Warning: more Red Flags
Sunday, February 10th, 2008Now that High Noon is done and posted at WebComicsNation I can now sit back and take a deep breath and ponder our next move. It sort of makes me pause and look back and where we’ve been and how little and/or how far we’ve come. Cue harp music and wispy cloud effect at the edge of the screen…
When we started this, the goal was to just create a small little thing to take to some conventions and mail out to reviewers, pros and publishers to get noticed and hopefully get some work in comics. Then it morphed as things tend to do and we ended up creating a(n almost) full scale comic that got some decent reviews but often it still seems like we’ve not managed to make anywhere near the dent we’d hoped at this point in time. It didn’t help that our first effort was neither fish nor fowl- a bit more than an “ash can” but not quite a full size comic book.
As you may know, Red Flag Publishing started when James Hitchcock and myself (Joe Williams) decided it sounded like fun to trade our weekly deadlines at the newspaper where we work for the not so different demands of creating comics. He’s a writer and editor and I’m an artist and designer and so we decided to marry our abilities and ideas. Jim had originally approached me a couple years earlier about the idea and when I was interested, he proceeded to write a series of modern noir scripts featuring a gritty detective. But as much as I wanted to work in comics, I just wasn’t a big fan of the detective genre and couldn’t muster the energy to produce the work since like most artists I can only work on projects I’m not personally excited about if there’s decent money.
So, fast forward couple years and I stumble across a contest from Viper Comics. They were seeking a short story in the crime/detective vein as a backup to a regular comic series they were producing. I mentioned it to Jim and he responded with a cool magical realist script about a hitman who was really the Angel of Death, “Mr. Smith.” We didn’t win the contest but now we had about 1/3rd of a comic, so the question was: what to do next?
Usually when Jim and I get together our discussions tend to center on either politics or relationship issues which often devolve into a discussion of the timeless “War of the Sexes.” We were probably discussing some new item on scientific research or something when we came up with the idea of a comic about a secret government agency designed to figure out who the future killers and psychopaths in society are, kidnap them as children and either “correct” them or remove them from society permanently. Jim’s idea to begin the story with a child abduction and quickly suggest something more at hand got a lot of people interested in the story, but we only produced about eight pages of “Snatched” which was to be the first part in a longer story. We decided to package the entire “Mr. Smith” and the first part of “Snatched” together in an anthology called “Red Flags.”
The name “Red Flags” came from the fact that Jim was recently divorced and hitting the dating scene. It seemed like every time Jim was on a date with a woman she would interrupt him and mention that something he’d said was a “red flag” that signaled trouble at the potential for a long-term relationship. He was often confounded that the supposed red flags were fairly minor complaints and these women were willing to cut a potential relationship short because they heard one little thing they didn’t like on a first date. Especially, considering that Jim was often overlooking similar minor flaws in the person on the other side of the table. I loved the idea that we could use this as a name for both our company and our comic but yet to this day when we explain where we got the name from, some people seem to expect all our comics to be about dating. I wonder if these same people think all DC comics are about events in our nation’s capitol?
By this time, Jim had come up with a couple more scripts and we started finding artists looking for stories to draw. While a couple of them never came through, James Tingley and John Moore cranked out some nice pages in a short time. In the meantime we’d been contacted by Matjaz Bertoncelj, a Slovenian comics artist looking for a US publisher. Unfortunately, sales were slower on Red Flags #1 than we’d have liked and at this point it became harder and harder to see coming up with the money to print another comic without first getting more people interested in the work. I’d been working on Jim to understand the evolving nature of the comics industry where more and more people were giving away stuff for free on the Internet in order to get publicity to sell more books. Giving stuff away for free to make money was counterintuitive at first but with more examples every day to show Jim, he eventually relented and we chose to start posting our stories online.
At this point, we’ve already had over 2,000 visitors to our page at Web Comics Nation. While most of them are like the people who just glance your way a convention yet keep walking, many of those have stayed, browsed and even read more than one of the stories. And I haven’t even really done much to get the word out other than hitting some of the web comics sites. Our plan is to hopefully get some Print On Demand copies of the new book to take to a couple conventions this year and at least make enough to pay to attend the shows which will help us raise our profile even more. Then hopefully we can produce a third anthology which will look and read even better and we’ll be in a much better position to make it the success we know it can be. The progress from our first issue to the second was steep and I can only imagine how cool the next one’s going to be. As hopeless as it sometimes seems to be pressing forward in the face of such antipathy, I’m actually excited and a bit hopeful for the future and more Red Flags!
