Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics

Crossing Boarders #2 by Andrew Goletz

Published Thu, 17 Mar 2011 06:00:29 -0500

Andrew Goletz writes for Bleeding Cool.

THEN

What's In a Name?

So I had broached the subject of doing a self-published anthology with friends from Jinxworld and the reception turned out to be overwhelmingly positive. A few weeks later (mid-January of 2010 to be precise) and I had no doubt that we were going to have enough contributors to make this work. The initial thing I was worried about was whether I'd find enough willing participants to be able to fill a whole comic book. If anything, it looked like I would have too many.

I had decided fairly early on that I wanted the anthology to have a specific theme to try and keep the wide variety of stories as focused as possible. That decision was relatively easy. Hope. We were trying to put together a self-published comic book created by a majority of people who'd never worked in the industry or had much of an understanding of how things worked. We were all hedging our bets on the hope that this would work out. It just seemed to be the most appropriate theme for the first time out.

The problem was what to call the damn thing. Creepy is a horror anthology that pretty much tells you what the book is about right from the get go. Our book was going to have a theme for the first issue but even though we were just weeks into the concept of doing our own comic in the back of my mind I was already thinking of future issues. The future issues would likely cover different themes so something like 'Hopiness' aside from being a terrible title wouldn't be appropriate for other issues. I used the anthology Flight as an inspiration. Flight is an ongoing oversized collection of stories published a few times a year that has no real universal theme. I'm a big fan of the Flight books so yeah, coming up with a title that sort of symbolized the collective nature of the contributors while not being too specific was inspired by that series. Too bad it was already taken.

I had come up with a few titles on my own and asked some of the contributors to offer suggestions for what they liked. The title most likely to get attention and sales was Siege of the Blackest Night. Unfortunately, it was also the most likely to get us sued. Some of the other titles bandied about were Unity, Focus, The Collective, and Beginnings. Most of the suggestions were plays on the idea that several new creators were coming together to tell stories but none of them struck me as being all that memorable. This was going to be the title to our comic. I wanted something that I wouldn't be annoyed by saying over and over again. Jason Hissong, one of the writers of the first issue came up with 'The Gathering' as the title. I liked it pretty much immediately. Writers and artists were gathering to tell comic book stories. It was a gathering of creators as much as a collection of stories.

I brought the final title to the attention of most of the potential creators interested in working on the comic and there weren't any objections. With a name for the book in place I called on a friend of a friend to help design the actual logo. This person has had years of experience in comics but due to the nature of exclusives with the bigger companies we weren't sure how their bosses would look upon the favor, so unfortunately they aren't able to get the proper credit that's due. I think the logo looks sharp as hell. It's bold, it stands out and combined with Aaron Bir's striking covers I am just extremely proud to feature the design on our covers.

So we had the idea for the anthology and now we had a theme and a title. What to do next?

NOW

Our second issue was met with some unfortunate delays, a lesson learned in how to juggle the marketing of a book that was out with prepping the production of the subsequent issue. Holidays and some deadline pushing set us off schedule a bit and we basically were pushed back from a planned November release to February. We're currently working on the double sized third issue called 'Heroes'. While the book is twice as long as a regular sized issue of The Gathering, there are fewer creators involved. Just eight writers and seven artists are working on this one which has stories ranging in length from six to eight pages instead of the usual two. The idea was to break a bit from the normal structure and I think it allowed for everyone involved to flex their creative muscles a bit more.

Even though we're looking at producing a much larger issue, with fewer creators to manage it seemed like it was a bit easier to manage the deadlines this time around. We have all the stories in and ready for production with the exception of one and in that case, the artist stepped in only a month ago to try and get it completed. There's a real likelihood that the issue will be done and ready this month and I'm very proud of the fact that for all intents and purposes we'll have turned around an issue in a month. Our Horror issue, which is Volume Four, is also looking to be in pretty good shape. Some finished stories are already coming in and it's really exciting to see what some of the newcomers to The Gathering are putting together. When juggling multiple issues at a time it can be hard to focus on the task or issue on hand but I think I'm getting the hang of it. Whether the Heroes issue comes out in March or April isn't as important to me as the ability to keep the book on a more consistent basis and not allow for the long delays that occurred between issues one and two.

NEXT WEEK: Gathering the Gatherers

The Gathering is an ongoing, self-published anthology from GrayHaven Comics with issue covering a particular theme. Volume 1 was Hope. Volume 2 was Despair. And Volume 3 is Heroes. The goal of The Gathering is to give new writers and artists a chance to have their work published and tell some pretty damn good stories while doing it. We also get some help from friends who are already pros like Gail Simone (Secret Six, Birds of Prey) and Len Wallace (Love Buzz).

Please check out www.grayhavencomics.com for the latest news. You can also follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/GatheringComic and click on our Facebook fan page GrayHaven Comics.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!