ICv2 talks to Dave Sim about his new comic, GLAMOURPUSS, which is also reported on here:
Who is the target audience for Glamourpuss?
Me. Writing and drawing comic books is so time-consuming (it takes an average of a full day to produce roughly five seconds worth of entertainment) the only sensible thing is to do a comic book that you are 100% interested in, personally. From there, it probably breaks down to “people like me” who always go back to the classic realists in comics: Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, Al Williamson, and Neal Adams.
Sim will release the first two issues and then pause to let retailers gauge the response to the book.
Yes, Sim is a batshit crazy misogynist, but I can’t help but appreciate the honesty of his approach – instead of claiming that his work is going to appeal to some currently underserved audience demographic, he just flat-out admits that he’s telling a story to entertain himself, whether or not it’ll entertain anyone else.
That’s an interesting statement he made about only serving the Direct Market since it served him so well in the past. I’ve never heard that argument before. I wonder if other self-publishers have that sense of loyalty to a type of retailer at the expense of others. Curiouser and curiouser . . .
To be fair, for all the sound and fury about bookstores being more friendly toward non-superhero comics than the direct market, I’ve always been more likely to find Cerebus phone books in comic shops than in book chains.
Sim has avoided the book chains because of the returns policy. While a large corporation can avoid losses on returned books, a small company like Aardvark-Vanaheim cannot. In order to get Corporate support, Sim would need to surrender control, and there’s no way that’s going to happen. The direct market comic stores, on the other hand, are much easier to deal with (and he owes his livelihood to their support over the last 30 years).