When last we left our heroes, they had had their smashingly successful designer hosiery business, Gambit by Dorothy Jones, cruelly snatched away by the evil Dr. Howard. Destitute in New York City, they were forced once more to regroup, redefine, and reinvent. After a brief stint designing for Perry Ellis Hosiery, Dorothy returned to her first love, costuming, and began a series of apprenticeships on Broadway that would culminate in her becoming a Master Draper/Patternmaker herself.

My path was, surprise!, more circuitous. In the immediate aftermath of Gambit’s implosion I office temped for over a year, until I was able to find a gig that took advantage of my experience in bringing products to market. That gig was Le Zink, launching an Australian Day-Glo colored sunscreen in the US. As it happened, Marvel Comics came onto the market while I was working on Le Zink and I convinced my entrepreneurial boss that we should own a comic book publisher.

There followed a whirlwind year in which I took the point coordinating the teams of accountants and lawyers and investment bankers, digging deep into Marvel’s financials and structuring the offer. We were the last man standing before Ronald Perelman bought Marvel, and I honestly believe our offer was better. We were not, however, Ronald Perelman and MacAndrews & Forbes, and I think that tipped the scales.

Meanwhile, throughout the year I was working on the leveraged buyout of Marvel, Dorothy and I were continuing to hang with two of our best friends in New York, Jenette Kahn and her husband, Mort Fink. Jenette was the President and Publisher of DC Comics, the primary rival of the company I was attempting to purchase. That whole year, all I could say when Jenette and Mort asked what I was up to was that I was working on a very interesting LBO, but that I was under NDA and couldn’t discuss it. Although, to be fair, that was the same answer I had to give everybody.

But how, I can hear you asking, did we become best buds with the President of DC Comics? That takes us back to our hosiery company, Gambit. Jenette was a well-known fashionista, and had fallen in love with Dorothy’s designs. In fact, she purchased so much product she qualified as a wholesale account.

I’m in our San Francisco production office late one evening when the phone rings. I pick it up and Jenette’s on the line, offering me the Wonder Woman license for printed hosiery and requesting a meeting to discuss particulars the next time we were in New York. That’s a pretty easy Yes.

Did we have any interest in making Wonder Woman printed hosiery? We did not. Was Jenette interested in offering the license to us? Clearly not, or someone from DC’s licensing department would have reached out. But when you’re the President of DC Comics and you want to meet someone, you have a lot of options for baiting the hook.

And that’s what Jenette wanted. She loved the work, and wanted to meet the people responsible for it, under the perfectly reasonable assumption that it took interesting people to do interesting work. For our part, why would we not want to meet the President of DC Comics? It’s good to have friends in high places.

As suggested, we met the next time we were in NYC and hit it off like we’d known each other for decades. Thenceforth, every time we were in the city we’d join them for dinner, or a Knicks game, or an excursion of some type, and that carried over when we moved there as Gambit collapsed. Dorothy was even Jenette’s Plus One at an all-girls sleepover for Gloria Steinem’s birthday, every guest snuggled under one of the hostess’s many furs. 20 Feet From Stardom.

I was released from the NDA when Marvel accepted Perelman’s offer, and was now free to talk to Jenette about what I’d learned in the last year, having been elbow deep in Marvel’s operations and financials. I suggested that my deep industry knowledge, coupled with my well-established entrepreneurial chops (I had two successful national product rollouts under my belt, Gambit and Le Zink, and I’d just ticked thirty), qualified me to do something at DC, even if I didn’t have a clue what it might be. I was crystal clear, however, that she should employ me. Somehow.

Although, as a counterfactual, it’s more than entertaining to imagine an outcome where Jenette and I headed DC and Marvel respectively. That’s certainly what I was imagining all that year. What would the industry have looked like with friendly rivals?

At the time Jenette and I sat down for our chat, Art Spiegelman’s Maus was making waves. It was still a few years away from its Pulitzer in 1992, but the first collected volume was published in 1986 and suggested an interesting path forward for the comic book business. Here was proof positive that non-comic book readers would go into a bookstore to buy a graphic novel whose content and themes spoke to them. Jenette had been wrestling with how DC could take advantage of this opportunity, which amounted to a whole new market for comics, when my startup chops walked through the door.

This quickly coalesced into a vision for a new imprint, broadly under the DC imprimatur but with distinct branding, that would focus on the emerging market of non-comic book readers willing to read the right kind of comic books.

There were two immediate, glaring problems with this plan, and both of them were me. First, I had no experience in comic books or publishing of any kind, so Jenette creating a new imprint and handing it off to a noob had the potential to create an uprising among the experienced DC editors who’d been bypassed for such a plum opportunity.

Of course, my inexperience was a feature not a bug, not that DC’s staff would see it that way. The imprint practically required someone who’d never produced comic books in order to make things that weren’t like what DC was already making. In the post on Gambit I discuss the value of Strategic Ignorance and the risks of being an expert. Experts are steeped in the common wisdom of what’s possible in their domain, while an outsider may well imagine solutions that experts cannot. I was exactly the sort of ignorant that this new imprint required, if it was to have a chance of success.

The other thing wrong with me as the potential leader of this new imprint was that I was Jenette’s friend. Although no one at DC knew me at the time, there would be no question, no matter how we kept it on the down low, that my relationship with Jenette would become common knowledge after about five minutes on the clock. Not a good look, and as problematic in its own way as my lack of industry experience.

Jenette’s solution was to stage a competition, open to all. In order to pick a leader for their new, yet-to-be-named imprint, DC solicited proposals for the launch of an imaginary new magazine. Not a comic book of any kind, but a regular newsstand magazine (how quaint), whose focus could be anything: fashion, sports, health, science, travel… You could pick anything, but you had to make the case for why it filled a need not met in the market and how you’d go about executing.

The proposal needed to make the business case for the title, describe the editorial focus, identify the market niche it filled, define the target audience demographics, and explain how it would make money. You know. A business plan. The thing no one with any comic book experience at the time knew how to create.

I know a bunch of people threw their hats in the ring, but a lot of them dropped out once they realized how hard the assignment was. I think at the end of the process there was my proposal and either two or three others from industry insiders. I pitched Manifesto, a men’s magazine with a how-to focus, basically Glamour for men.

Believe it or not, I still have the proposal, which I came across when we unpacked in Chicago and I was sorting through our archives. Ten pages of detailed market analysis, circulation estimates, demographics, competitive analysis, editorial philosophy, and graphic design considerations. Ten more pages of appendices of raw data, a twelve-month editorial calendar, and a sample issue’s full contents. Those poor fuckers never stood a chance.

Did Jenette put her thumb on the scale by creating that particular challenge, suspecting that I’d be the only candidate who could successfully execute it? Maybe. But it’s also true that the skills the assignment was meant to foreground were absolutely critical to successfully launching the imprint, and mine was the only submission that objectively demonstrated those skills. You tell me if that’s “unfair.”

Fair or not, it was now possible to identify me as possessing the unique skill set necessary to launch a new imprint. Did that keep DC’s editors from grumbling about how Jenette’s friend just happened to win? It did not. That dogged me the entire time I worked at DC.

A Rocky Start

I was a fish out of water at DC from Day One. Under the normal chain of command I would have reported to the Executive Editor, Dick Giordano, with the EVP, Paul Levitz, greenlighting projects. Instead, I reported directly to Jenette, who was the only person I had to convince to approve a book. Paul reviewed my budgets and print runs and made sure my numbers made sense. Dick was a resource available to me whenever I had creative questions.

Reflecting the fact that this was meant to be a standalone entity, I had the unwieldy official title, Group Editor and Marketing Manager. I solicited and acquired projects, brokered writer/artist teams when necessary, provided story and copy editing, set production estimates and budgets, prepared the marketing plan and managed the execution of collateral materials, set and managed the publishing calendar, prepared the artwork to be turned into film, checked the film and made corrections before it went to the printer, and even flew to Quebec to our printer, Ronalds, to color correct on press if we had a particularly challenging production. I also attended conventions, spoke on panels, and was responsible for the brand in every way imaginable.

The very first panel I sat on, at the San Diego Comic-Con, was a literal nightmare. I don’t remember who else was on the panel, but it was Art Speigelman and a bunch of other heavy hitters. Piranha had just published its first books, which somehow qualified me to sit with this group. I had never done any public speaking before, and when a question came to me, I opened my mouth, uttered a few words, and went completely blank. After an uncomfortable moment of silence, I muttered something about losing my train of thought and passed to the next contestant.

That’s the nightmare, isn’t it? Leaving the house without pants on, running into the ex and her new boy toy when you haven’t showered in a couple of days, having a mental breakdown in public… But a funny thing happened. I was fine. The worst thing that could have happened in that moment happened, and then it was over and everything was OK. I never had an issue with public speaking after that.

Anyway, all of this action was managed from a home office. I eventually wound up with an official DC office, but for the first two years they wanted me isolated from their day-to-day operations. They didn’t want me infected by the methods they used to produce traditional comic books. DC was, I think, the only employer I’ve ever had that truly understood and valued my ignorance.

A key difference between my role and the other editors was that I was financially responsible for my line, whereas DC’s traditional editors were only responsible for the creative integrity of their books. Not only did Paul Levitz review and approve my budgets, but we always had a post mortem once a book had been published to see if I’d hit my targets or not. Not a one of those other editors wanted bottom line responsibility, a point I was happy to make whenever anyone gave me the stinkeye.

However, none of this happened right away, as I hit more a brick wall than a speed bump on Day One.

The traditional comic book business is built on the work-made-for-hire model, meaning writers and artists are paid to create to the company’s spec and the company owns the creative output. Jenette had done heroic work creating and implementing a royalty structure so that creatives could share in the financial gains their work generated, but the work itself was, still and always, for hire, and owned by DC.

I had been tasked with launching a line of creator-oriented work, inspired by Maus, and it never occurred to me that DC thought that might be possible using a work-made-for-hire contract. Because that would be insane. But that’s what I discovered on Day One. Paul handed me their standard contract and told me to go out and acquire all the goodness Jenette craved.

I asked Jenette if this was real, and she said it was. A huge component of their business model involved dusting off old properties and reimagining them in a new context. Since they never knew what might be valuable in the future, they just owned everything.

I told Jenette we’d never get the properties we’d set our sights on with a work-made-for-hire contract, and she told me to go figure out what we could do instead. As long as that solution didn’t involve DC losing access to potentially valuable properties.

Fuck.

I spent literally my entire first year on staff working with Chantal d’Aulnis, their in-house counsel. We couldn’t announce the line, I couldn’t solicit work, we couldn’t do anything public facing until the contractual issue was resolved. There wasn’t really a new imprint until I figured out how to wrest a creator’s rights contract out of a company that had no interest in any such thing.

Other than work on the contract the one thing I was able to do in that year was name and brand the imprint. I’d been staring at a blank legal pad in the run-up to the meeting with Jenette, and had nothing. I had a list of names so anodyne no one involved in the process can recall them, myself included. As a joke, and without any particular thought or effort, I tossed Piranha Press onto that list, so that at least Jenette and I could enjoy a laugh together while we bemoaned my lack of imagination.

Unexpectedly, it resonated with Jenette and stuck. Henceforth, Piranha Press, Comics With Teeth.

Of course, without a creator’s rights contract to offer, the newly named Piranha Press would die in the cradle. The whole thing just seemed silly. It’s not like Art Spiegelman was raking in the bucks on Maus merch. I was tasked with signing projects that had almost by definition next to zero merchandising value, with a contract that insisted, as a habit, on the value of the merchandising rights.

If there’s a theme to extract from these career retrospectives, it’s that I’m not smart enough to stop when something appears objectively impossible. For a full year I pushed and yielded and pushed some more, probing, searching for a weak spot that I could exploit, a combination of elements no one had thought of before that would unlock the solution. It was an impossible problem I had to solve. I needed the job.

I have accomplished a few things in my career of which I am genuinely proud, things that have left the larger world slightly different because of my efforts. One was figuring out how to print on hosiery. Another was birthing the first creator’s rights contract offered by either of the major comic book publishers. I can’t take all of the credit, as I had willing partners in Jenette and Chantal, although neither, I think, truly believed there was a solution. So I’ll take full credit for the solution.

What finally cut the knot? The contract Piranha offered vested all rights to the property directly with the creator. Creators owned their own work, but licensed back to DC the rights to publish and exploit the materials in any manner and in any medium. They could make posable action figures, t-shirts, movies, games, anything and everything was included in the license. I don’t remember the split, but there was generous profit sharing of such exploitation.

So how was this different than a work-made-for-hire contract? Creative ownership was meaningless if the same rights as existed under the previous arrangement were simply licensed away instead of being forcibly wrested by droit du seigneur. The hook was that in order for DC to retain the rights to exploit a property they would have to keep it in print. If three years lapsed without publication, the contract terminated and all licensed rights reverted to the creator.

What that meant as a practical matter was that as the three year window loomed, DC would have to make a rational cost/benefit analysis about the value of the subsidiary rights. In the past they had never had to make that call, as they owned everything forever.

If a book had been out of print for three years, was it worth the investment in reprinting in order to retain the licensing rights? In most cases, the answer was obviously no, and all rights reverted. On the off chance that Piranha published a blockbuster, DC could retain the rights as long as they wanted. Otherwise, there was no business rationale for absorbing the cost of reprinting in order to retain the licensing rights. I’d left DC by the time the first three-year window came up, but all of those properties reverted to their creators, as intended.

I baked one other innovation into the contract. Since these were properties owned by the creators, DC couldn’t exercise the sort of editorial control to which they were accustomed. So what happened if a story came in and they wanted changes?

They had to ask.

They had to make their case to the creators why the changes were necessary or meaningful. Creators could then accede to the request, reject it, or offer a compromise solution. Which DC could accept or reject. For the most part, this led to exactly the kind of creative compromise and accommodation you’d like to see between publisher and creator. In the event that compromise could not be reached, DC’s only option was nuclear: decline to publish. With the creators keeping any already paid advance.

This actually came up regarding the final issue of a four-issue mini-series, The Score. Jenette requested a change that the creators weren’t comfortable with, but neither was Jenette comfortable failing to publish the final issue. In the end, the creators negotiated a one-off Batman special in exchange for acquiescing to the request. Truthfully, I don’t think the change was that big a deal for them, but I’d handed them leverage and they were happy to use it.

That creator’s rights contract was the one Karen Berger used to launch Vertigo. Trying to take any of the credit for Vertigo would be stupid, as it was Karen’s vision and execution through and through. But it’s a fact that she couldn’t have acquired the properties that made Vertigo so successful without the contract I’d pioneered for Piranha, and that absent my efforts that contract would never have existed.

So… Sandman. You’re welcome.

Congratulations! You Have A Fish!

Now what? I’d solved one problem only to be confronted with another: what was Piranha Press? All I really had was a negative mandate: don’t make traditional superhero comics. That left… a lot.

Of course, this was really two completely different questions: what should the stories be about, and how should they be told? On the first of those questions, content, I made an intentional choice for eclectic, with a side of literary. More than anything, I wanted to publish books that covered the full range of subject matter available to fiction that didn’t have pictures, putting comic books on an equal footing with literature.

The second question, regarding form, was, I thought, even more interesting. Comic books had developed a rigorous graphical language, using panels and word balloons to tell sequential stories. That was fine for the sort of action-oriented superhero fare that was the norm, but I felt like there were more ways than that to combine words and pictures to tell a story.

What I wanted out of form was for each story to combine words and pictures in the way best suited to telling that particular story. If that happened to be a traditional panel and word balloon structure, great. If the story needed something different, let’s figure that out.

That aligned with how I viewed my role as an editor. Having acquired a property, I was endorsing the creators as capable of telling their story and the work as worthy of publishing. My role was to make sure that the final product represented the best articulated version of the story they were telling. Not, “I think this is wrong,” or, “I think this would be better.” More, “I think your intention here is X, and I’m not sure that’s coming across clearly. Is there a better way to express that idea?” I felt like I was standing in for the reader rather than the publisher, saying, “Hold on, I didn’t follow that last bit.”

Also, while I wasn’t against working with talent that came from a comic book background, I had a strong bias towards new voices, people who had, because of the stories they wanted to tell, never considered the comic book industry a likely option. While there were quite a few smaller publishers out there at the time, doing interesting work, I had one thing that creators wanted that the small press didn’t have: money. I was able to pay creators way more than the independent press could offer, which popped loose material that might otherwise have never seen the light of day.

As I’m busy acquiring properties with my brand new contract and my freshly articulated editorial POV, I had to think not only about launch, but also pretty much the entire first year’s production calendar. I could backfill with new acquisitions for Year Two and beyond, but I’d need enough in the pipeline to make sure I could publish that first year without a hiccup.

Part of that process was also settling on what the books would look like. I wanted there to be consistent line branding, but I wanted the finished product to look more like a book than a comic. My benchmark was that I wanted someone on the subway to be comfortable reading a Piranha Press book, knowing that it didn’t brand them as a nerd. Remember, this was way before the nerds won and superheroes went mainstream. Comic books were still considered a cultural backwater.

Those three launch titles were, in effect, my manifesto. They needed to represent the range I was trying to encompass with Piranha, in both the kinds of stories being told and the way they were being told. I was in no small measure outlining the perimeters of an editorial vision for the line. The shape would fill in as I published more titles, but I needed to establish the broad outline on launch.

My three launch titles were:

Structurally, BSFUC was illustrated fiction: text offset with pictures, although the exact shape of that arrangement varied story to story, as did Dan’s illustration technique. Everything was in service of the story.

Next up was ETC, a science fiction page-turner written by industry vet Tim Conrad. I connected Tim with Michael Davis, an illustrator who was new to the comics and storytelling world. This was a full-color five issue limited series, and the most traditional of my launch titles, in the sense that it was primarily a panel and word balloon presentation, although executed in high style.

The launch was rounded out by Desert Streams, by the delightful Alison Marek. Desert Streams was a quiet first person story of a teenage girl caught in the crossfire of the family drama between her mother and stepfather. Rendered in sensitive pencil, Alison beautifully captures the adolescent search for normalcy.

Structurally, Desert Streams represented yet another approach. The narrative was pictures with text, but in a more orderly, rigorous way than BSFUC. And the shape made everyone batshit insane. It was about half a trade paperback high, a format no had ever used for anything ever. But Alison had finished Desert Streams years earlier, and it was complete when she brought it to me. I didn’t have a single editorial suggestion (I think the only thing we did was typeset the text), and I certainly wasn’t going to demand that she completely redo the book from scratch so it would fit into a predetermined format.

What did this all add up to? I had an ongoing black and white anthology series of illustrated fiction. I had a full-color mini-series set in a science fiction future. And I had a half-sized trade paperback black-and-white kitchen sink drama.

I hoped that what it demonstrated was a commitment to do what was best for each story, and that the focus on story integrity would attract even more excellent work. I hoped that the range on display, of both genre and structure, would demonstrate our devotion to telling stories of any and every kind, attracting even more excellent work.

Or…

It was an incoherent editorial mess without a focus or point of view. I was trying to use three data points to illustrate a larger theme, and that’s only going to work so well. Let’s just say that I had both passionate supporters and passionate detractors, from initial launch all the way through to demise.

Many Unhappy Returns

There was now one last problem to solve in order for Piranha Press to fulfill its destiny. I needed to put the books in bookstores, not just comic book shops. I had been tasked with creating a line of books meant to be attractive to a mainstream, non-comic book readership, and I needed to be where those readers were, which was not in comic book shops.

The flip side of that equation is that by creating an editorial POV focused on attracting non-comic book readers I had, in what appeared to be an intentional act, completely alienated the vast majority of traditional comic book readers. Piranha Press had a devoted readership in comic shops, but it was burdened with both a low floor and a low ceiling. It’s tough to build a successful business on that profile.

That’s when I discovered a quirk of the comic book industry that I somehow had never learned. When bookstores order books they can be returned to the publisher. If you’re old enough to remember used book stores that sold paperbacks with their covers torn off, that’s how it used to be done. Retailers would tear the covers off unsold books and return just the covers to the publishers for credit, proof that a book had been destroyed. Or sold to the secondary market.

But when a comic book shop bought a book, it was forever. Comic books were a non-returnable business, which was an entirely different economic model than bookstores. First I had to convince DC to offer creator’s rights. Now I would have to convince them to sell books on a returnable basis, a thing they had never done before, in order to get my titles in front of the readers for whom they were intended in the first place.

Fuck.

I worked with DC’s marketing department to put together a pilot program in the main Tower Books store in the Village. We brought in an old-fashioned drug store style spinner rack, set it up in the store, and stocked it with both DC and Piranha Press titles. This was long before every bookstore had a dedicated graphic novel section.

All of the metrics from that test pointed to putting my titles into bookstores. I had higher total dollar sales than the DC books, which wasn’t surprising on the one hand, because my books were more expensive. But I also had higher unit sales and higher sell through rates. Those books performed in that setting.

I took those results back to Paul, and he still wasn’t comfortable getting into a returnable business. To be fair, it would have been a non-trivial change, as they had no logistics set up around returns. But still. I’d been hired to create an imprint that would appeal to people who would never go into a comic shop, delivered on that mandate, and proven that I’d done so. It seemed like I’d been set up to fail, and that securing the creator’s rights contract at the beginning just kicked that failure down the road.

Jenette was sympathetic, but unwilling to overrule Paul on what amounted to a core financial decision. What I was told was that the line didn’t have to go into bookstores and build an entirely new audience for DC. They were perfectly comfortable keeping it as an art house project whose benefits were more reputational than financial. They had unquestionably accrued cred for publishing such oddball stuff, and were happy continuing to do so.

I wasn’t, and maybe that was just youth and righteousness speaking. But I’d signed on to create a real business, and babysitting a vanity press didn’t feel right to me. This was my third successful national product launch in the span of about half a dozen years, and there was something about the proposed arrangement that felt like being put out to pasture. Of course, I couldn’t have known at the time that Piranha would be my last product launch.

Feelings aside, I also had the very real practical concern that the long-term commitment to a prestige product would look very different than the commitment to a money-making concern. A profitable imprint justifies its own existence, but a vanity press survives at the whim of its patrons, which I just couldn’t count on.

So I left.

Don’t Let The Domino Hit You On The Way Out

For my last couple of years at DC I’d had an editorial assistant working for me, a bright, talented young woman. When I announced my departure she, naturally, wanted to step into the lead role. She was super competent, but at the time I wasn’t convinced she had the editorial chops to make the transition. I’d given her some top-line editorial tasks, and I felt like her instincts weren’t quite there.

I have no way of knowing if DC would have given her the position if I’d gone to bat for her. But I didn’t. Instead, I made the case that I didn’t think she was quite ready. I failed to account for a number of things in this process. First, how little actual influence I had once I’d lame ducked myself. I felt like I was still collaborating with DC on how to make the line successful after my departure, and they felt that letting me offer opinions didn’t cost them anything.

The other thing I hadn’t accounted for was how much worse the alternatives to my assistant were. They handed the line to Andy Helfer, one of their existing editors. The gap in editorial sensibility between myself and my assistant was a rounding error compared to the gulf that separated Helfer and I.

Andy immediately canceled every project in my pipeline with one exception, Stuck Rubber Baby. Everything else was killed, no matter where it was in the production cycle. Everyone’s rights reverted and they got to keep the money they’d been paid, but none of those projects ever sniffed daylight.

Andy eventually changed the imprint to Paradox Press, for which I was intensely grateful, as one of the only books he published under the Piranha name was a one-off that cast Prince as a superhero.

But that’s what happens when you walk away. It’s not yours any longer.

Obviously, Paradox Press had the same structural headwinds that had caused me to leave Piranha, and sure enough, it was shuttered when it failed to make money. Being put out to pasture with Piranha might have made for a pleasant few years, but I would still have ended up at the glue factory, as I’d predicted.

Next…

About six months before I opted out, DC’s Design Director, Richard Bruning, decided to move on and return to freelancing. He was frustrated by several things. One was that in leading the design department he was spending most days supervising other designers, but never getting much opportunity to create himself. I live with a maker, so I totally understand that. Richard was a crackerjack manager, but it’s the rare maker who actually enjoys managing, and Richard wasn’t one of them.

Richard was even more frustrated by DC’s disinterest in using digital design tools in any part of their workflow. Richard was justifiably concerned that if he stayed at DC the graphic design industry would pass him by as it pivoted to a digital design paradigm, so he and Dean Motter were starting a design studio that was built from the ground up to use digital tools, and did I want to join them?

Richard and I had become work besties over the previous few years. We respected each other’s abilities and collaborated really gracefully together on a number of efforts. If I was going to go into business with anyone it would be Richard. But at the time I was asked, I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t given up on Piranha Press at that point, as I was convinced that I could still make it a success.

When I finally did decide to leave six months later, I took Richard and Dean up on their offer and joined as a partner, responsible for client management and business operations. We were originally Bruning Motter Nevelow, but we gave up that catchy moniker when Dean left. Richard and I embarked on our adventure together as Brainstorm Unlimited.

The Titles

Who’d like a little lowdown on each of the titles I published? No? Well, feel free to stop reading. Although you’ll miss the after-credits outtakes.

The Sinners & Hardcore

Alec Stevens is a writer/artist who brought me The Sinners, an old man’s recounting of his life of sin, torment, and redemption. The story has the feeling of classic literature, while the art is an absolutely gorgeous gloss on German Expressionism, with a side of stained glass. Alec followed that up with Hardcore, the story of a violent skinhead gang, rendered in a similar style.

The Drowned Girl & Nation Of Snitches

One of my best friends in NYC was Jon Hammer, a painter whose work I love to this day. Some of it is still on my walls as we speak. After I got the Piranha gig I casually asked Jon whether he’d ever considered telling a story. He hadn’t, but he went away and came back to me with The Drowned Girl, a fever dream about Dick Shamus, a delusional fellow who thinks he’s a private eye hunting down a clutch of fifth column Nazis bent on world domination. He’s not, but his meaningless exploits are hysterical, and the fact that there’s no real story at the end of the day is audacious. The artwork is spectacular, and the ending is unexpectedly lyrical.

The Drowned Girl wasn’t particularly successful for me financially, not that many of my books were (see above about not selling in bookstores). But I thought it was a roaring success creatively and I published a second Hammer book, A Nation Of Snitches, about, if it can be said to be about anything, a satanic serial killer who murders for Christ. In a twist, both Dorothy and I appear in cameos. The artist photo in The Drowned Girl is of Dorothy dying Jon’s hair, and I have a walk-on in Nation Of Snitches in my urologist’s waiting room.

The Score

Writer Gerard Jones brought me this twisty mystery as a four-part limited series. My recollection is that I connected Gerry with artist Mark Badger, but they might have come as a team. Structurally, The Score is a fairly traditional panel-and-word-balloon presentation, which makes perfect sense for an action story. However, the painterly approach Mark used makes the book look nothing at all like a conventional comic book.

The drama in The Score wasn’t confined to the page. This wasn’t the first project I brought to Jenette that she rejected, but it was the first one I fought her over. She didn’t care for the story’s focus on prostitution, drugs, and violence. I told her she was wrong, that beneath that gritty surface there was a compelling, page-turning mystery with real depth and beautiful art. I kind of insisted. She relented, but in the chilliest manner possible. She looked me in the eye and said, “OK. But you’d better be right.” Ouch!

Spoiler alert: I was right. It turned out beautifully and never came back to bite me. But there was plenty more drama to come. For starters, Jenette scrutinized the scripts and gave notes in a way she didn’t for any of my other projects. From a subject matter perspective, The Score pushed both Jenette’s and DC’s boundaries, and she was vigilant about policing the borders.

Gerry and Mark knew that they were going to get exceptionally close scrutiny, literally down to specific words. This is how I learned that scumbag meant a used condom. I did not know that. That word was excised. In our defense, we did slip in what I’m certain was DC’s first anal sex scene, by way of an artful scene cut. I’m pretty sure Jenette missed it.

My other favorite part of The Score was the development process. The thing about mysteries is that they have to be honest. All of the pieces need to interlock like a clockwork mechanism, and all of the breadcrumbs need to lead to the conclusion. When you’re done reading, all of the clues should be logical and true, even if you didn’t pick up on them at the time.

To achieve that effect I flew Gerry and Mark to New York and put them up for a week. I commandeered a conference room in the office and we hunkered down to plot the story out inch by painstaking inch. We poked holes that needed to be patched, brainstormed solutions, restructured scenes, and tightened that fucker down until it squeaked. I think that’s the most fun I ever had as an editor.

I mentioned earlier that Jenette had demanded a change that almost got the fourth and final issue shitcanned. The cover to issue four featured one of the female characters on the ground being menaced by a man with a knife. Jenette felt that the positioning of the characters suggested a sexual assault, when in fact it was just a good, old-fashioned vanilla assault.

We’d pushed Jenette pretty hard with this project, but this is where she dug her heels in. Still, given that the work was actually owned by Gerry and Mark, her only leverage was refusal to publish. We came up with what I think is an exceptionally clever solution that satisfied all parties, and put a lot of money in Gerry’s and Mark’s pockets, as they negotiated a Batman special as compensation for relenting.

We discussed painting an entirely new cover, but instead we took the rejected cover art, wrapped it in Kraft paper and tape like we were covering up porn, and strategically ripped the wrapper to show enough of the cover underneath to tell the story. We put stamps on the actual artwork and I took the board to the Post Office to get the stamps canceled. It took some convincing before the clerk understood that I didn’t want to mail it, I just wanted the stamps canceled and the art handed back to me.

Honestly, I think it was a better cover because of the changes. But our aggrieved artists would never admit any such thing.

Epicurus The Sage

Bill Messner-Loebs was the writer/artist responsible for one of the towering achievements of the indie comics scene: Journey, The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire. It wasn’t particularly successful, but holy fuck was it good. It told the story of Michigan frontier life in the 19th century, centered on the real Fort Miami. It was a gripping, dramatic, page-turning adventure story built out of the slenderest of elements: weather, personalities, and weather.

I can’t recall now whether I solicited Bill or he solicited me, but his pitch was so oddball I had to say yes. An adventure story/satire about Greek philosophy, featuring Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and our hero, the tolerant, rational Epicurus. Also appearing was Alexander of Macedon as a child, before he was Great. If memory serves, Bill and artist Sam Kieth came to me as a package. Structurally, Epicurus is a traditional panels-and-word-balloons narrative, but Sam’s approach to panel layout experimented with form, using the entire page as a design element. To say nothing of the fact that the artwork is just beautiful.

Epicurus was well received, and I published a second volume. The first was nominated for a Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album.

Gregory

Gregory was the brainchild of writer/artist Marc Hempel, and was an oddball breakout hit for Piranha, nominated for a Harvey and two Eisner awards. It was successful enough that three subsequent volumes came out under the Piranha imprint after I left. Structurally it was panels-and-word-balloons, but with quite a bit more chaos in the page design than that description suggests.

Gregory was the heartwarming story of Gregory, a young boy (lunatic was still on the approved list back then) who lives in a straitjacket in a small cell in an asylum, can barely speak, and has as his only friend a rat named Hermin Vermin, who keeps dying and coming back to life. I’m sure it’s exactly the kind of earnest, personal story Jenette had in mind when she imagined going after the Maus readership.

Despite that description, it is unaccountably charming and utterly original. There’s no way that a few random pages can capture the glory, so I offer up the entirety of A Hello To Arms. You’re welcome.

Why I Hate Saturn

Why I Hate Saturn was a hit for Piranha, winning the Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Original Work. Kyle Baker was a gifted writer/artist who had just published his first graphic novel, The Cowboy Wally Show. I don’t remember who approached whom, but Cowboy Wally was hysterical, so it was easy to sign Kyle up for his next book.

Structurally, Saturn is panels and captions, not a word balloon to be found. It’s a screwball comedy with hipster Anne, Anne’s platonic BFF Ricky, and Anne’s sister Laura, who thinks she’s the Queen of the Leather AstroGirls of Saturn. It’s mostly talking heads, but the dialogue has a crisp serve-and-volley rhythm that’s seductive. It is very, very funny.

Saturn was a tricky book to produce. At first blush it looks like a black-and-white book with a gray tint, but it’s actually two-color printing: black and a PMS-match brown for the wash. The brown was a completely separate overlay that was turned into a second plate, so there was no way to see exactly what it looked like until the press was running.

This was one of those occasions where I went up to our printer in Quebec to color correct on press. Piranha’s print runs were always minuscule compared to DC’s, so they always ran afterwards. I’d park myself in their waiting room and pass out until summoned, usually somewhere around two or three in the morning.

At which point I’d have to leap into high-functioning cognition, as I had a tiny window to make corrections. “Bring up the red in the center, tone down the yellow on the right…” The presses were so fast and my runs were so short that if I dithered, the run would be over. If I wanted the books to look good, I had moments to make the corrections. Thank goodness Saturn wasn’t my first press check. That two-color thing was complicated, but I think the final product looked great.

Our rep at Ronalds told me this great story about Frank Miller and his colorist Lynn Varley doing color correction on the first issue of The Dark Knight. They tweaked and adjusted and tweaked again until they were satisfied with the color, and announced that the print run could now commence. But the press had been running the entire time, and the run was actually ending. The last couple of hundred copies that came off the press looked exactly like Frank and Lynn wanted, and the rest got sold anyway. Even with a large run, you want to make press corrections fast.

Actually completing Saturn was a challenge. Kyle always had a ton of side gigs, and was relentless in requesting extensions from me so that he could complete other work. I was generous in granting them until I wasn’t. I had to get Saturn on the production calendar at some point, which meant Kyle had to actually finish the book.

Did I say “You’re running out of friends?” I did, because he was. He was very young, and was developing a reputation for burning editors. That’s not good, and he needed to understand that the juggling he was trying to pull off had consequences. But I wasn’t expecting this, which took up a full page in the September 1991 issue of National Lampoon.

I will confess that I was hurt by it, which was, obviously, the point. I went so far as to discuss it with a lawyer, who thankfully talked me off the ledge. But I am incapable of finding it funny.

Sparrow

Desert Streams was pretty well received, so Alison brought me Sparrow. This one hadn’t been sitting in her drawer and was created from scratch. It utilizes a text-and-illustrations approach similar to Desert Streams, but with a full-sized format and a fresh start Alison had the freedom to experiment more with the relationship between words and pictures, creating a more fluid reading experience. Sparrow tells the story of Jumpy McNabb, an acknowledged bad boy at only five years old, and looks at what it takes to twist a child into that shape.

Mars On Earth

Mars On Earth is a story about a down-on-his-luck bowling hustler, written by Damon Cardwell, a down-on-his-luck bowling hustler. I was familiar with Glenn Barr’s work through, I’m pretty sure, Juxtapoz magazine, and I thought his style would be a good fit for Damon’s story. They were fireworks together. Mars is straight up illustrated fiction, no sequential storytelling at all.

This was one of my favorite books to edit, because I just loved the long calls with Damon going over the latest script. Mars is about 95% autobiographical, and it’s not the 5% you think. Every time I’d say, “OK, that part’s made up,” he’d say, “Nope, that happened.” The thing about the adrenaline shot? True story.

Possibly my single most favorite moment as an editor came near the end of the process. A climactic scene is set in a Vegas strip club Damon identified as The Crazy Horse. I said, “Damon. That strip club you describe isn’t The Crazy Horse. It’s The Crazy Horse II.” There was a pause on the other end of the line, and he finally said, “You’re right. That is The Crazy Horse II. How did you know that?” “I’m an editor, Damon. It’s my job to know shit.”

What If This Were Heaven, Wouldn’t That Be Hell & The Wasteland

I published three trade paperbacks by the BSFUC boys. What If This Were Heaven, Wouldn’t That Be Hell was three original stories: Lester, The Lonesome Druid, Even Bluebirds Go To Hell, and The Night They Missed The Donkey Show. The genesis of this book was, I think, that the stories were either too short or too long to fit the BSFUC format, so we collected them as a volume.

Donkey Show was a largely truthful recounting of the evening I shanghaied a group of my creators (names withheld for obvious reasons) from the San Diego Comic-Con to search for the mythical donkey show in Tijuana. We never found it, thank goodness, but it turned into a great story. Dave made up the part about the inflatable Elvises, but I swear everything else in the story actually happened.

The Wasteland was a collection of their single panel cartoons, which had initially so endeared them to me. And A Cotton Candy Autopsy collected the first two stories about the out of control clowns, Anybody’s Freak from issue #1, Bingo And Addy’s Escape from issue #13, and a brand-new story to close the trilogy, The Resurrection Of Joey Punchinello. I got to quote a Penn & Teller endorsement on the back cover: “As ugly children we found this book extremely beautiful.” Also, from an MTV review, when that was a thing: “Makes Heathers look like Police Academy.” That’s a great quote.

Stuck Rubber Baby

Stuck Rubber Baby is, without question, the book I’m proudest of, even though my name doesn’t appear in it anywhere. It is tender, fierce, and important. It’s the kind of book that makes a difference.

Howard Cruse was the king of independent gay comics. He couldn’t be the king of mainstream gay comics, because there wasn’t any such thing. His strips Wendel and Barefootz were grounded in the post-Stonewall gay community, and the collected editions were a testament to his creative vision.

Howard had begun thinking of a longer form project, but his art style is slow and painstaking, so he didn’t think he’d be able to earn enough from a book to cover the time it took to create it. A friend urged him to reach out to me. I was familiar with his work and more than receptive. I worked with Howard to put together a pitch that would deliver an advance against royalties adequate to cover his estimated time frame of two years for creation of this 201 page behemoth.

Sadly, Howard underestimated the time by a significant factor. It took him four years to complete his two year project. He wound up auctioning off pages of original artwork, before they were actually done, to make ends meet.

Stuck Rubber Baby is a frankly brilliant exploration of a Southern lad coming to grips with being gay during the civil rights movement. It’s the intersection of those two strands, and the way the main character comes to better understand both himself and his place, that’s so effective.

Howard grew up in Birmingham at that time, so SRB was often taken for thinly veiled autobiography, but it wasn’t. It was based on his lived experience, and has some elements in common with his personal history, but the story itself is just that. A story, enriched and deepened by its author’s life. Like “real” fiction.

I loved the editorial process for this book. Howard was telling a complicated story using a denser, more fluid panel narrative than he had in the past, so everything was new to him. Being that outside set of eyes, saying “This is working beautifully, this isn’t coming across, my eye isn’t going where you want it to…,” helping to make the final story the very best it could be, was enormously gratifying. Howard was an open-minded collaborator, always willing to listen to suggestions. And even adopt them, when he agreed. As it should be.

I left Piranha when the book was only about 25% complete, which freaked Howard out. He was not looking for a change in editorial horses midstream. He trusted me, and didn’t want to have to start over with someone who hadn’t been there from the beginning. He knew I worked for both his and the story’s best interests, so as part of my exit from DC we agreed that I’d continue to edit SRB on a freelance basis.

For reasons I don’t recall, that arrangement ended before the book was completely done, and he was handed off to one of Andy’s editors. There wasn’t a lot of risk, as he was probably 80% finished. All the hard work of plotting was completed, and Howard had a firm hand on page layout and design by that point, so the change didn’t really impact the finished product.

What surprised me, on publication, was that I was given zero credit as the editor of the book. I still don’t know what that was about. I have an idea or two, but they fall under the heading of rank speculation. But that’s just me whinging. The book itself was everything I’d hoped for, whether my name was on it or not. It swept the awards the year it was published, deservedly winning for Best Graphic Novel at the Eisners, the Harveys, and the UK Comic Art Awards.

Howard did an exceptionally detailed series of blog posts about the creation of SRB, but his site was taken down after he died in 2019. Given DC’s snub on credits, this was practically the only place where my role was properly acknowledged, although Howard did thank me in the credits of the book itself. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine, so Howard’s posts are still available.

The Elvis Mandible

The Elvis Mandible gave The Drowned Girl a run for its money as the weirdest thing I published. Writer/artist Douglas Michael uncovers the long buried truth: the jawbone of the King wields enormous power. Hopefully the CIA can keep it away from the commies. This one is more panel-and-caption than panel-and-word balloon, with a delicate gray wash that makes the line art glow. Hilariously, DC’s legal department required the cover disclaimer, so I made it look as much like a joke as I could get away with.

The Laziest Secretary In The World

Jennifer Waters brought this to me as a straight up novella, and I connected her to Gil Ashby, whose work I knew from Denys Cowan. This was pure illustrated fiction, and was, I think, Gil’s first book. The story is about the titular Latoya, who would rather scam than work. Madcap hijinks ensue when she agrees to marry a Korean businessman so he can get American citizenship.

Invaders From Home

John Blair Moore was the writer/artist behind this absurdist, mostly-based-on-a-true-story (I think he made up the talking duck) tale of a man falling apart at the prospect of having a child. Years later when we moved to St. Louis, I learned that John, and the now-grown daughter in question, were residents, and we struck up a renewed relationship. This is theoretically panels-and-word balloons, but with a loose, shambolic approach to page layout that echoes the protagonist’s mental state.

The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place is where the last member of a species facing extinction goes to live out its days. A young boy stumbles on it and discovers an eco-disaster in the making. Charlie Boatner came to me with this story, and I hooked him up with illustrator Steve Parkhouse, whose whimsical, charming style brings the story to life. Steve was an established industry vet, whose Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention The Hiding Place. This was told in a fairly straightforward panel-and-word-balloon structure.

But Wait, There’s More…

I’ll close with a few items that I couldn’t shoehorn into the above. Enjoy.

Real Life Funnies

The Village Voice ran a weekly strip called Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies from the 70s to the 90s. Its tag lines were “100% overheard” and “All dialogue guaranteed verbatim.” I really enjoyed Stan’s work, and reached out to see if he had something in mind more long-form than a weekly strip. He did not, but we hit it off and I enjoyed his company. He was an excellent conversationalist, but I was unaware at the time the extent to which he was listening. Real Life Funnies was reportage, and Stan was a reporter. Always.

He wound up doing two strips about us. One was about the dissolution of Gambit (which I sadly can’t find a copy of), and then there was this, which actually appeared in AdWeek. It doesn’t entirely live up to the “All dialogue guaranteed verbatim” claim, but I understand where creative license makes the strip better.

Phoenix Rising

It was a simpler time. Men watched women take off their clothes, and women paid their way through college. One of the projects that got killed when I left Piranha was a science fiction story whose technical consultant was a graduate physics student by day, stripper by night. We had a story conference one evening at a club where she danced, in between numbers.

So it was not abnormal for our crew to gather at a strip club for drinks and gawks. My oldest friend, Bruce, had been telling me about a gorgeous new dancer at one of the clubs whose nom de peau was Phoenix. After weeks of buildup, I was finally able to join Bruce and our other friends at her club one night.

Phoenix lived up to the hype. She was, as advertised, a goddess. I asked her to join our table after her dance, and she did. The round of introductions involved sharing what we all did for a living. When it was my turn I offered up that I published comic books.

Phoenix said she loved comic books and I asked her what her favorites were. She said that she liked really obscure stuff that I’d probably never heard of. When prompted, she told me that her favorite comic book was Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children. I told her that was one of the books I published, and her eyes got wide.

“Are you Mark Nevelow?”

I swear, I dined out on that story for years.

Weirdly, sometime after that I was at a convention, enjoying the local scene, when another stripper who called herself Phoenix confessed that BSFUC was her favorite comic, although she couldn’t name check me.

I came back to New York confident that I’d surgically identified Piranha’s target market: strippers named Phoenix. Of course, I couldn’t share that insight with corporate without exposing my expense account, so I kept it to myself.

Sir Pranksalot

I am not, temperamentally, a prankster. Too much planning, too much to potentially go south, not enough payoff. But that doesn’t mean, when circumstances demand, that I can’t rise to the occasion.

Paul Levitz had an uncanny knack for spotting the one typo or error whenever one of my books was published. He’d call me into his office to congratulate me on whatever had just come out and open it casually. Invariably to the spread with whatever error might have slipped through.

I was convinced that he got an advance copy air shipped to him from the printer, before the case got to the library*, just so he could pore through it ahead of time and locate the error. He was too consistent and too cheerful for it not to have been intentional.

One day Paul escalates this from a gentle poking to an actual prank. He had the printer bind a Flash cover on one of my books, then called me into his office when the issue hit the library. He let me go for about ten minutes thinking there’d been a bindery error, and that my entire run had shipped with the wrong cover. After watching me hyperventilate for ten minutes, he admitted it was a prank.

Revenge is unquestionably a dish best served cold, so I planned my revenge carefully and took my time putting my plot in motion. The only people who knew what I was planning were Jenette, because I’m not actually stupid, and Richard Bruning, because he was my co-conspirator.

At the time, DC’s most popular book was Legends of the Dark Knight: Gothic, by Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson. The next issue coming up was #6. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but there was a massive print run for this book.

I contacted our printer in Canada and told him to pull the black plate at the end of the run and bind 100 copies. Those were to be cased and shipped to the DC library like they were the actual books. To describe him as reluctant is a massive understatement. I had to swear on a stack of bibles that the prank had been approved by Jenette.

But I couldn’t let the library find the “mistake” and raise the alarm. The library often took multiple days to open cases and distribute them, so the book would have hit the stands by the time the library cracked the case. If there was really a massive printing error, it would have been raised days before the library found it.

I had one of my distributor friends call DC’s Marketing VP, Bruce Bristow, the morning the book hit the street. The call came from outside DC, so it seemed completely legit. Bruce got a call saying “Have you seen Legends #6? How the hell did this leave the printer?”

So Bruce runs down to the library, cracks the case, and finds what appears to be an entire run that’s been printed without the black plate. He grabs a handful and runs to Levitz’s office, and all hell breaks loose. 

It was beautiful, like someone had set a bomb off at HQ. People were running back and forth, production was called in, marketing was called in, and everyone was running around chasing their tails. After an hour, Jenette made me confess, so something useful could be accomplished that day. Who knows how long it would have gone on if I hadn’t pulled the plug?

Jenette, to her credit, denied any knowledge of the prank, claiming I’d gone rogue. Paul, to what should have been his shame, insisted that he hadn’t been fooled and was just playing along. Sore loser.

I took a copy to the next Comic-Con, and as artists stopped by the booth I encouraged them to ink a page for sport.

I still have a stack of those books. They should be valuable in a collectibles-driven market, like the Inverted Jenny upside-down airplane stamp, but no one even knows they exist.

Until now.