Red Flag Publishing

Forgive me while I steal the microphone from Joe for a moment, but I just read something that struck me as particularly poignant.

If you haven’t read Steven Grant’s most recent Permanent Damage column, you should.

In the column, “What’s good about comics today? Audacity.” Grant makes a very Druckerian argument:
Society becomes stagnant, until someone breaks the rules, and moves in a different direction. Then society follows in a rush, until the broken rule now becomes the norm, and everything plateaus again.

For a diversion into the ideas of economist Peter Drucker and his relationship to Red Flag Publishing, read Biff’s entry in Alfalfa Was Right.

But, back to Grant. While he talks about the history and current state of audacity, he makes a good point:

In fact, since the ’80s, largely prompted by the arrival of MTV, faux audacity has pretty much been the cornerstone of marketing in American pop culture, across the board.
Now it’s virtually a necessity.

I think he then slips back into the illusion with which faux audacity provides us: that we are being ground-breaking by doing outlandish things. When in fact the reality is, those in control (while providing faux outrage at our faux audacity) are really quite satisfied that we are breaking the rules they want us to break, because it takes our minds off the rules we SHOULD break.

It’s the old “lapel pin” misdirection. A political candidate points to the universal corruption and cronyism of the ruling party, and they fire back, “Look, he’s not even wearing an American Flag pin on his lapel!!!”

Mozart: audacious genius

So, while Grant revels at the end of his piece that audacity has given us a playing field with no rules, he is contradicting himself, as in the quote above, he points out that audacity IS the rule, therefore being audacious is no longer truly AUDACIOUS.

After all, would it be audacious for M. Night Shyamalan to write a screenplay with a twist ending? Or would it be audacious for him to write a screenplay that is a sensitive study of human relationships that takes the anti-plot character-based drama to its extreme?

While Grant goes on to say:
But audacity, real or plastic, has its limits and contradictions.

He doesn’t mention the biggest limiting factor of true audaciousness. All of the examples of truly audacious artists he gives were not recognized as great until after their deaths. So then, being truly audacious is to toil your entire life without fame, fortune, or recognition.

While to be faux audacious, such as Andy Warhol, means instant fame, fortune and recognition.

Sort of like Wolfgang Mozart and Antonio Salieri: During their lifetimes, Salieri was hugely successful by practicing faux audacity in his compositions; listeners gasped as he took them just a little out of their comfort zone, and then applauded mightily when he resolved the tension by bringing them back to the familiar.

Salieri: faux audacious pap

Mozart, however, wrote what would be the modern equivilent of film noir, music that went off the edge, and never came back to the soothingly familiar. That lack of resolution - the happy ending - left people feeling uncomfortable, and they booed. He died penniless, while I expect Salieri’s progeny are probably still spending his riches.

Salieri himself is said to have recognized Mozart’s greatness, but it took centuries for the rest of us to. Yet now, when Mozart’s audaciousness in composing music is still appreciated, Salieri’s faux audaciousness is seen for what it really was: pop music pap.

I’m not sure what this means, other than that if we wish for fame and fortune, faux audacity (continuing audacity) would seem the course to follow, whilst to be truly audacious in a time where audaciousness was the norm would require INAUDACITY.

But I don’t even know what that would look like …

Although I suspect our story The Copy Editors is closer to it than zombie and vampire stories.
A scene from The Copy Editors

But, the problem is, I fucking love zombies and vampires.

So, maybe the answer is to create comics that couch true audaciousness within its faux equivilent? Stories that are, on the surface, pop-schlock genre comics but within contain the germ of a truly audacious idea?

Something that readers will devour for the blood, guts, and tits.

But then, maybe months later, they see something in the news that reminds them of the story. And makes them start to think.

For that is what our keepers fear most. Captives that can think.

Thanks for listening
James Hitchcock
RFP Editorial Director

Now 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!

I’m a pretty avid reader of The Comics Reporter so it was kind of neat to see my name show up on the site after I emailed Tom about a recent entry he’d made. It was a little disappointing to see I didn’t merit a hyperlink since I added our URL to my email to Tom, but it was nice to see that he thought my comment had merit since I really respect Mr. Spurgeon’s excellent writing about comics. Maybe next time he mentions my name it’s in regard to my actual comics work (I sent him a review copy of Red Flags #1 but never saw him post a review of it), but for now I’ll settle with it being about my deep insights into the comics field.

On a related note, I was once again searching the Internet for mentions of our comics since the other day I found a review I didn’t know existed when I came across another mention of my name from a while ago of which I was previously unaware. It seems a comment I made at the Comics Worth Reading blog was picked up by the author of the SLG LiveJournal:

“As much as people complain about “event fatigue” I haven’t seen enough people add up the numbers and realize that what DC and Marvel are doing with their massive flood of new titles, variant covers, crossovers, events and reprints is what they’ve always done- try to flood the market to prevent other publishers from gaining a toe-hold (while also maximizing short-term profits for their investors of course).”
-Joe Williams, Comics Worth Reading Blog (in comments)

Just like with The Comics Reporter, it was especially nice since SLG is a very fine small publisher that has continually put out material that no one else was doing- something which we’re trying to do with Red Flag.

I try to keep current of what’s going on in comics and so I spent a fair amount of times reading news sites and blogs and often can’t help myself from commenting on whatever the topic du jour is. Sometimes I feel so far out in the wilderness here in rural SW Michigan without a really good comic shop close by and not a lot of money to buy them with anyway that it’s sort of important for me to know what’s happening in the field, what the latest trends are, etc. I also have heard often that part of getting paying work in comics and gaining a readership is to get your name and work out there in front of people which is hard when you don’t know anyone in the field and can’t afford to attend conventions and aren’t really part of any particular “scene.” One way to do so is to be active on forums and blogs but I haven’t noticed it working for me and in fact, I was just complaining to Jim about it this very week so it’s especially gratifying to find both of these examples of people responding positively to my opinions about comics in the same week.

I know this kind of sounds like Sally Field’s “You like me, you really, really like me!” speech at the Oscars but I’ve been a bit down about things lately which hasn’t been helped (and maybe even been made worse) by the Arctic temperatures and lack of sunlight in Michigan in January so I’ll take what I can get. Hopefully, it’s a small sign that some of my hard work over the last bit is starting to finally pay some (small) dividends.

As the artist it’s kind of funny to just finally be able to get my hands on the steering wheel as it were. You see, I just took over the maintenance duties from esteemed author James Hitchcock who will still stay involved with Red Flag Publishing by continuing to write more grim tales exposing the soft white underbelly of society and the human psyche, but has handed the reigns of the site to me so he can breed exotic amphibians. So, now I have to put my money where my mouth is and actually make this place look nice and put something interesting in it. Let’s see what happens…