Perilous Press Blog

Guerilla Marketing

It was Thursday afternoon in the cavernous dealer room at San Diego Comic Con, and Mike Dubisch and I were excited. We felt like we’d finally got the answer to a problem we’d been struggling with for years, and the guy who could make all our dreams come true was somewhere in the building.

We’d been working together for several years, Mike illustrating one or another of my projects, but this year, we’d finally completed breakdowns for MYSTERY MEAT, a gnarly underground horror comic that not only recalled the stony glory of Skull, Death Rattle and Slow Death Eco-Funnies, but brought back the danger and social consciousness sorely lacking from modern horror comics. And even though the editor we were hunting had shot us both down in the past, we were reasonably sure that THIS TIME, we had his number.

Several months before, after years of schmoozing and stalking, I had managed to sell a script to Dark Horse’s revival of Creepy, and another editor there bought “nuMeat,” a short piece that teased the larger Mystery Meat scenario, and he seemed to like it a lot. We’d talked about the possibility of Dark Horse picking up MYSTERY MEAT when it was approaching completion, and he seemed enthusiastic to see it.

So we went over there.

During a brief lull between signings at the Dark Horse pavilion, Mike and I approached the editor in question and told him what we had to show him. We didn’t expect him to turn backflips or plant a kiss on us, but we were both a bit nonplussed when he winced and told us to hold that thought, he’d be happy to check out our stuff, but he had to go to the restroom real quick.

Then he walked about ten feet away and braced another passing creative and started talking to him as if we’d never existed. The guy he was talking to looked awkwardly over his shoulder at us and stifled a giggle. The editor kept up the phony conversation until we both realized just how little we really were, in the grand scheme of big-time comix, took our dumb little sketches, and went back to our hideout in the small press slum to scheme up our petty revenge.

Small Press Area, San Diego Comic Con 2013

This year was my twenty-first consecutive SDCC (23^rd in total), and this year, Mike and I had returned with a platter of sweet revenge: MYSTERY MEAT, self-published and printed thanks to a Kickstarter campaign, available digitally through Comixology. The editor who snubbed us so rudely a few years ago was MIA due to a scandal caused by drunkenly assaulting coworkers and contractors the same weekend he was a dick to us, and so had been promoted to a senior position that prudently kept him from attending conventions, so we wouldn’t be able to send him to the restroom with a copy of our swanky mag, but we still felt we had something to prove.

Our Swanky Mag.

The further I move away from San Diego, the more going into that gargantuan sweat lodge feels like coming home. I’m old enough that I remember how drastically everything began to change when Hollywood moved in about twelve years back, invested enough in it that I worry about its future more than I should as it begins and sicken and change.

At its height, Comic Con became not just a genre popular culture event, but a city of conventions. If you didn’t care about the new CBS fall lineup or celebrity perp walk panels in Hall H (and if you could wrest a badge from the legions who most fanatically did) or ultrarare Con-exclusive Funko toys, you could still meet comics legends and see panels and shop for comics without camping out in a lawnchair or waiting in any kind of serious line. When I helped run the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in San Pedro, we easily filled a 500-seat room for a panel on HPL every year at the decidedly crappy Saturday night timeslot. I don’t think we ever had that many people attend the festival itself on a Saturday.

We are now a few years past peak Comic Con, and the film, videogame and toy interests continue to crowd out actual comics vendors and creators, even as they try in inevitable corporate fashion to squeeze more promotion out of the event with less expense and effort. Watching them tighten their grip on the geek audience year by year has been like watching a boa constrictor digest its dinner.

I’ve seen industry parties go from lavish, everybody’s-invited extravaganzas with bulging swag bags and hosted bars to tight-fisted elite circle-jerks where lines of the unwashed circle round the block, while those inside seem to be having less fun than the parents in the Red Dawn re-education camp. The convention itself feels sleepier, Sunday-tired on Wednesday night, but still crowded with folks sleepwalking through a mall and buying plastic dreams with more plastic.

While the big pavilions stayed big, the only novelty on the floor this year was all that’s been lost––venerable vendors like Mile High Comics who’ve been priced out of Comic Con after 44 years, or independents like Bud Plant, once an aisle unto itself, now relegated to a scurfy single booth in the back of the hall. My friends who’ve always paid for next year’s booth with the petty cash from the current year were unable to meet the rent due to stale sales.

The fans were still buying, still cosplaying, still enduring preposterous lines, but not for comics. As the economy continues to leave working people behind and the political crises leave even the most secure of us seething with frustration and anxiety, fans were buying almost in a panic, and they were reaching for security blankets.

This is your only space program...

Recognizable brands dominate the merchandise more every year, the Disney-driven saturation of Marvel and Star Wars merch all but overwhelming Warner’s DC stuff. As one of the only open-source brands, Cthulhu still attracts buyers, but they want shirts, shot glasses, bumper stickers and resin busts, not troublesome, tedious books. People weren’t looking for new stories to read, or even familiar ones. They wanted icons, fetish objects to let them step inside their heroes and take on their strength, their sense of purpose. Conditioned by years of media bombardment, fans feel empowered to express their inner child, to wear Superman or Captain America T-shirts in public as serious expressions of personal philosophy, to take the collectible toys out of the packaging and play with them.

This is your military...

Without a trace of irony, fans embrace geekdom, the metaphor of a besotted drunk who eats anything given to him in a sideshow of bottomless degradation. They have become heroes of proactive consumerism, drunk on their seeming power to shape by social media focus-grouping summer tentpole movies to better pander to the adultification of their childhood fantasies. Superhero movies are our education policy, sci-fi fantasy is our only viable space program.

This is your government

We didn’t need to sit in a booth all weekend to know that nobody’s cherished childhood fantasies this year included horrible shit coming out of their food.

But we did it anyway.

In Supergods, Grant Morrison lays out an elaborate scheme that diagrams the pendulum swing of the zeitgeist, which he employs to pitch projects that best head off collective American appetites at the pass. If MYSTERY MEAT ever had a chance of breaking out according to this scenario, we were coming out at the exact worst end of the cycle for a confrontational, anti-authority horror comic. I gave an advance copy of MYSTERY MEAT to Grant last year. He probably didn’t read it, either.

IGNORE ME!

But we’d long since given up on trying to “break in” to comics, and were resigned to eking out a market for the kind of books we wish somebody else had made. For as long as I’ve been coming to SDCC, I’ve tried networking and ass-kissing and parading around in a bloody sandwich board to try to find a place in the comic industry, to no avail. It’s much harder for writers to get over than artists, for whom an elaborate program of portfolio reviews are scheduled. You can’t just pitch ideas to editors wary of getting sued, and nobody’s actively looking for the next Alan Moore in the rope-line at Comic Con. Comics have learned a lot of the worst lessons from Hollywood, which has relied on them as a market-testing, brand-breaking farm team for nearly twenty years. Namely, to get noticed at all, you have to have already broken out on your own, so their buying your title benefits them in the short term more than it will benefit you, who’ve already done the unimaginably difficult job of making yourself a viable brand.

There is no God...

but Godzilla.

I have no illusions about my ambitions or my methods. I’ve never wanted to write superhero comics for Marvel or DC, and I’ve always known the kind of stuff I’d excel at writing would only appeal to a wafer-thin slice of the comic reading audience, which only comprises a shrinking plurality even of the folks who attend Comic Con. Peers of mine who’ve moved from obscurity to writing flagship Marvel titles did so by striking up relationships that have eluded me over a lifetime of chasing comics work. It took a couple years of bird-dogging Dark Horse at events to cultivate an editor who liked my work, and they almost immediately let her go. Same thing happened at IDW, where Jeff Conner tirelessly put together a raft of great prose anthologies based on their cheesy properties, which were dumped on the market with so little fanfare that year in and year out, the reps at their booth weren’t even aware they existed.

Truth is, every year, Comic Con leaves me feeling like the poor fucker in Kafka’s “Before The Law” piece from The Trial. I lost my capacity to enjoy playing RPGs after the decade-long hosing I received at the hands of Chaosium over the San Francisco Guidebook, so I’ve always tried to balance my disappointment with my progress in the comic industry against the fear of losing the pleasure of reading them. Though I failed to add any new “contacts,” my greatest pleasures of the weekend were the times I got to spend with my real friends in the community––Mike Dubisch, who’s helped me give life to ideas no sane comic company would ever touch; Ron Kirby, Comic Con volunteer since before you or I were even born, who has always made sure I was welcome; Brian and Gwen Callahan of Sigh Co Graphics and H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, who’ve always carried my wares and let me hide from the inevitable backlash to my guerilla marketing stunts in their booth; and a bunch more people, dear friends I only see at Comic Con every year, who make the dream a reality.

Moving the smell at Comic Con with Anthony Trevino

If I’ve learned anything worth knowing from twenty-one years at Comic Con, it’s just that: know who your friends are. Lift them up and never forget all the times you’ve leaned on them. Strangers won’t pick you up unless you’re spilling money out your pockets.

It was Sunday evening of another Comic Con several years ago. I’d just spent the last of my disposable Con cash on a t-shirt for my daughter and was hanging out on the lanai of the Hilton, watching the sunset and enjoying a beer before driving back to Los Angeles, when a writer of some note in both prose and comics, invited me to join him and some close friends and colleagues for a limo run to the Mission Valley In N Out.

I’d eaten there often; in fact, I like as not would’ve stopped there by myself on my way out of town, but this was exactly the kind of secret handshake socializing thing I’d despaired of ever getting in on.

I was barely acquainted with this author, having been introduced to him at a World Horror con in 2005 when we were both coming up, but we’d never interacted since. I’d been on a science fiction panel with some notable luminaries that weekend in spite of having no major publications to speak of, so his invitation couldn’t help but strike me as some kind of threshold moment. The cool kids had invited me to ride in their fancy car to get lunch! It was like hanging out with the seniors freshman year of high school, all over again.

The limo was so long, it couldn’t get up the ramp to the Hilton carport, so we had to come down to it. The author introduced me to his wife, whose idea the limo ride apparently was, but not to any of his friends, who conversed animatedly with each other all the way to the In N Out.

The limo couldn’t fit into the drive-thru either, so we got out and filed inside to order. I got my food and ate in the car next to them, but managed to insert not a single word into the conversation. I felt like a ghost, alive but too boring to be perceived by my fellow passengers. I had more than enough time to wonder why I’d been invited at all, since they had plenty of friends.

When we got back to the hotel, I found out. The writer’s wife cornered me on my way to the restroom and hit me up to chip in for the limo ride. I didn’t hear her talk with any of their industry friends about paying for the ride. The writer had told me his wife was independently wealthy and wanted to do it for her friends who’d never had In N Out before. I had to explain to her that I was flat broke and didn’t know we were supposed to chip in, or I’d have gone to In N Out by myself in my car, which was parked at Qualcomm Stadium, about a mile away from Mission Valley. I apologized to her, but I could tell I’d offended her deeply, that if she got any impression of me at all, it was as a freeloader who’d taken advantage of her little outing for a free ride. I took the trolley back, past the fateful In N Out, and though my belly was filled, I had to go to my parents’ house in Lakeside before leaving town and made them cook tacos before I felt solid again.

I don’t want this endless bummer post with a bummer, so here’s the most amazing guy I’ve had the pleasure to get to know and work with through Comic Con.

Don't be a sinner... be like SKINNER!