Posted in: Comics | Tagged: ec comics, indiegogo, Paul Thomas Chapman, Rachel Pandich, Skin Crawling Comics

You Can't Scare Apathy Even If You Can Scare The World

Published Sat, 31 Aug 2013 12:00:45 -0500

Paul Thomas Chapman writes for Bleeding Cool:

We came together with a simple goal. We wanted to tell spooky stories, the kind of stories that make a person lose sleep at night. We wanted to scare the world. Our editor, Rachel Pandich, clarified that simple goal, expanding upon it and tempering it into our mission statement: we wanted to disturb and unsettle people, not simply gross them out. We didn't want to rely on shock value. We didn't want to use excessive gore or sexual trauma as a means to an end. To achieve our goal a total of forty independent writers, artists, letterers, and colorists from states as far apart as Florida, New York, and California gathered beneath Rachel's editorial leadership to create Skin Crawling Comics.

Drawing inspiration from the spooky comics of old, such as EC Comics' Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, we pooled our efforts and created a one hundred and eighty page color horror comics anthology, featuring twenty short stories treating on topics ranging from mental illness and economic disparity to more traditional subjects like zombies, serial killers, and the ugly but all too human desire for revenge.

It was a slow and sometimes painful process coordinating such a diverse group of artists, but after many setbacks and complications, we found a small press publisher that would allow us to keep the rights to our creations. All we had to do was use crowd funding to help raise the money for the cost of the initial printing. With a successful IndieGoGo campaign, not only would we see our fears made manifest on the printed page, but we'd also receive a modest page-rate for our troubles. Simple, right?

Wrong.

Hopes and dreams and fears are lovely, but reality is a cruel mistress. You can't make people tremble in terror if they don't care, and you can't make them care if they don't know that you exist. In an effort to drum up support for Skin Crawling Comics, we've sent out press releases to hundreds of news sources and websites. We've done interviews with dozens of independent, small-press publications. We've provided samples of the stories and artwork, a taste of what the finished product will be like. But we haven't scored the attention of a major, mainstream media site. We haven't achieved the sort of breakout coverage that we need to push us past our goal. As of this writing, we only have two weeks remaining until the conclusion of the IndieGoGo campaign, and we've gathered less than a third of what we need to publish Skin Crawling Comics.

It's a tough pill to swallow when you pitch your product to your local comic stores and are met with stares of blank indifference or when the promised support of friends and colleagues for whatever reason fails to materialize. Maybe we overestimated the appeal of something as specific as indie horror comics, which fills a niche within a niche within a niche. Maybe we underestimated the power of name recognition and how the average consumer might not be interested in the work of artists who are just getting started in the industry. Maybe we went into this campaign too green, but that doesn't mean we can't garner something positive from the experience.

Hindsight's twenty-twenty. We should have cut ourselves to the bone to lower the initial funding goal. Color printing is expensive. We should have gone with black & white. We shouldn't have got our hopes up at the promise of a page-rate. Skin Crawling Comics was originally supposed to be a portfolio piece, and there's no discernible difference between not getting paid because you volunteer your effort toward a greater goal and not getting paid because your project fails to fund. We should have planned to include more traditional pledge rewards – such as stickers, posters, and t-shirts – to appeal to the casual fan. Original works of art are wonderful, but they can't be mass-produced and they require more energy and emotional investment from both the audience and the artist. We learned all of these things the hard way. Let our struggles be a lesson to you, gentle readers, so that you may learn from our mistakes.

There's a glut of products trying to raise capital through crowd funding sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and GoFundMe. The competition for people's attention and money is intense and the landscape is indifferent. Any project you create will be vying against established celebrities and major companies looking to defray their production costs. As much as we'd like to think that we're giving the audience exactly what they desire and that we're not competing with a previously established media franchise or a major video game, the truth of the matter is that crowd funding is a zero sum game. In these tough economic times, people have limited resources to spread among the projects that interest them.

We're immensely grateful to the one hundred and thirty one people who at the time of this writing have pledged their hard-earned money to support Skin Crawling Comics. We still hold out hope that we can make this book a reality, but the flipside of hope is dread, and we dread that our dreams of ghouls and ghastlies and things that go bump in the night may not see the light of day. The deadline looms. We fear the reaper. We want to scare the world, but you can't scare apathy. Our IndieGoGo Campaign.