Free Comic Book Day at Comicopia: Kevin Church Gets Agreeable

You're a pretty busy hombre. In addition to making scratch for the rent and drinking pints at The Burren, you've got an Agreeable Comics mini-empire comprised of The Rack, Lydia (a Rack spin-off), She Died In Terrebonne, and The Loneliest Astronauts. How did you trick... er.... "convince" talented artists like Benjamin Birdie, Max Riffner, T.J. Kirsch, and Ming Doyle to collaborate on these projects? We're sure lots of aspiring comics writers out there who can't draw for beans are envious of your mad networking skills.

I am extremely fortunate in that regard. Three of those [collaborations] mentioned were because of artists saying "hey, I don't hate you, so why don't we do something together?" Birdie wanted to do a Penny Arcade for comics and I cranked out the bible for The Rack. Max Riffner guested on The Rack and mentioned he liked drawing Lydia, so we did a short-run webcomic about one of The Rack's characters leaving the comic book shop and joining the corporate world. T.J. walked up to me at the New York Comic Con and said he liked my blog and somehow he decided he wanted to work with me.

Ming, I commissioned to do a piece for my J Jonah Jameson collection and we became friends when she showed up for one of the movie nights I do at The Somerville Theatre with my friend Hannah. I came up with the idea of The Loneliest Astronauts while on the phone with another one of my friends and I pitched it to her with a "just once a week and you'll keep putting stuff out in front of people and it'll be awesome and there's astronauts and c'mon please" sort of email.

I work with some amazing collaborators, all of whom have different strengths. My next two comics (one is going to be announced this week on Battlemouth; another is currently in preproduction, but has a website) feature artists who are different from these three, but they're also pretty spectacular as well.

I have no idea how to network in the conventional sense: I had a popular blog and I guess I rolled that into meeting great people who want to make good comics. I've not been a good blogger lately, really, but now I have some really great-looking comics whose words are OK. Again: it's about putting it out there and hustling, as Rick Ross would tell you.

You're also paying to print your webcomics, shilling collections and floppies at cons and getting them into stores. You're pretty careful to make sure these editions are well-designed and jam-packed with extra goodies for fans. What's this process been like (good, bad, ugly), and what advice can you give folks who are looking to sell their own comics wares in print and online?

I've been exceedingly happy with the response to our print versions, mostly because they do look darn nice. In this day and age, Marvel and DC are asking $4 for the latest issue of a Wolverine miniseries and readers don't really balk at paying the same for something new if it looks like they'll enjoy it. We sold out of The Loneliest Astronauts and She Died In Terrebonne's new floppies at the Boston Comic-Con a couple of weeks ago, and the majority of those sales were to non-fans, just people looking for something to read. The Loneliest Astronauts works perfectly in a book format: Ming's art looks terrific printed, even if it's reduced from our three-color look to black and white, and the hook gets people buying right away. She Died In Terrebonne is going to be collected when it's done, but the floppies are a great way of getting the book into people's hands and getting them reading the webcomic.

Advice: Keep print in mind from the beginning! Get a format and stick to it, and keep the print version in your head if you ever need to deviate. Nowadays, there's more options than ever for short-run printing. Economy of scale does kick in for small outfits like Agreeable Comics, but if you stick to selling your book yourself or bite the bullet and sell it to select retailers at cost, you can grow your audience pretty effectively. Heck, if you can't afford to print the comics yet, print postcards through a site like GotPrint.net and start leaving them everywhere and sending them to retailers who are friendly to your cause.

The Rack, your longest-running strip, is frequently serving up street justice to the various goons and ghouls of the comics industry. Boston's no New York or San Diego, but we've got a pretty rad comics scene and awesome shops like Comicopia in town. What's your experience been like with the local talent, and who else (besides you and Ming) are out there fighting the good fight?

Oh, man, I gotta give it up to Liz Prince, Joe Quinones, Maris Wicks, and Raul Gonzalez for representing Somerville so awesomely. Maris and Liz do terrific indie comics and Joe's about to explode at one of the Big Two in the very near future. Raul's doing galleries and stuff right now but I've seen pages from various comics projects he's working on and they're really gorgeous and witty.

Karl Stevens's work blows me away every time I see it. I was a big fan of Whatever and Guilty, but Succe$$ saw him experimenting a bit with Gustavo Turner and now I'm pretty much up for anything he does.

As far as retailers go, I can't say enough about how good Comicopia is, but the Allston New England Comics is a great indie-friendly location for that particular chain and my guys at Comicazi hook me up every week and are willing to sojourn across the land to find oddities that may hover into my view.

She Died In Terrebonne is a slight change of pace from your usual jokey antics. What's it been like writing a long-form mystery, and what made you want to switch gears? Can we expect more of this sort of thing on the horizon? Also, since we were not alive in the 70's, we need to know: why is it set way back then, and where are the dinosaurs? (Note: this last question is kind of mean.)

Dinosaurs died out in the Sixties, after we kept sending them to fight the Germans in Vietnam. Jeez. What are they teaching kids these days?

I've always had longer-form stories in my head that I wanted to do, so it wasn't really a matter of switching gears, just finding the first story. I'd written Cover Girl and generated a 5-issue, 130-page graphic novel in the process. I do think about the individual dose quite a bit more with She Died In Terrebonne and the upcoming strips I'm doing, as they'll both be longer form. I don't want to just do "a page from the graphic novel" when a new person visits the comic for the first time, because that's alienating and I want them to kind of instantly get what's happening.

The Loneliest Astronauts is our favorite strip of yours, mainly because it is straight bonkers. What's the collaborative process between you and Ming like, and what's on the lunar horizon for astronauts Dan and Steve?

There's honestly not a huge amount of collaboration on an individual strip basis for The Loneliest Astronauts. It's more thematic collaboration, where I mention that I might want to do this or touch on that and I get feedback from her. You'll notice that the strip has gotten stripped down quite a bit since the beginning. In just a few months, we've figured out where our strengths lie and I'm now much more amenable to cutting out three or four cute lies on dialogue for the sake of working in more overall weirdness and crushing isolation.

What's on the horizon? I don't like telling things in advance, particularly when we've both been enjoying the turn the strip has taken in the last few weeks. (I think Ming has been enjoying it. I hope she has.)

You seem pretty comfortable creating your own work and distributing it on your own terms, but it must be a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in beers. Are you interested in work-for-hire somewhere down the line for The Big Two or other companies?

I'm friendly with people at both Marvel and DC and I still like the folks at BOOM! a lot, but I'm pretty happy in my own niche at the moment, particularly as I've been squeezing the mind grapes particularly effectively of late. That said, I have a really great Johnny Storm pitch that I want to do something with someday, and of course there's the dream comic I want to do with Ming: a Daily Planet ongoing filled with interoffice politics, reporting, and Lois Lane looking terrific.