While comics seem to be holding their own as an industry, with revenue generally up, there are a few folks on shaky ground, and 2014 saw a few casualties. One of them is Great Beast, the indie uUK graphic novel publisher run by cartoonists Adam Cadwell and Mark Ellerby. The imprint was sort of run as an “Image” like model, with Great Beast generally handling distribution for an emerging generation of UK cartoonists including , Robert M Ball, Dan Berry, Adam Cadwell, Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Dan Cox, John Cei Douglas, Marc Ellerby, Isabel Greenberg, John Riordan and Rachael Smith.

The reason for the shut down? Too much success basically. Ellerby had left running the publisher earlier in the year and Cadwell did not have the time to keep things going:

The reason behind this decision is that the Beast has grown too big for us to handle. As the group got bigger, as the books became more successful and as we widened the range of shops we sold to there became more of a need for the management and promotion to come from one or two people and Marc Ellerby and I (Adam Cadwell) happily took up that role. However, as time went on we found that the time spent working for the benefit of the group was getting in the way of us actually making our own comics, which is why we started the group in the first place. In Summer, Marc stepped back from the ‘publishing’ side of things to focus on his freelance work and his comics and now as 2014 draws to a close I feel like it’s time for me to do the same.

We looked at many ways of monetising the group so we could pay someone to run things whilst still giving the creators the bulk of the profits but we just couldn’t find a fair way to make it work. I wish we could find a business minded person who loved our comics (but didn’t make comics themselves) who could find a way to make the model financially viable and take over but I can’t imagine who that would be or how it would work.
Marc and I started Great Beast in April 2012 as a place to self publish comics to a professional standard and create a home for fun, accessible comics for a wide age range. Over the last few years, Great Beast has gained a reputation as an exciting and innovative publisher of quality comics and I’m enormously proud of that and of all the books we’ve helped produce. I hope we’ve improved the perception of what self publishing can be and shown the appeal of fun, bold, original comics. Please continue to follow the work of all our fantastic creators, I’m sure there’s a lot of incredible work yet to come.

While Great Beast has joined the Great Hall of Shuttered Publishers, it definitely left its mark on a British scene that is growing and developing by leaps and bounds. Check out commentary by Zainab Akhtar and Steve Morris for more. Morris writes:

Great Beast was hugely helpful for the UK comics scene in general – the influence it wields will likely live on in a number of small-press publishers who’ve been set up in their wake. Having a publisher makes it easier for comic-makers to get press out to retailers and fans, and Great Beast were rather pioneering in the way they marketed themselves and got their books onto shelves across the company.

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Christmas is being held on December 25th this year, so you’ve only got a few weeks left to find something decent to give your family and friends. But never tremble with frostbitten fear! Because there are still places you can go, events you can take part in, and presents you can get for your demanding little sister. But… only if you’re British. Sorry, everywhere else in the World!

Today see the Leeds Alternative Comics Fair take place for the 5th consecutive year, promising a great lineup of small press and self-published creators and makers such as Kristyna Baczynski, Adam Cadwell, Gareth Brookes and organisers Steve Tillotson and Hugh Raine. Held at Nation of Shopkeepers in Leeds (which is a BAR), it’s a great, fun event, and will be running today. Oh! You’d better run!

We also see Newcastle’s Canny Comic Con kick off today, with guests including Bryan and Mary Talbot, Gary Erskine, Al Ewing and those Art Hero boys everybody’s talking about nowadays. Another festive tradition in Britain, the CCC is another brilliant way to find some last-minute (you still have several weeks, but I like to instil fear in an audience) presents for people.

Oh, but again – that’s happening today. You’d better run! Again!

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Adam Cadwell is a writer and artist whose works include The Everyday, an autobiographical webcomic which ran for three years between 2007 and 2010. He is currently working on the six-issue series Blood Blokes, about vampire life in Manchester.

Which, it turns out, is very similar to just plain old ‘life’ in Manchester.

He also founded Great Beast comics with Marc Ellerby, and created the British Comic Awards, which were held at Thought Bubble this year for their inaugural ceremony. He knows about web publishing, self-publishing, and how to spin brilliant answers out of somewhat-shabby questions. You come to Adam Cadwell with a problem, he’ll deal with it.

I spoke to him at Thought Bubble the morning after the BCAs were awarded, to see how they came about – and how he thinks they reflect the British comics scene in general.

Steve Morris: What inspired the British Comics Awards?

Adam Cadwell: I felt the British comics scene really needed an award which was just for British creators. There’s been a real upswing in publishing momentum, and talent and quality in the british scene over the last couple of year, and I felt that there should be a proper recognition of that talent and the stories being made.

I went to the Doug Wright awards at TCAF event in Toronto and I thought it was a really well-done awards show. There were only four awards given out, so each one felt more important or valuable. So when we decided to run the BCA we borrowed their approach – we tweaked the format slightly and included a Hall of Fame Award, but we only have five categories in total.

We wanted to make sure that the nominees all got attention and were promoted as much as the winners would ultimately be. It was more about the shortlist for each category being made up of quality titles which will entertain you and are worth your time. We could then send the shortlist to libraries as a recommended buying list, and use it to promote comics which we felt needed more attention and were worth looking at. That was really the ambition for the first year.

Steve: What’s interesting is that Britain has a different scene to America, especially in the way things are organised. We don’t have a big mainstream publisher like Marvel or DC – instead we have a series of small-press publishers and creator-owned communities. Was it interesting to get to see a cross-section of everything at once, in the nomination process?

Adam: We had an open nomination process where anyone could put forward their favourites online. We invited people to promote work they liked, and also asked publishers and creators to do the same – although we struggled to get them to, because I suppose it isn’t very British to boast about yourself. It was important that we had people get in touch and talk to us about what they liked, and in the process we got to learn about all these small publishers. Some are more prominent than others, but I think it’s a good thing that we have a lot of small publishers and collectives. I think it’s very healthy to have all these different talents working on different things.

Steve: As you can see here at Thought Bubble.

Adam: Yeah. Here everyone’s in the same room, talking to each other, and that’s how friendships and new collaborations come about. The question today seems to be about distribution, which is becoming more and more important. We have a lot of publishers, but the question is how we get these comics into libraries, how we introduce them to kids. That’s a bigger issue right now which we need to work towards.

Steve: Do you think it’s easier for new creators to get seen now, with so many new publishers establishing themselves in the British scene?

Adam: I think it depends on the quality of the work. If it’s good work, it’s easier now to get it seen, I think. We have a lot of publishers operating like Nobrow, Blank Slate, and Self Made Hero. They’re good at getting their books promoted and reviewed, but not all publishers can distribute in large numbers. For independent publishers, especially self-publishers, it can be very difficult to find outlets for selling books. Comic shows are good, but aside from that? Some shops are very supportive of self-published comics, others would rather just take free copies and “get back to you”.

Marc Ellerby and I set up Great Beast earlier this year to make a publishing banner so we could distribute self-published comics at a professional standard. We could go to wider outlets and present our works in the manner of a publisher, with everything shops need already set up – the logo, isbn numbers, barcodes. Presenting as Great Beast makes us a brand, and made it a lot easier than presenting books as an individual. As a comics culture, we need to work together on how to get these seen.

Steve: Speaking of Great Beast! You’ve been working recently on Blood Blokes, a new series about vampires living in Manchester. How has that experience been?

Adam: It’s been really good. When I first started doing it, people thought it was an odd choice because I went from doing autobiographical webcomics for four years… to this six-issue series about slacker vampires. But it does start off in autobiographical style. There’s not much vampire action in issue 1 – he gets the bus, he goes to work, he goes about a normal life. Then towards the end of issue 1, we start to explore elements of the vampire culture in Manchester.

Steve: Is it fun to play around with the more fantastical setting?

Adam: I handle the darker elements in quite a throwaway sense. It’s coming from the same place as my autobiographical works – it’s still my observations, my sense of humour about day-to-day life. But I don’t shy away from the fact the vampires are murderers, and are very casual about it. They’re monsters, but they can be as lazy and unmotivated as we can be – they’re quite like students. It’s really fun to have darker elements of horror I can throw in to surprise the reader.

Steve: What else do you have coming up?

Adam: I’m on issue 2 at the moment, working on issue 3. I’m planning it for 6 issues. I’m also doing a kids comic at the moment called The King of Things, which will be appearing in Paper Science.

I have a lot of other stories in mind for that character. It’s really bright, colourful – flexing different comics muscles for me. I’m enjoying working on them all.

Thanks to Adam for his time! You can find more from him over on his website, or head over to twitter @adamcadwell. Go!

By Steve Morris

British news time! We’ll forego the traditional playing of the National Anthem (although feel free to play it on your radio whilst you read this article, life is yours for the taking and nobody can stop you from such things) on this occasion, as we’ll just get straight into the announcement here. Creator/maker Adam Cadwell — yes, he of comics fame – has founded a new awards ceremony, which will be handed out at this November’s Thought Bubble Festival. Hey! That’s my home territory! Fancy that!

The British Comics Awards, a simple title I’m surprised nobody has taken before, will run a little differently to most others within the industry, with only British books allowed to be entered into consideration. Anybody can nominate a comic for consideration (as long as you stay within the guidelines) and the pool of choices will then be evaluated by The Committee — made up of Cadwell, the two main organisers of Thought Bubble (Lisa Wood and Clark Burscough), and a number of other writers and artists. These hoarse-voiced whisperers of fate will then whittle the choices down and hand things over to The Judges, who will then pick winners in each categories. The Judges have yet to be revealed, and if you look directly at them you’ll turn to stone.

The categories are: Best Comic (short-form story), Best Book (long-form story/collection),  Emerging Talent, the Young People’s Comic Award, and the Hall of Fame. Only the first three of these will be open for the public to elect; the Young People’s Comic Award will be chosen by schoolchildren from all across the UK. I’d imagine Phoenix Magazine would likely be a contender here, although surely only a fool would vote against Roger Langridge’s Snarked? Then again, according to every British newspaper there is, apparently children are fools nowadays. We’ll have to wait and see how that one goes. The Hall of Fame Award will go to a creator chosen by the committee, who will presumably be all dressed in dark robes as they ominously chant the name of their chosen victor in an echoing, dark cathedral.

This looks set to be a fun little awards ceremony! Thought Bubble has a reputation for favouring creativity and art above corporate stuff, so the nominees will likely be diverse, unexpected, and filled with incredible talent. Time to start speculating! Who do you think will win each category? Which British comics have been best this year? Why is there no category for “Best British Internet Comics Blogger Writey Person?”