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The other day we presented a story on long running SF comics shop Comix Experience and their plans to increase revenue in the face of the local rise in the minimum wage: a graphic novel book club that’s already had a positive response. It’s a serious issue for small business owners, and led to a lively comments section. I reached out to Hibbs to see if he had any comments on the comments and ever loquatious, he suggested an interview. The results can be read below.

Comis Experience has two locations, the iconic Divisidero St. shop just off Haight St. site of many famed signings by creators from Neil Gaiman to Warren Ellis and an early adapter of the grahpic novel movement; and a newer more superhero focused store on Ocean Ave. that Hibbs took over from a previous business last year. Hibbs has long been one of the most vocal comics retailers. His Tilting at Windmills column at CBR is must reading and the comics review blog he started Savage Critics is, unbelievably, still running after 10 years or so. I’m grateful for him to take the time to talk about issues that are sure to become more and more pressing around the country.

THE BEAT: In the Beat comments and a few other places you’ve gotten a lot of free advice on running a store in the Bay Area. Did you expect that when you announced this plan?


HIBBS: After seeing what happened to Alan Beatts of Borderlands Books after he told his story earlier this year, in the public comments sections of Facebook or mainstream news stories — people accusing him of being a monster or much worse — I was expecting a lot more advice from people without all of the facts! Welcome to the internet!

The thing is that these are flashpoint issues for a lot of people, with political under-currents that can’t really be ignored, and I totally get that, but I’m most interested in keeping my store moving into the future, and doing the best I possibly can by my wonderful staff.

THE BEAT: Just to make it as clear as possible when talking about something as personal as what people make for a living, the current minimum wage in California is $9 an hour. I believe you mentioned this in your own comment, but can you confirm that you currently pay your employees more than that?  As I understand your comment, you would still have to raise wages in compliance with the new SF minimum wage hike?


HIBBS: Federal MW is $7.25, California is $9, San Francisco is (today this second) $11.05, and moves it to $12.25 in May (not July like I stupidly wrote in the original pitch), then to $13 on 7/1/16, $14 on 7/1/17 and $15 on 7/1/18.

I think it is also important for people to understand that San Francisco’s MW does not STOP at $15/hour after that — San Francisco has an older law that sets annual increases to the amount that the Consumer Price Index (tracked by the Federal government) in the Greater Bay Area rises.  Historically, this is 2-3% a year.  Therefore in 2019 it might be $15.45, $15.91 in 2020, $16.39 in 2021, and so on

But, anyway, at this second in time we’re obligated to pay $11.05/hour MW in San Francisco.  However, we don’t pay MW, except for an initial three month training period.  I have no employee currently that is making less than $11.25.

The thing is, as MW rises, so do we need to raise our pay — I’ve spent twenty-six years being a not-MW job (well, twenty-five, because I worked seven days a week in year one), and I don’t want to begin now.  When MW is raised by $1.20/hour in May, I believe that means that the people I pay $11.25 today will need to make no less than $12.45 at that point, because, otherwise, are we not effectively CUTTING their pay?  In the same way, I have to pay my managers more so that there’s, y’know, a financial benefit for being a manager, and they’re not making the same as “just” staff — and I can’t raise it less than the amount MW is raising by, otherwise, again, they’re effectively getting a cut.

THE BEAT: Doing back of the envelope math, $80K comes to $220 a day, which is a pretty hefty added expense for any small business. That would equal selling 55 periodical comics a day more, to put it in perspective. Were there any other methods besides a book club that you considered to make up the shortfall?


HIBBS: Fifty-five $3.99 comics, but more like seventy-four that cost $2.99.  And I can’t change those cover prices — we’d lose more customers than we would gain in revenue!

For people asking about the math, it works like this: I have roughly 190 employee hours each week between the two stores.  We’re open 10 hours a day at each of the two stores, seven days a week, so you can see that’s really not a tremendous overlap of hours to get all of the labor done that simply can’t be done with only one person in the store who is expected to be, y’know, helping customers find the things they want (or discover things they don’t know they want yet!)

The difference between today’s MW and 2018 is $3.95 /hour.  $3.95 times 190 hours times fifty-two weeks a year equals just over $39,000 then we have to add about another $3,000 for the matching taxes that all employers pay for Social Security and Medicare, so that’s $42,000 more that staff will cost. (not counting the new-this-year California mandated minimum Sick Days, either!)

However, in order to make forty-two thousand dollars, this means I have to sell roughly eighty-four thousand dollars worth of merchandise because the Cost of Goods Sold is (very roughly) half of the income — no one is keeping $3.99 from a $3.99 comic book!

I rounded down for ease of communication, but I probably just as easily could have rounded up to $90k because of the various overhead costs that have to be dealt with (shipping, primarily, but there are always other marginal costs that begin to add up quick)

But, yeah, $80k+ is a big hill to climb for a small business.

I do have a few other ways I can help close the gap — I can certainly reduce the number of hours the stores operates for one, though it would help less than you might think because, often, the stores are slowest in the MIDDLE of the day.  Further, the great Jim Hanley told me something that always stuck in my mind: you should be open for the customers who are there, not the ones who are not. There are absolutely days that your biggest sale of the day comes at 10:05 AM or 7:55 PM, and you can’t be certain if that sale would still be there if your hours weren’t convenient for the customer.

So, yeah, I could reduce hours of operation, or I could cut staff overlap to be even tighter (though, it’s hard to see how the physical work of the store doesn’t start to slip some in that case), to work that much harder for the pay. I have that choice.  There’s not a lot of other places that expenses can be cut, though — we run extremely lean on inventory, and we’ve got robust mechanisms for getting rid of excess stock that work pretty well; and we always do as much cost-pruning as we can for ongoing expenses — just as a dumb example: we’ve used high efficiency light bulbs for years.  Hell, I have DSL in the store, rather than cable so that I can save the ~$60/month that entails. No, staffing the stores is, in fact, the single biggest expense each month, higher than rent and every utility and service combined.

And, while I would fire people if that’s what it absolutely positively took to keep the doors open, it is my fervent belief that bookstores that try to cheap their way out of cash-flow problems almost always enter the death-spiral at that point because customers can smell the stench of failure.

What I’d really much rather do, any day of the week, is grow the business enough to pay for this new mandate.

THE BEAT: People in the comments seem to think that owning a smallish comics shop, let alone two smallish comics shops, in the Bay Area with its insane cost of living rise in recent years is a doomed enterprise. How worried are you about the general prognosis for a small business in Google/Apple City, USA?


HIBBS: Don’t forget Twitter and Airbnb and Uber and Yelp too!  Plus, The City gives tech firms millions of dollars of tax breaks, and basically pays nothing but lip service to small businesses.

Look: the comic shop that sold (I’ve been told) the largest number of periodical comics in San Francisco, Jeffrey’s Toys on Market street, just a few blocks from all of those tech offices downtown, was just forced out by their landlord who demanded that their rent raised from eight thousand dollars a month to forty thousand! A five-fold increase!

Who on earth can pay forty grand a month each and every month for retail space? A super-high-end restaurant like a Gary Danko or something…. maybe? San Francisco is littered with empty retail store fronts right now because commercial rents have gone nuts, and everyone is trying to get their piece. Just this month two different businesses (Michael’s Pit Stop, a bodega and keymaker, and the KK Cafe, which was a great little cafe where this wonderful couple, Jack and Margret, also made their own peanut milk) within a block of us have been kicked out of their space due to unbearable rent increases.

It is something I worry about each and every day.  The main store has been month-to-month for twenty-one years now, my landlord has always refused my offers of a new lease, but they’ve also always been extremely generous about how they handle rent increases.  I might have had a crisis long before now except for that. But I could be kicked out at any time with essentially no warning, or have my rent tripled, or whatever, and there’s no recourse.

Look: when I opened in 1989, we had twenty-four comic stores in town, and now we are down to just eight. Two of which are mine. I don’t like that.

Hell, we are probably the only major United States city that doesn’t have a single national-chain bookstore because the economics of bookselling are really hard in a city this expensive.

More generally, though, I do think that the climate for small business in San Francisco, especially small business based around art or creativity, is rough and getting rougher.  I certainly expect that between rising rents and this new minimum wage mandate, business like mine which are currently profitable, but only by so much, are going to continue to be pressured over the next few years as the costs associated rise.  All we can do is try to plan ahead for the things we can know about, which is really why I am trying to do the Graphic Novel Club.

I really think there’s a value and a need in a curated graphic novel program, because I really and truly think that there are a lot of people who would adore the output of the market…. if only they were aware of all of the choices they have.  Comics rule pop culture, but there’s no one really saying “Here, civilian, here is a thing you should read each month”.

I have to think that almost everyone reading this could think of at least one friend or relative who might enjoy the program, and I super encourage folks to spread the word.

Are we “doomed” though?  Well, hell no — I could always go back to just having one store and firing most of the staff and running it myself five days a week again; and given that fallback, it’s difficult for me to see almost any outside force making the store close.  But, Heidi, that would be such a step backwards, and I’m trying with bold optimism, to move things forward.

 

THE BEAT: Are there any other steps you are taking to deal with the rising cost of living in the Bay Area?


HIBBS: Well, all you can do is try to diversify your store and your customer base and try to appeal to as many people as broadly as possible to help spread the words that comics are awesome.  We’re now holding regular ladies nights to try to attract new women to the store (We had one on Ocean last night, and our next one on Divisadero is May 6th), and we’ve started a regular series of weekly videos for the new store to communicate their energy.  We want for the original store to do a slightly more cerebral video series at some point — but, whew, only so many hours in the day to shoot and edit such things.

We’re about to start experimenting with doing children’s weekend mornings, with drawing classes and such, too — but ideas are easy; it’s execution and manpower and pulling off community and events without spending too much to implement the ideas that is the trick.  Give me an infinite budget, and I bet I could do some amazing things — but the problem isthat budget (and the amount of hours available to DO promotion) and that it is always a limited thing that has to be worked in and around the normal day-to-day servicing of customers and keeping the store running, physically.

THE BEAT: As also mentioned in the comments, the theory behind the wage hike is a form of “trickle down” economics. Do you think it could eventually raise your customer base in some way?


HIBBS: Yeah, well, I have to say, living in a city where we’ve had raising minimum wage every year for the last eleven (well, wait, it didn’t raise in 2010, it looks like), I can not say that I can detect any kind of a correlation between a rising MW and rising revenue.  Now, whether that is a result of cost-of-living rising faster than wages, or a result of something particular and specific about the relationship that comics fans and their buying habits share, or whether it is something that I am doing right or wrong, or whether it just has to do with the fact that human beings are messy, illogical beings that operate differently than “well, that sounds like a reasonable theory” would otherwise suggest, I just can’t say. But I am just not seeing any correlation in my sales.

Let me say, kind of as forthrightly as I possibly can, I am not an economist. I don’t actually understand a lot of the theorycraft behind it (though I try), but I do have 26 years as a business owner in a “realpolitik” way of watching my individual micro-economy, and I really think that any kind of “trickle down” is pretty much hooey for a business like mine.  People, by and large, determine their budget for comics pretty independently of their specific income. I know plenty of plenty of people who are already spending above their means, and plenty who could pay five times more, but are super-picky, and every case study in-between.

Further, if I understand the various studies that I’ve read correctly, and I absolutely may not be, most studies are reporting on the macro, not the micro — they don’t give a shit about an individual person or entity as long as the overall picture shows a particular result.  That’s reasonable of course, but my major concern is for for my staff and my store. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of that ledger. I don’t want to have to fire people, therefore making their new minimum wage zero dollars per hour!

If I understand the studies I’ve read, and, again, I really may not have understood them well at all, they generally show a “neutral” or “slightly improved” impact of small (25 to 50 cent per hour) MW changes. But within any survey there of course will be winners and losers from any kind of economic shift — it’s great that the economy as a whole is “neutral”, but that doesn’t help you if your own personal economy is “laid off” or “have to shut your business”.

Further, it is my understanding (again again again maybe totally wrong) that no credible economist can accurately predict what a raise in MW of this scale will do, because there’s absolutely no evidence since there’s never been a raise on this scale.  It is going up 43% over three years, by $3.95 — that is literally unprecedented.

What I think is going to happen is either that more workers will become MW workers, or will get closer to being MW workers, because I have a hard time seeing every San Francisco based business giving each and every employee a $3.95 raise over the next three years,  and / or common everyday transactions are going to have to go up as a result.  You’ll pay fifty cents more for your coffee and a buck more for your burrito, and you’ll wonder why you seem to have no more money in your pocket at the end of the day.

One of my main frustrations with the law is that it is so arbitrarily, geographically.  My minimum wage is going to be $15, but travel just a few minutes south to Daly City and it is only $11; even Marin to our north, which is historically filled with “rich people”, only maxes at $13.  Within an half-hour drive, it is only $9.

But the real disconnect, for me, is that what is a “living wage”, and just how much individuals should be able to participate in decisions about their own compensation, and what that entails.

I think it is important to understand that raw dollars-per-hour is not necessarily the only calculation that people make for employment — sometimes people are looking more for respect and agency, while other times people have income needs wholly outside the notion of having to support themselves or their families.

I have staff who live at home and are full-time students; I have staff who are fully supported by their significant other, and who work because they want to generate some pocket money while they work on their art careers. I have staff who purposefully quit better paying corporate jobs to work for me because they have more agency here. And I have staff (Pretty much each and every one of them, really!) who are awesome enough to probably make two or three or five times what I am paying them, but who would rather be here than the many other choices that they have.

Ultimately, I try to be about empowerment — one of my staff specifically told me during the job interview that her goal is to open her own comic book shop someday. Hell yeahs! I am so down with that notion — because certainly one of my proudest days ever was when Michael Drivas learned just enough from me to help him open Big Brain Comics in Minneapolis – but isn’t, I dunno, “learning at the feet of the master” (ew, bad metaphor!!!) worth some sort of credit against hourly wage? Man, I charge my consultancy clients $100/hour for what I say.  I mean, I clearly believe that I owe her for her time, duh, but shouldn’t we calculate “value” past only dollars-per-hour?

My bottom line is that I absolutely want to pay people every penny that they are worth, but the hard realities of profit-and-loss sometimes make that harder for others — whether that you’re in a high-expense city, or a low-expense town, I’ve met exceedingly few comic store owners that don’t struggle every day to take care of business.

The more important thing to me is how you deal with that struggle, and I’m trying to find a path that allows my staff to get paid more while making sure that I don’t contract the business so that five of them lose their jobs as a result.

 

THE BEAT: Do you foresee the wage hike affecting other shops in the area?


HIBBS: So, my two physically closest competitors are “family operated”, and I don’t believe employ anyone who is getting paid any kind of “hourly wages”. Which is 100% fine, but that means they have a smaller “nut” than I do to breaking even. Three of the other four stores in town have at least one employee, and so will be impacted to at least that degree.  No one else in San Francisco, at least as far as I know, has six employees and the payroll that I face, but I do know at least one other store who has a plan to deal with their own shortfall that I assume they will be announcing soon.

Other geek-friendly shops in the area, book stores, game stores, to the extent that they have employees, will have to come up with extra funds to take care of those costs.

I don’t know exactly how clearly other stores are looking at their own liabilities.  Until I wrote Alan Beatts I hadn’t actually bothered to take out the pen and actually figure out what the bottom line impact was.  Then I crapped my pants when I realized the scope of it.

Thankfully necessity is the mother of invention, because I think I have solid, entrepreneurial plan.

THE BEAT: Finally, how is the book club doing so far? Any surprises or new wrinkles in the huge amount of time (two days) it’s been live?


HIBBS: We’re closing on 72 hours since I first put it live (but I don’t think anyone noticed for most of the first day) and we’re allllmost at the 25%-funded mark, which I think is an absolutely fantastic response, even though that still gives us miles yet to go.  I’m also strongly hoping that we can beat the goal by really large percentage so that all of my staff can get paid well above the $15 hour MW as they properly deserve.

My hope of your readership is, even if they don’t think this is for them, is that they’ll think of someone they know who it might be a good fit for, and they’ll make a point of turning their friends on to the idea — from my point of view right now where we’re at, a share is as good as a subscription.  We’re fully set up to handle nationwide subs, and the social media connections we have planned, as well as the streaming and recorded book club meetings will be, we hope, the icing on an already fantastic cake of content. If you know anyone who could use a sherpa to guide them through the mountains of comics being published today, I think the Graphic Novel Club is for them.

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§

Coming soon! The next edition of @SpEditionNYC… #StayTuned #SENYC #comicbooks #NYC #comics pic.twitter.com/A7dTN4lYMQ

— Special Edition: NYC (@SpEditionNYC) January 8, 2015

Just a reminder coming on yesterday announcement of ECCC being acquired by ReedPOP, that Special Edition is coming back, the smaller artist focused NYC show. Date is TK.

§ Retailer Brian Hibbs wrote in the other day to chide me and another prominent comics writer for not linking to his latest column for CBR, entitled Too Much Competition. The column features dark warnings as well as a lot of charts. Hibbs’ central thesis is that there are just too many comics books, and the sheer volume is what is driving down sales.

We’ve at very least doubled, and maybe as much as quadrupled, the number of titles produced each month, so it shouldn’t be any major surprise that circulations have dropped by 50-75%. The real answer, most of the time, to “Why didn’t the market support [your favorite comic]?!?” is “There is too much competition!” I’ve been struggling with a way to really drive this message home, because this title growth has kind of been incremental over the life of the Direct Market and so is maybe less obvious than it could be. So, perhaps, the way to discuss it is in terms of consumer behavior, and the ordering mechanism.

Hibbs does the math, offering charts for all publishers that shows how many of their books in November had no order, which had a moderate number of copies ordered, which had a lot, and how subs do or don’t fit in. Hibbs makes a good case that there is too much dross out there—and despite this being a Golden Age of Comics, few would argue that we need a little trim. He also offers a clear explanation of something that every comics creator or publisher I have hung out with for more than 15 minutes has complained about for the last 25 years: that not ordering shelf copies of books means that no one will ever discover them on the shelf. The world of pre-ordering has been criticized here and elsewhere ad nauseum but it’s how things are done.  The economics don’t support a shelf copy, Hibbs says.

You’re going to see a lot of crazy low numbers, so I want to reiterate what I said earlier — retailers are committed to selling as many comics to as many people as possible. I know I am! There are, at least, fifteen publishers of which I try to stock one hundred percent of their new launches until the market shows me that it is futile. We have hundreds of customers coming in each and every month, and more than half the comics coming into my store can not sell three rack copies. That’s pretty sobering. Three copies is an important line because that’s the point where the math against having any unsold copies starts to work against you. Order four, don’t sell one, well, at 75% sell-through you, at least, haven’t lost money. Order three and only sell two? Then you’re probably, after costs, losing a few pennies. You don’t want to lose money on products in retail; that’s not your winning formula.

My little alarm bell went off a bit on this piece when Hibbs referenced Comico, which stopped publishing 25 years ago—NOTHING has the exact same business model as it did 25 years ago!—but it’s a sobering reminder for publishers that a lot of books aren’t ever going to cut it in Brian Hibbs stores, and looking at the numbers, they probably don’t make much money.

In the comments, people ask “Then why to these books get published?” and Hibbs suggest many reasons including market share. I’d also allow that other shops may have oddball customers who happen to like some of the books Hibbs can’t give way.  As long as we’re using the long ago past to reference the present, those who read Krause’s Comics & Games Retailer may recall the monthly retailer surveys that ran in every issue, and how one comic sold here another there. Sure there are Sagas and Harley Quinns that sell everywhere, but marginal titles depend on marginal audiences.

§ A new Teen Boat book is coming from John Green And Dave Roman! Teen Boat! The Race for Boatlantis! Huzzah!

§ Josie Campbell has a fine historical piece here looking at how “Agent Carter”  deals with real world history and the role of women: 

“Agent Carter” is a superhero show about the postwar erasure of women from American culture — which is incredibly fitting, as after World War II the comics industry erased women on the page and behind the scenes. As a comics community, we need to address the fact that women in comics is not a new occurrence. Women have been here since day one, a fact that is often ignored because this postwar erasure of women from our culture worked so well.

I’d agree this aspect of the show is a pleasant surprise.

§ At ScreenCrush, Matt Singer offers The Complete History of Comic-Book Movies, which sounds like a lifetime project, but starts off with the Captain Marvel movie serial. More actual history! Nice.

This Bizarro World is a long way from the 1940s, when comic-book superheroes first transitioned to the big-screen as the subjects of serials. These series of episodic shorts were often cheaply made and sometimes shockingly unfaithful to their source material. Comics were ahead of their time, at least at the movie theater; too adventurous and imaginative to be accurately reproduced with the tools of the day. As technology improved, so did the comic-book movies, leading to a series of watershed films—‘Superman,’ ‘Batman,’ ‘X-Men’—that reshaped the entire industry. How did we get there? All superheroes have an origin story. So do comic-book movies. This column will attempt to find it, one film at a time.

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It's my FAVORITE day of the year, when Brian Hibbs posts the year-end sales from bookstores via the Bookscan chart. Now we know these numbers are significantly low, but as I always say, they present a metric. The huge take away? Well, we all knew The Waking Dead was a juggernaut,—sales in this franchise would have made it the #3 publisher all by itself—but after that it's kids comics all the way, led by the maybe-comics of Dork Diaries, but following by Big Nate, Ninjago, Ursula Vernon's Dragonbreath, Drama and so on.

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The next blog was meant to be about reading aloud, but I wanted to blog this rather than Twitter it to make sure that everyone had an equal chance:

Go and read http://savagecritic.com/ (and you need to read both http://savagecritic.com/2009/07/neil-gaiman-at-comix-experience-719.html which is the story behind the signing (and has some photos of me in 1989 with the most remarkable mullet) and http://savagecritic.com/2009/07/neil-gaiman-at-comix-experience-719_08.html which is the facts.

Short version, I'm doing a signing at Comix Experience on on Sunday, July 19th from 11 AM to 12:30 PM. And because time is limited, it's limited to 100 people. Brian Hibbs decided that the easiest way to pick the 100 people was to presell them copies of the WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER hardback, which will be out then.

Preorders for the book can be taken immediately by visiting Comix Experience at 305 Divisadero St. (at Page) in San Francisco, or by calling 415-863-9258 from 11-7 Monday-to-Saturday, Sundays 12-5, PST.

And my Metamorpho Page with the brilliant Mike Allred is out in Wednesday Comics -- details of what this thing is at: http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21941

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Today my assistant Lorraine is in the kitchen doing mysterious things to obtain beeswax from slumgum, and I am mostly on the phone copy-editing The Graveyard Book.

Anyway. Free books. I started thinking about times we've used this principle in paper books -- using the free thing to spread the author or the idea, and, if you ignore the five fingered discount (remember, in the UK you can add Terry Pratchett to the "four authors who are flying off the shelves and don't forget the graphic novels" list) then you still have things like Free Comic Book Day. And before there was ever Free Comic Book Day, there was Sandman 8.

It was 1989. I wrote Sandman #8, Mike Dringenberg drew it, and the editorial and marketing departments at DC Comics got enthusiastic about it. I went out and got three pages of quotes from fantasy and horror authors about Sandman, wrote a "The Story So Far". DC Comics overprinted Sandman #8 and sent each retailer an extra 25% above what they'd ordered, for free, and told them that they could do whatever they wanted with them.

Some stores simply sold them.

The smart stores gave them away. Some of the smart stores even went back to DC and asked for more. The stores that gave them away were the stores who, a year or so later, found it very easy to sell Sandman trade paperbacks to their customers. And then to sell Sandman hardcovers. And some of them are now selling the Absolute Sandmans.

(And a few people have written to let me know that ABSOLUTE SANDMAN Volume 3 is now up at Amazon, with the extra 5% discount for pre-ordering it bringing it to 42% off.)

Anyway. There weren't any grumbles that we were somehow devaluing other comics, or that this was Marxism in action, or that this was going to put comics retailers out of business or anything like that. It was about expanding the readership, about convincing people that it was safe to try something new.

(I just called Brian Hibbs at Comix Experience who put labels with his store's name and address on his free comics and then left them at barbers' shops and on buses and anywhere else he could, bookcrossing style -- he said he passed out about 400 copies of Sandman 8 and got 100 readers back, who bought every copy of Sandman, and the collected editions, and some of those people are buying Absolute Sandmans from him now -- and then he pointed out that it wasn't just Sandman that those people bought, but lots of them discovered comics and bought everything...)

...

Rachel McAdams says she would like to be Black Orchid on the screen -- I'd like to see that too. I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote Black Orchid, and it shows, but there's some dialogue I'm still really happy with, and a wilful attempt to avoid cliche that I'm still proud of. And Dave McKean created an entire school of realistic superhero art (one he's still apologising for). It was our first full-colour baby.

I wish her luck.

...

How does he come up with the cover images? Dave I mean. Does he just make it up out of his head like writing? Or is there a HarperCollins committee that says, "We would like a blue cover with a knife. And perhaps a black one with some mist...no no, more swirly please."


Can you ask him? And if he answers, can you post it?


Thanks Neil!

-Miriam

I can answer this -- I was there and watching it. The first cover Dave did was done to a Harpers request (they sent him a sketch of the kind of thing they wanted, and he painted that). With the more recent ones I posted, Dave had simply read the book (which I was still writing when he did the first one) and then sketched a bunch of potential covers and handed them in.

Hi Neil,

Can I ask what happened to the much more finished graveyard book cover that you posted a few weeks back? I have a feeling that Dave might be someone that hands in finished pieces on a whim sometimes, but had he just done that for promotion etc, or was it just an early version? I know what it is like to do covers several times, not just as roughs but also finished pieces, and I think the rough sketches you posted might be stronger than that one, but I just wondered...

-Joel Stewart

Well, it exists, and it might be used in promotion, or turn up in the back of the Subterranean Press Edition or as a colour Frontispiece to the Bloomsbury limited edition, but it probably won't be a book cover (unless there's a foreign publisher who wants it, I suppose).

It was done to order, but it really didn't reflect the book I wrote, which was why we went back to Dave and said, "you don't have to worry any longer about doing a book cover that looks like it's for young readers. Just do a book cover."

And yes, I think most of the ones he came back with are stronger than that was.

And yes, it's not at all unknown for Dave simply to do finished art and hand it in. On Sandman he did it after he was removed from the book, as we started The Doll's House. He was told that he was off Sandman so that he could concentrate on finishing Arkham Asylum -- he simply went home and did the next three Sandman covers and sent them off to DC...

...

Which reminds me -- it's been a very long time since I posted a link to http://gaimanmckeanbooks.co.uk/ -- there are some very wonderful Dave McKean screensavers and ecards and suchlike there... Read the rest of this post

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I walked into my kitchen this morning, glanced out the window, and saw pigeons everywhere. There were pigeons on my windowsill and the neighbor’s. There were pigeons on my balcony and the fire escape. There were even pigeons sitting on the edge of the garage. There were pigeons all over the place, their little beady eyes watching as I moved around the kitchen packing my lunch, and I knew that they had come for me.

You see, yesterday I’d committed the ultimate pigeon insult—I’d taken an egg from a nest.

My nest robbing was a preemptive strike as a pigeon couple had finally succeeded in building a viable nest on my kitchen windowsill. Before the birds had always contented themselves with turning my balcony into a pigeon birthing community (making it impossible for me to use it as well as stinking up my office with the odor of pigeon droppings), but my sill with its downward slope had remained safe. This safety allowed me a window I could open in the summer, a way to create a cross breeze in my apartment.

Not anymore. Not with a permanent pigeon occupant—and the bird would be permanent occupant. If I’ve learned anything about pigeons and pigeon reproduction in the last few years of the balcony occupation, it is that pigeons breed year around.

Oh yeah, and they are not above using the young from one next to incubate the eggs of the next.

Baby machines, I tell you.

I’d had enough. It was time to make a pre-emptive strike. It was time to make sure that no baby pigeons started their lives on my windowsill. So I popped open the window, shoed away mama pigeon, and stole her egg (which went immediately into the trash). Sure I felt bad; I’m not someone that harms another animal very easily, but it had to be done. It was my stand against those feathered invaders.

And that stand was why there was a hit squad of said invaders waiting for me to leave for the garage at 6 am in the morning.

I made it through safely. No scratches or pecking or pigeon poop bombs. So maybe it was just a show of numbers, an empty threat.

Or maybe they were trying to lull me into a sense of complicity. Being all, “Look, silly girl, we’re just hanging. Just hanging out doing nothing and ignoring you. You won’t come to any harm today…but tomorrow? When our numbers double or triple? When you’re not paying attention? Oh yes, then…” [cue evil bird chirp/cackle]

Of course, there is one more option, one that cannot be ignored. You know, the one where I admit that I have an overactive imagination when I’m sleepy and am prone to hyperbole. That could totally be what’s going on here.

But if Hitchcock has taught me nothing else, it is that just as you write it all off as coincidence they will choose that moment to attack.

Know any books where nature has gotten its revenge in this manner?


P.S. I’m totally blaming the birds on why I didn’t post yesterday despite the fact I had the legitimate excuse of actually having to do some work at work. This morning that is obviously not the case as today’s post was brought to you by the fact that I’m only getting calls from people who aren’t eligible to bet with us.

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