of sitting with 32 pages of his work all at once is jarring and extremely exciting to me as a publisher.

Like with when Michael and I licensed and published a Gengoroh Tagame story in 'Thickness' #3, I simply don't think the language barriers between the various indie scenes are legitimate walls to keep us from enjoying and reading these works. I have my friend Roman Muradov to thank for facilitating all communication in Russian, so that the process of designing the issue would be dynamic and painless for me and Uno.

How was your experience translating Uno Moralez’s work to print? You mentioned on your site that the printing and look of each issue of 'Frontier' will change to suite the artist involved, which makes Moralez seem like an ambitious first choice.

It was definitely a purposeful choice, a bit of a shot across the bow to stake out new territory for Youth in Decline, and to challenge myself on the layout, printing, and production side of things. Uno's work is a bit of a phantom in the Internet - showing up in strange places and without attribution on Tumblr and Twitter. I had the pleasure of printing a short comic of his in Jonny Negron and Jesse Balmer's 'Chamelon' #2, and his work translated extremely well to the smudgy, ditto printing that the Risograph creates.

I think the collected work in 'Frontier' #1 plays really well in the printed form, shifting from large full-bleed spreads to frame-by-frame GIF pages, as well as two longer-form narrative comics. In addition to the book, Youth in Decline is also publishing a limited-edition set of "animated prints" using lenticular printing - that type of thing you'd see on some schlocky DVD covers or in 70's pinup postcards, where the image shifts as you move it from left to right.  It presents a really creepy and beautiful way to bring GIF art into the physical world, and I'm extremely excited for folks to see those together with the monograph zine.

In addition to debuting 'Frontier' #1 at TCAF, you’re also going to have advance copies of Suehiro Maruo’s 'The Strange Tale of Panorama Island' which you translated, you’ve worked on scanlations of his work before, what do you see in Maruo’s work that keeps you coming back to it?

It's a happy coincidence that the debut of 'The Strange Tale of Panorama Island' is lining up with TCAF -- it really feels like my formal debut into the high society of comics!  It's extremely gratifying to see just how lush and nicely the book came out -- it's a 270 page hardcover over-sized book, with gold foil printing on the cover. Suehiro Mauro has been a favorite of mine since I first encountered his work in Comics Underground Japan back in the 90's, and I'm happy to been able to work with Last Gasp and Evan Hayden, who handled all the lettering and book design. It's nice to be part of the team to get him back in print for English audiences for the first time in nearly 15 years.

The book is a bit of a departure from some of the more shocking short stories that have circulated in the scanlation scenes for years. Panorama Island is an adaptation of a noir-ish detective fiction novella by Edogawa Rampo from the early 20th century; the grotesque and beautiful style of that era is a perfect match for Mauro's artwork. It's one of the most beautiful comics I've ever seen, and I can't wait for folks to dig into it. I'll have a few dozen advance copies at the Youth in Decline booth at TCAF, and it will be available from Last Gasp in the coming week or so.

You can purchase 'Frontier' #1 here

diary of a guttersnipe 02/25/2013: a woman is a woman

by Shawn Starr

Welcome back! I took a week off but to make up for it, i bring you JENNIFER LAWRENCE OSCAR GIF'S!!!!

Mini-Reviews

Batman #13-17 (DC)
by Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, Fco Plascencia

I like that the function of these issues is to walk through all of DC's currently in print Joker stories. It's difficult to reference issues or collections that are out of print because then some people can't buy them, and then they won't get how awesome your references are, and then DC won't get a spike in trade sales. Unlike that jackass Grant Morrison and his bat-mite bullshit, Scott Snyder knows which Joker books you need to read. The ones you can find at your local Barnes and Nobles, not the ones you find in your local shop's back issue bins or eBay. Because fuck back issues bins! Scott Snyder is a real fan! He knows what's legit, and back issue bins are definitely not bat-certified legit.

Justice League of America #1 (DC)
by Geoff Johns, David Finch, Jeromy Cox, Sonia Oback

Exposition: The Comic!

(Also i’m not sure if Finch drew the characters this way, or if it was the colorist, but every other character looks like a terrible 3-D model that got photo-shopped onto the page)

Appleseed, Book One (Dark Horse)
by Masamune Shirow

I like that this book just drops you in the middle of a world, it does not feel the need to spend five pages dumping exposition, it just kind of parcels out information when it feels like it. This technique works well for the majority of the book, except at around the 2/3rd mark when a conspiracy starts to unfold. This conspiracy is a secret at the heart of the utopia our heroes find themselves living in (following a post-global war), that gets kind of confusing and convoluted very fast in comparison to everything else in the story. The art, and in particular the action scenes and backgrounds in this book are pretty breathtaking though, so the conspiracy thing is not that big a deal, i also feel like it’ll make more sense as the series progresses.

FF #3 (Marvel)
by Matt Fraction, Mike Allred, Laura Allred

'FF' is the first instance of a book that i have been a reader of that has been inadvertently harmed by Marvel's insistence on putting books out on a bi-weekly schedule.

But, 'FF' is not bi-weekly! You will say, and you would be correct.

'FF' is indeed not bi-weekly, it’s regular old monthly, but every other major Marvel book is (and to make matters worse, 'Avengers' is near weekly). This creates a problem where after prolonged exposure (almost a year and a half or more), every book which comes out from Marvel on a “regular” schedule seems incredibly late. 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' was bi-monthly and felt like it, 'FF' is monthly and now because of Marvel's insane shipping habits, feels like it’s bi-monthly.

This lead me to completely forget that this comic existed until i moved a stack of comics and found it underneath a stray issue of '2001: A Space Odyssey'. It’s not that this book is bad, it has Mike Allred art and better than normal Matt Fraction writing (not 'Casanova', but not 'Invincible Iron Man'), I just keep forgetting it exists.

I swear, this bi-weekly shit is a cancer eating away at every facet of their line.

Captain America #4 (Marvel) 
by Rick Remender, John Romita Jr., Klaus Janson, Dean White, Lee Loughride

This is a weird fucking comic. 

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Stray thoughts on 'Holy Terror'

Holy Terror (Legendary)

by Frank Miller

. It has been about a year and a half since 'Holy Terror' was released to what I'd call less than stellar reviews. It was labeled racist, xenophobic, revisionist wish fulfillment, etc. Those thoughts weren't helped by Miller's press statements calling the work "a piece of propaganda...bound to offend just about everybody". I don't buy this line of  thought though, even from Miller this description rings hollow. Removed from his     media campaign, and Miller's own form of press propaganda 'Holy Terror' reads like a man attempting to actualize a facebook rant, but constantly adding footnotes and asides that ultimately deflate his argument, it is ineffectual by design.  

. What i still can't grasp while reading 'Holy Terror' is how to read it, it is one of those works which you could easily find in a issue of 'RAW' or a Klan magazine, and it would work well enough in both context's.  
 

. Nothing in 'Holy Terror' is more offensive than Miller's previous work '300'.  
     
. '300' is a xenophobic retelling of how a fascist warrior society beat back the hordes of Persia while the gays in Athens got lubed up. While the basic story is true to some extent, Miller chooses to highlight the most extreme and simple minded aspects of each player to glorify (in the case of the Spartans) or demonize (Persians) while adding in revisionist flare (which is a pervasive problem with historical writing, and not     unique to Miller).  
   

. While 'Holy Terror' also deals with similar elements, a fascist hero, a "Persians" type of enemy, and     historical revisionism, the difference is that 'Holy Terror' is a failure as pure propaganda, it was released well past the backlash on Neo-Conservatism was in full effect, and the patriotism 9-11 sparked had dissipated. No one read 'Holy Terror' and thought we should invade Qatar, unlike the lingering effects of '300' and the "Spartan" mystique which has proved effective in both promoting general masculinity and also serving as a figurehead for the Greek fascist movement (similar to what Moore/Lloyd's 'V For Vendetta' did for leftist movements).

. Miller is (at least in the last decade of his career) a satirist first and foremost. It does not always work, but 'Holy Terror' has to be recognized in this context.  

. 'Holy Terror' is a failure as pure propaganda because of Miller's inability to make one identify with The Fixer or his tactics, there is no moment when the reader cheers or their hearts swell with pride, the only real character Miller humanizes in the book is a young female suicide bomber. A simple swig of beer and a wish for paradise leave you cursing the institution which raised her, not thinking The Fixer is right (unless that wasn't the point).  

. The Irish Catholic who builds an upside down bomb strikes me as Miller (who is of Irish Catholic     heritage) acknowledging his own ineffectualness. He's still going to set that bomb off, it's just not going to do the damage as he wanted, it was directed the wrong way.

. 'Holy Terror' is one of the best looking books of the decade.

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Suehiro Maruo showcase

In between making me sick to my stomach (SO MUCH EYEBALL LICKING!), Suehiro Maruo does some beautiful collage work. 

images are from 'DDT' which can be purchased here

links

I have now seen every "Death Race" movie, so i got that going for me (The remake/sequels -  notwithstanding their agitating post-Michael Bay ‘we have to have a cut every 2 seconds during every action scene no matter what’ shooting style that every director decided was how you shoot action scenes - are actually strangely watchable films. Or at least watchable between the hours of 2am-4am while i’m trying to fall asleep.).

Fantagraphics put up a video preview of 'The Adventures of Jodelle'. That is one handsome looking book, especially for an artist making his first “major” US debut.

CF strip at The New York Times.

The Steve Bissette interview on Inkstuds was very interesting. Part One. Part Two.

“New” publisher Ryan Sands announced the first issue of his curated series 'Frontier' will feature work by Uno Moralez. If you’re not familiar with Uno Moralez’ work (/ know who he is and why this is a big deal) here’s an interview he did with Sean Collins and a link to a comic/gif/something he did. Moralez is one of those artists, even more so than Negron, that has taken the structure of Tumblr and Internet culture and ran with it into a niche that it can’t really be removed from. I’m intrigued how he, and Sands, approach print.

Speaking of Negron, someone should buy me this.