 Hello, San Francisco! For far too long, us nerds have lived in the shadows, the basements, tiny, rented. Anyways, thank you all so much for being here. My name is Avi. I am the founder of Silver Sprocket. We're a local radical indie comic publisher and retail store and gallery. We help put on this event. We are so thrilled for you all to be here. We just had, we just hit over 1,000 attendees. Holy fucking shit, that's incredible. So, we've got such an amazing, thriving queer comic community here in San Francisco, and we're so excited to welcome all these creators, all of you, I expect many of you are creators yourselves. And the purpose of this panel here is really to showcase what local queer publishing, just the variety of different operations, how they operate. We're really hoping to demystify what publishing even is. Hopefully inspire some of you to publish your own work or start your own presses. And also just spotlight some really incredible local publishing houses that are all doing very just impressive, fantastic, vital comics with a wide variety of different approaches, styles, ways of doing business, types of books being created. Just really amazing work over here that is right here in your backyard, part of your community. So, let me kick things off. I'm just gonna introduce our panelists. So, to my left is Casper of ABO Comics. Then we've got Brena of Linnea House. Then we've got Tara of Stacked Deck Press. And then we've got Yasmin of Dry over at the end. So, thank you all. So, I guess just to kick things off, I think just how about we all just, if you all wanna introduce yourselves, I guess I'll start with Casper and we'll go this way. And yeah, if you could just tell us a little bit about your publishing operation. Hi everybody, I'm Casper. I'm the co-founder and director of ABO Comics, short for abolition comics. We have a storefront in our gallery in Oakland. So, if you ever make it across the bridge, I know it's a massive trek, but please come visit us. We're over on Telegraph Avenue. We are occupying not a basement dwelling, but actually a three-story former haunted cinema. So, it's super gothy, super fun. So, our publication or our publishing house works exclusively with currently incarcerated queer and trans artists. We work with people in prisons and jails nationwide, help people sort of establish a creative practice while they're incarcerated and help them through the publishing process. So, whether they wanna publish their individual solo comics, if they wanna, we've branched out into publishing people's like autobiographies and memoirs, poetry, all sorts of different aspects into the publishing world, sort of trying to, like Avi said, demystify the publishing world which has historically kind of been kept from people in prison as far as, you know, getting their stories out there in their own words. So, that's what we do and we also help people sell their creative work. So, while they're inside, if they're painting, drawing, if they're doing leatherworking or craft work, we have that available at our gallery as well for sale, and then we donate all of our proceeds back to the commissary accounts or to the loved ones of the artists that we work with so that they can remain financially stable during their incarceration. Thank you. Hi. Oh, do y'all wanna clap for that amazing intro? Yeah, hi, my name is Brina Nunez. I'm the co-founder of La Neja House. My spouse is Lawrence Lindell, who's also the co-founder. You might be seeing them pushing like a little adorable baby in like a green, like, chickered outfit. So, that's my partner. Yeah, we started the press during like the beginning of the pandemic, which I think when I kind of laugh at it because it doesn't seem like a really smart idea, but at the same time, I feel like we were all like living in the internet for the most part. So, it was really nice to just find the time and also just the space for us to create comics. We both have been published individually in other ways and experiencing different processes of being published in, I don't wanna say, speaking for myself, mostly been working with clients like the Nib, for instance, and Lawrence has been published by Drone and Quarterly. And at the same time, we just sort of miss like the approach to making like our own comics that aren't necessarily being assigned via commission. And we just wanna keep the zine spirit alive. And that's how we both found each other as partners and as a family-run press. That's why we wanted to create the space to honor our pace and like the sense of time as well because I feel like we're also kind of define the expectations in a really capitalist society that we live in. Sometimes we feel, at least for myself, I feel rushed to complete work. And Lawrence has a very different pace at the same time. So we also just wanted to create Lineha House as just like our own little sacred space for us to really be tender with the process and with the work and to really make this our own personal playground as well. Yeah, that's all I'll say about Lineha House. I'm Tara Madison-Avery. My publishing imprint is Stack to Deck Press. We launched in 2015. We started with a book called Collogrenant, which is our All Ages Trans series, but the project we were formed to publish was a work from an association with Prism Comics called Alphabet. Some of you might remember that. So I also am a board member of Prism Comics. So if you are a convention goer and you go to conventions here in California, you might see Stack Deck Press and Prism Comics joined at the hip and a lot of that's because we do a lot of things together. I am not local in the sense I'm living in the Palm Springs area, but I do publish a lot of local creators, some names you might be familiar with, Awan Mans, Tyler Cohen, John Macy, and many others. And I love coming here a few times a year to see what y'all are up to. And in the ensuing nine years, we've published some things we're pretty proud of. One is the first All Trans Comics anthology. We're still here, which we were fortunate enough to win an Ignats Award for. And we're also here this weekend to promote a couple of brand new titles. One is, I'm gonna get my plug all out of the way and then the suspense will be over. We belong, which is an all black, all queer sci-fi fantasy comics anthology, which is debuting today. This is the first time it's been available anywhere. And then we also have a graphic memoir coming up called A Good Sport, which is about one woman's participation in the 2018 Gay Games. And so just been plugging away at this for nine years. Something Keith Knight once said is, we're too small to fail. So if it's an operation of one person, if you've gotta put things on the back burner for a while and go get a desk job somewhere else to make sure the mortgage is paid, well, your business doesn't disappear. It just comes back to you when you have the time, energy, and financial good fortune to return to it. So, and that's been my story for nine years now and hopefully for many more. Hello, my name is Yasmin. I'm part of Dry, which is Daniels O, Raul Higuera, Yasmin Abedifar Dry, very original. We're actually Avi's child, so we all started a job at Silver Sprocket together and met each other and we're like, wow, there are people who are making comics in the Bay. So we put our forces together. Realistically what happened is that I wanted to apply to SF Scene Fest and I didn't wanna do it alone. So I said, hey, you two, come. So that started the whole thing. They still work there, I don't, but it's kind of the breeding ground of Dry. I think I am from the Bay Area and so is Daniel. So I think one of the focus of the kind of work we do is seeing the people that are making comics in the Bay Area, which is an abundant amount, I think, often the Bay Area isn't really included in the conversation. And I think we're currently working on an anthology. We have 16 artists that are all from the Bay Area as kind of the starting, kind of dipping our feet into putting other people's work out there. So I think ultimately it's just highlighting Bay Area artists and also focusing on mostly publishing women and women of color or people of color because I think a lot of anthologies have 10 white guys and it's not revolutionary. So yeah, that's kind of who we are. Cool, thank you so much for those wonderful introductions. So I guess I wanna know, I'd love to talk some more about what are your goals with your publishing house and what's unique about your approach to publishing that really serves what those goals are? I guess I'll start with you, Yasmin, and we'll work back this way. Yeah, I think ultimately, often comics feels like a community in which people are like, I wish I could do that, right? Like for me, I feel like it's something that's really accessible in some ways and it's not accessible. So I think a lot of the mystification is how do I do this? How do I print this? How do I format this? And I think often there were times that I wanted this little magical place that'd be like, I will tell you everything and we'll do it all together, right? So I think I wanna kind of like create that space for the Bay Area that there are people that we feel like should, we wanna put them out there. So I think putting their work in a place that it hasn't been in because we're able to table at these events, often people maybe only have one comic they've ever made or they'd ever made one. So it's kind of intimidating to table. So I think the fact that we're able to kind of be together and have like friendship be the center of what we do, kind of bringing that towards like multiple groups of people and publishing their work for the first time or having their work in print. And again, as I said earlier, I think it's just sort of giving a space for people who generally don't have that space and it comes kind of naturally to like feature those people cause that's the people that are our friends. So I think it's friendship. Yeah, and as a follow-up, correct me if I'm wrong, but has Dry so far just published the three of you? So it's the three of you helping each other get each other's work out. Yeah, yeah. It's a, I think again, like I was too nervous to do it myself. So having them as like two people with me kind of stayed cause I think it really does help to have multiple people in your court. So yeah. So what I think is really bad ass over here is rather than being like a formal publisher with like an editor and like someone assigning things, you're just three friends who came together to hold each other's hands and support each other as a group of three friends getting your work out there and anyone here can do that. Yeah, you can do it, just ask. There's so many friends that would just want to like sit with you. You can just goof around for five hours and make money. Just stable stuff. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks. I don't know. What makes my publishing company unique is that I am the sole employee, which means that I'm the person Mitt Romney warned you about. I am a corporation. And I think a lot of them for me is, I kind of backed into this whole thing. When Prism needed to publish for alphabet nine years ago, the publisher who had committed to publishing it, was unable to fulfill their commitment for perfectly understandable reasons. There was no controversy, but just said I'm sorry I can't take on this project. And I was at the time working at the family business and we had a shell corporation lying around that we weren't doing anything with. Once upon a time, it had been of some use to us. And I said, I told the president of Prism that, okay, well, I have a corporation, I'll turn it into a publisher, I'll publish a book. And that's how I got started. So now 21 titles and nine years later, and we're doing it. I don't know how this is unique, but I try to, two things I like to keep in mind is to find new people, new talent, and give them platform where they can get their work in front of eyes who can do good things for them. To get them in high profile projects or projects of critical import or something that people can actually say, oh my gosh, this person is amazing and we're gonna give that person an opportunity to publish. Or if I'm really lucky and they liked how I handled the whole mess, then maybe they'll stick with me and I can continue to work with them. So, but for the most part, yeah, I am an army of one, if you don't count the cats. And that's, I guess that might make me unique. Very good. Yes, yes, always count the cats. I think we also operate, or the way we also started La Neja House was like in a very similar direction or approach to dry, because we've always been in conversation, Lawrence and I, and also Trinidad Escobar when we all used to live together in a place, a special place in Oakland called Cartoonist House. And yeah, and I think I'm gonna be really cheesy and rom-com-y, I guess, because we've, that's how I fell in love with Lawrence too, through places like San Francisco Zine Fest and our just, our love for the medium and for the ways that we feel seen in comics and how they've been just these really special places of harboring community, a sense of home and agency and just inspiring us to be better cartoonists and educators as well. But yeah, I think what I'm gonna probably be echoing what I said earlier is that we wanted to create the space for ourselves. It's a lot of work to maybe publish other people's work. So it's just nice for us to have that for us and just to call it a family-run business. The name of the press itself was inspired by us combining our mother's like maiden names together when we were getting married during the pandemic. So we couldn't, we realized when we were getting married we couldn't automatically change our last names to this new name. So we were like, oh, whoops. We really didn't do our homework during the ceremony but at least that's gonna live on in the press and I guess the goals are always being met with every issue that we've been able to pump out but Lawrence honestly does a lot of the heavy lifting because I always creatively burnt out and I think that's why it's also been amazing to be in partnership with Lawrence because they have the energy and the drive to use themselves as like a resource to do the book layouts, reducing ideas and also being my cheerleader because I tend to be really defeatist when it comes to myself and measuring how productive I am in like again a capitalist society. We live in this culture of immediacy where we feel like we need to be seen all the time as artists or cartoonists and Lawrence will go into the archives of like all of these like cart or these comics that I just have like lying in the bottom of like the barrel and they'll be like, let's put this in the next issue and I'm like, really? Like, I don't know, it doesn't seem that good but they'll be like, no, no, like it needs to live out there in the world and I think again it just comes down to the ways we've been able to really embrace or feel embraced by the zine community and just the spirit of doing things on your own time, owning your autonomy and like we were saying earlier Avi, like doing things without needing to be in collaboration with the editor and sometimes, I mean, not to dislike any editors in the audience or the people that we've worked with in the past but it's just nice to really create something that has really run authentically ourselves without having to do a lot of self editing and I think that's what's beautiful about the work that we do too because it just comes straight from the heart and it really just shows who we are as like individuals, as a team and when I think back to all of the issues that we've put out together, it's also kind of like our homage to Los Bros and like the way the Love and Rockets series have been published and we just love the way that there's just like a non-linear like approach to creating like these like mini anthologies. I mean, there are some linear like storylines but it's always like each issue is like a surprise like you don't know what to expect in the next one. So I feel like that's what's been pretty special about working in tandem with my partner. Now there's a quick little follow up question. One thing that I was really impressed by from your just collective operations early on was the Bailey's website, which was a really fantastic resource. I wonder if you could speak to what that was about like the impetus for creating that and what kind of success or impact you've seen it have. Yeah, again, I'm just gonna be like putting Lawrence on blast because they put in the work to building the website and Can you describe what it is? Oh, the Bailey's, yeah. The website itself, it's an online archive of Bay Area cartoonists that are currently with us and I look back to the conversations Lawrence and I would have too about like some of the stuff that we're learning in comics classes or like things or like just the perception of like how maybe the cartoonist industry or comics industry might kind of like see the Bay Area under the magnifying glasses, maybe not being as thriving. I mean, we have a really rich history here and I feel like we've always spoken about it in the past tense, but I just remember Lawrence being like, no, like there's so many people here doing such amazing work. Like, let's, like, we gotta do this. The Bailey's has to happen and they were spearheading the Kickstarter for the first issue of the Bailey's and again, us being in conversation like who should we highlight who hasn't been giving the roses but who have also inspired us as cartoonists to keep moving forward. And I'm really happy to say that we got to feature an artist who inspired me to like be a memoir cartoonist. Jaime Crespo, he's like my comics uncle and well, our uncle. And he's the artist who was featured on the cover of the first issue of the Bailey's. And I feel like, yeah, that's a goal that we've been able to meet too and to see cartoonists or getting emails from people saying that it's been a really useful resource, especially for folks who are trying to like add more, add more names from this landmass in their curriculums. And it's just really nice to see how reciprocal the experience has been because we just do it out of love. And I feel like the way we receive that gift back is just hearing how useful that website has been for other people. Well, it got me a gig, so thanks, Brena. Yeah, it's a good website. Go on it. Yeah, it's like a database, like I don't wanna say database because that implies like massive reams of data, but it's like a directory of local queer and cartoonists of color. And it just having a central resource that people can go to because people are like, oh, I don't know any like whatever. It's like really, like you're really not trying, but here it's so fucking easy. So thank you for doing that on behalf of the entire everybody. What's the URL? Thebailees.com. And I think you can also find it through our presses website, lenehahouse.com. I'll spell that. Bailees, ah, yeah. B-A-Y-L-I-E-S. Cool, thank you. Casper. And the question again was what is, like what are the goals of your publishing house and what's unique about your approach to publishing that really, you know, directs it towards that? I think the goals of our publishing house have really shifted a lot over time. We went into this work really not knowing what we were getting ourselves into in the slightest. It was back in 2017, two of my friends, and this is actually how I met Avi, one of our co-founders of the ABO Comics who was really interested in comic making here in the Bay. We were discussing some of the advocacy work I was doing with queer prisoners, which I had been doing for the better part of a decade at that point. And I knew a lot of artists in prison and so we just had the idea that it'd be cool to reach out to people and see if they would want to do a comic anthology about their experience and their life as a queer person inside. And so we took out a call for submissions ad in the Black and Pink newspaper, which is an organization that links up queer people in prison with free world pen pals. And we just were inundated with hundreds and hundreds of letters from artists all around the nation who were just thrilled at the idea of getting to share their stories in comic form. So we put together a comic anthology in 2017 just as like that was our goal, just to do a fun project with some of the artists I knew and some other new friends inside. And they wouldn't let us stop. So we did it again in 2018 and again they wouldn't let us stop. So here we are now in whatever year it is now. And we've published I think over 25 books, another probably 30 or so zines. And our goals are just completely evolving and shaped by whatever our friends inside prison want us to do. So a lot of the agency has been taken out of our hands and put into their hands by the incredible ideas that artists have and working with hundreds of artists now all over the nation. We grew from working with 25 incarcerated artists in 2017 to now our mailing list is over 600 people who are submitting art to us all year long. We get hundreds of letters a month and we're drowning under that but it's like a beautiful drowning. And so through their guidance and their ideas we've done stuff like a first season of a podcast with interviews with currently incarcerated queer folks. People have ideas for database making or research projects. Of course, all of the comics that people want to do. So we've branched out into doing people's individual graphic novels, publishing their life stories through their autobiographies. A lot of people are doing illustrated poetry books or drawing books. A lot of it also doubles as advocacy work as well to be able to share people's stories and what they're going through inside that's also helped us finance things like gender affirming surgeries for prisoners or eye surgery for people who are going blind inside or medical co-pays for whatever kind of issues people are going through. It's also helped us finance things like buying art supplies at commissary or supplementing prison diets which are notoriously terrible. So being able to buy people like a ramen noodle soup at Combs is one of the most important things at commissary through comic book sales has been something that we never really expected. But yeah, it's just constantly shifting goals that we never really know what we're doing but somehow we just kind of find ways to make it work. That's awesome. Yeah. And that's kind of a follow-up question. I feel like it's a lot of people don't even expect that there is a genre of comics that's comics made by queer prisoners. How has the reception of that been to the outside world? Because I know anybody who's ever tried to publish anything knows how hard it is just to make something exist, to break even, to make money on it and you're able to actually get money and resources back to people on the inside. How is that? It's hard. I mean, it's wonderful. I couldn't imagine falling into any better project with my life but it's difficult. A lot of it's thankfully we get grant funding now as a non-profit but really our community has just been so wonderful and receptive to the idea and we do a lot of this work with completely volunteer support. So people who just really believe in the fact that prisoners are human beings and should have agency and care and love in their lives and still be connected to the outside community because so often we find like with people in prison it's just out of sight, out of mind. Family support drops off after a certain amount of time. People lose friends. They really have lost all connection to the outside world so the fact that our community is so invested in making sure that the community inside prison stays connected to us and has resources and has opportunities to share their stories in their own words and from their own perspective and not just be told by the media or by outside advocates has been really cool to see. Amazing. All right, so I'm gonna ask one last round of questions and then I'm gonna ask everyone to hold up their work so you guys can actually, do you guys wanna do that right now and just hold up your comics so people can see what the hell it is we're even talking about? I realize that should have been part of our introduction but we've got a wide variety of photocopied stuff, reasographed or offset printed of all different sorts of production values and lengths and bindings. A lot of stuff handmade like in bedrooms or sent off to a printer so just, you can do all this stuff but thank you. Okay, so my last question before we turn this over to the Q and A, I'm just curious, like what have been some like notable challenges that you've faced in running your publishing operation? What's been the most difficult or challenging or interesting in that area? And then I'd also like to ask, what have been some successes that you're especially proud of? Things that really came together that are just like, fuck yeah, we did it. We'll start with Casper. Challenges. Well, working with the prison system is really hard. They don't like us and they don't like us telling the stories of people they're keeping captive. So we face a lot of censorship issues, especially as we've gotten kind of bigger and gotten some name recognition. I did some prison visits, I don't know, a year or two ago and I walked into the prison and I had never been there before and they looked at my ID and went, oh, you're Casper. And I was like, wow, what the fuck? But it turns out that there's not a whole lot of, a whole lot of publishers working with incarcerated artists. So you kind of get that name recognition in prison and so that means that like every time we release a new publication, it goes through so much scrutiny by the prison system. And our books have been banned and hundreds of prisons nationwide and we're fighting tooth and nail, First Amendment stuff all the time to make sure that we jump through every loop or jump through every hoop they put us through, kind of make sure we adhere to every prison rule and regulations so that our publications are accessible by the artists who are making them. And we're actually in a lawsuit right now against San Mateo County jail for censorship and for basically outlawing all physical mail from coming into their facilities and just making it so prisoners don't have outlets to communicate with friends and family anymore. And that's happening all across the country right now as prisons move towards phasing out physical mail and moving completely to digital tablet mail, which makes it so that every piece of correspondence that goes into prison, every book, every photograph, every child's drawing is stored indefinitely in a government database forever that's accessible by any and all government employees any time they want for any reason and they don't have to explain it. So we're seeing like this sort of authoritarian takeover in the prison system that's getting worse and worse as years go by and making it harder and harder to stay in contact with people inside and just make art and just make comics with our friends. So that's definitely a challenge we're facing but successes is that we're still doing it. So yeah, we won't give up and we're still publishing and we've accumulated hundreds and hundreds if not borderline thousands of pieces of artwork and comics and just amazing stories that even if they banned us tomorrow from ever corresponding with people again, we'll still share stories until we're dead and yeah, we'll figure out ways. Humans are clever and then we can always find loopholes in the rules and we're silly little anarchist kids so we'll fight the government until the day we die and that's my success story. Thank you. Thank you for all the work that you guys, by the way. Thank you for all that you do as well. We face a different kind of challenge. Our current one is just, I guess I might be speaking for myself or maybe for the both of us, just finding enough respite to recharge from being full-time parents to a beautiful 18 month-year-old child, also the third member of Linnea House and yeah, finding the time to not only just create more issues for Linnea House but also just finding time to also see what's available for us in terms of funding, yeah, because we're both doing full-time cartooning and education stuff at the same time and we chose really lucrative jobs for our family but yeah, I'll just distinctly say that the way that I guess I would also measure success is that we're still existing, we're still making work despite the fact that we're really, really tired and just like squinty-eyed all hours of the day and just more crunchy joints at this period in our life but I feel like the love of making comics is what's keeping us and keeping Linnea House alive. So I find the fun part, the easy part, well, easy is overestimate. Making the books is always a fairly straightforward process, you have an anthology, you put out a CFS, you make an editorial review with the people who wanna participate, you decide who's suited to the book and who's not or someone approaches you with the work of their own and you make that decision that the real trick is selling the books, you know? You can create the most amazing piece of work, the most, this document of queer culture and its moment in queer history and the real trick is getting it in people's hands and they want them, you know they're out there. So I have been getting by with sort of a patchwork quote of independent distributors and also just meeting, whenever I go to a town, if I have an extra day or an extra afternoon in my schedule on a convention weekend, I go to bookstores, I go to comic shops, I bring my card, I develop direct wholesale relationships with the stores themselves, a lot of them like that because that means they can get the book without having to pay the distributor their cut. And it means I also get the sale without having to pay the distributor their cut. So it also gives me, I get to see what people want to read. I think that's what people are reading, where the, meet the, hunt where the ducks are, right? Meet the reader where they live. And so I think that is the most challenging part is selling the books. However, I think in terms of, if you were looking for things that came together rather nicely, number one is probably, we're still here. It's my perennial seller. And we really, Gene Thornton was co-editor on that and she and I, she covered the East Coast, I covered the West Coast and we were the transcontinental railroad of transness. And we drove the Golden Spike in and we came up with a winner. But was there really a Golden Spike? Did they really do that? Or was that just like a legend? I don't know. Was that real? Okay. And then the other things is like the series, we do a series of coloring books. They're, they feature all real life individuals, LGBTQ historical coloring book series. And somebody approached me, friend John Macy and his friend Avery Cassell. And they said, well, we want to do a coloring book that revolves, that features the famous butch lesbians from the 20s, 30s and 40s. Now, somebody approached you with this coloring book idea and you've never published a coloring book before. You think, well, you know, that might be an interesting addition to my catalog. That might sell a copy here and there, you know. Somebody's gonna be interested in it. It's my biggest selling coloring book and has been for seven years now, you know. So you never know, you know. I mean, I've had other hits, but you know, like as time goes on, you know, more months than not, the coloring book that sells the most is Butch Lesbians of the 20s, 30s and 40s. And who would think, you know, upon first blush that, oh yeah, that's what people really want to get their crayons out for, you know. So that was a really pleasant surprise, so. But you know, again, as we have all, I think the common theme here is where we all get to keep doing it. We're all too small to fail. I'm just looking forward to doing more and maybe branching out into other areas of publishing, but comics is my thing. It's all I've ever wanted to do and I'm glad I can keep doing it. I like the idea of starting what's good first. I think one of the things that, since we're, I imagine it as a little clown car and all three of us are in there trying our best. So I think it's about community. So that's such a vague word. What does that mean? I think it really means, okay, well, Yasmin got a job that is at a college and then she has a resograph at her disposal. Okay, now we can make a resograph anthology. Okay, if we can do a resograph anthology, how are we gonna bind it? Okay, well, we would use the saddle stitch from Silver Sprocket. All right, okay, then like, how are we, you know, it's like all of these little things of thinking about the network of people that you have. I didn't go into certain spaces and be like, that's the person who has the perfect binder that I need, right? I think it's just, we have a community of people around us in various ways that can support us. It's also just finding ways to be resourceful, asking around, I think often there's a fear, right? Like if you see a space where like, Tiny Splendor in Berkeley, I was curious where they get their paper and they're like, go to Kelly Paper in Concord. And I was like, okay, and it's just a paper shop and that's where I get my paper now, you know? So I think asking the right questions and just fostering relationships that feel authentic, it kind of nourishes you, but it also nourishes the community. So I think having that aspect is the forefront of basically, that's basically how we are able to make the stuff we do was just from the support of our friends. So I told my students this, like all of you guys have each other, that's your community. And albeit you be in a college or some sort of friend group, you know someone with something and you can all kind of work together. It doesn't have to be this high production value item. It can be something that Xerox with a staple and then you can keep going. So with that being the little clown car, I think the challenges are is that there's no rules or there's no real like, we're all figuring out as we go. We're gonna make a 48 page anthology and we're trying to figure out how to staple all that together, you know? We'll get to that point when we get there. And I think again, it just is the challenges that come upon the way of making this stuff. I think again, just asking for help and figuring it out as you go. I don't think there's really a rule manual, but I'm an open book. If someone asks me, where'd you do this? How'd you do that? I think I'd love to answer those questions at any point. I think it's important to kind of gatekeep or keep things like a little troll with gold or something. There's only, we're all just cartoonists who are making comics, you know? So I think upholding each other. So I think, yeah, challenge is community and community and is good, so. Thank you. And I do, you are all two kinds. And I think I speak for everybody on the stage right here and probably in this entire festival that none of us wanna be gatekeeping any of the knowledge or resources that we have. So if any of you are curious about how we did something or where something got printed or how we achieved some special effect, how we got distribution through somewhere, like I think all of us are open books and are always very happy to share what we know and make that accessible and available to us. I would love for more people to be good at publishing comics so that we don't have to publish as many and I could take a nap. But it's also a joy and a gift and we love doing it. So we're not mad, but we definitely don't wanna be the only people up here on a pedestal, on a literal stage, fuck. All right, so we've got time for a couple questions. So if you've got questions, you wanna raise your hand. I have a mic, so if you raise your hand, I'll bring the mic too. All right. Thank you, everybody, for your presentations. If you could quickly run down the names of the organizations that are publishing again, please. Sure, so if you go to the website for Pride and Panels, we do have a listing of who we all are and what our publishing houses are called, but I guess we could just do a roll call. I'm Avi from Silver Sprocket. Actually, all of us are tabling in the room around the corner, so after this, I'm sure that we'll all be back at our tables. But yeah, Avi Silver Sprocket. I'm Casper from ABO Comics. Brina from La Neja House. Tara from Stack to Deck Press. Yasmin from Dry Comics. Yeah, hi. Tara talked a little bit about distribution and about going to stores and stuff. I'm wondering if you all could talk a little bit more about, I know it's been tough in comics distribution, like Diamond kind of melted down and some stuff. How much of your stuff is sold in traditional comic book stores? How much of it is it sold in more zine-like stores like Silver Sprocket versus just regular bookstores? And how do you reach those markets? Is it just all hand sales or do you have...? A lot of it, yeah. For me, it's a lot of hand sales. A certain segment of what I do, I do through the Evil Empire. I do it through Amazon KDP. So all the coloring books are all ages trans series and several other things are available and what that does if you have books that are available through Amazon KDP is you also get Ingram distribution. So you might be publishing something at Amazon and not in thinking, well, I have to order author copies to distribute it through this distributor. I actually have a personal relationship with or send them out to my old sale customers and stores. No, they distribute it directly to like, I'll be on the internet every once in a while and say, I wonder what's new and I'll find out this coloring book of ours that I don't think much about is now available at Barnes and Noble and other stores around the country that I had no direct involvement in. I get paid for it. Every month I get paid for what they call expanded distribution from Amazon. So Amazon's got a lot of problems with it but you know what? You publish some books with them. Every month they put money in your bank account. You don't have to do much. It is kind of nice. That's why I guess that's why they are the evil empire. They're very efficient. And then I think with the other things like the distributors, I have mostly handle comic shops. And so a lot of the, like you say, hand sales, like a lot of me showing up with a business card and a stack of books at a bookstores. That's like, you know, because comic shops aren't the only places people buy comics anymore. It's not 1985, you know? And there are a lot more people who go to regular, you know, traditional bookstores dominated by pros looking for comics, looking for graphic novels or whatever the term of art is. And that's where I get my hand sales mostly. Just, hi, I publish comics and they're the cool thing. You want some? Is anyone else have something to contribute on the topic? I was gonna say one of the things that's great is that there's a lot of festivals. So I think a lot of comic artists will go to festivals and kind of, I guess it's a different type of hand sale, but you meet people that wanna have your work and then also you meet people who are tabling alongside you. And I think also, like, what happens if they own a store in Portland and they wanna put your work in it? So I think, again, it's about, as you're saying, going to shops and saying, here's my thing, do you want it? Sometimes they'll say yes, so, but also in person at tabling events. Yeah, do you guys wanna comment briefly? Like, what is your distribution like? Similar approach to what Yasmin is saying, like going to festivals, especially prior to the pandemic when we were all on lockdown. People were really generous about just approaching our table and just being really excited and we would just sometimes give them a few copies. Then we would return home, just print some extra issues and then mail it off to whichever comic shop was out of state, but since we live here in the city, we've literally also just done the shipping and the handling ourselves, just like driving and making it just like a family event for us to just treat ourselves to some comics too. And I don't know if this is like a line to the distribution conversation, but we've also have some free, at least some free comics too, sorry. I'm having a brain fog because I got really little sleep. Yeah, we have some, I wanna say we do have some free comics online because as we've also interacted with educators, we also wanna make sure the work is accessible to them because yeah, as much as people have to pay high tuition fees to get into these schools, we've also been noticing that students can't always afford the work, so we try to make that another avenue for them to access our work. Yeah, I think part of the being like a indie small press is that you have to wear all the hats. So you gotta be out there tabling at every comic convention ever in the entire world that doesn't charge you a tabling fee. You've gotta be out there handing business cards. You gotta be throwing events and fundraisers. I mean, you don't got to, this is all stuff that we ended up doing just because we get ripped into it a lot, but we have an e-commerce site on our personal website, so we also package up all of our own stuff and ship it out, but we used to publish through small print on demand services that were local and eventually we found out that there is this thing called Ingram Spark that exists and that took us several years to find out on our own which brings it back to like ask questions of other people who are doing it because if we had swallowed our ego and just asked other people and been like, how do you do this? We would have found out about it a lot sooner, but Ingram Spark basically just distributes stuff for you. So we had an incarcerated contributor be like, I had a family member who went to Target and they found the book and I was like, who the heck is stealing our comics and putting them in Target? And then come to find out that like they actually distribute to like Target, Barnes and Nobles, all this stuff and we had no idea. So yeah, ask people questions, it's a good idea. So we're unfortunately right at time, it's 3.50. If you've got a quick question, let's do our best, sure. Looking for local printers independent that we can support in the Bay Area that would do a traditional graphic novel. Please let us know what you find. Damn. There used to be a lot, now there are not very many. So and we could probably teach a whole master class on distribution and printing and still not even cover all of it because there's just so much out there but please know that we are available and very happy to have those conversations. So I'd like to thank all of our panelists for hanging out, let's give them a round of applause. Thank you all, thank you so much for being here. It is so inspiring and humbling that you guys give a shit about what we have to say. We're gonna all be back at our tables for the next two hours of this one hour. We have one hour left, so buy all of our comics so that we can keep making them and you can have a nice time with them. Thank you so much. It's a lot to take home. Yeah. Did it, did it, it's fine, it's done.