Interview: Saurabh Bhatia draws out the ambitions of Comix.One (Part Two)

Concluding our two part interview with Comix.One founder Saurabh Bhatia, the Beat’s Dean Simons digs deeper under the hood of the digital comics platform hoping to support indie comics – teasing out more about the digital comics reader, the risks of the endeavour, and ideas further down the pipe.

So far: Comix.One is a platform born out of the idea that Kickstarter indie comics creators needed a dedicated platform to set up their own storefront to continue selling their digital comics after the crowdfunding campaign ends – and further build their audience. Already a website, the app edition is prepping for imminent launch on iOS.

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DS: What have you done on the digital comics reader side for Comix.One? Over the past decade I have seen many run at varying speeds, with book loading times, page turns etc. How have you gone about it?

SB: For both web and mobile we have our own readers. I know it’s early days. I think there could still be issues with loading times – at least the initial loading times, but we load the whole thing in one go. So once the once the comic is loaded, it is really fast. On mobile, we actually save the progress of the comic so if you leave a comic and you come back to it, you can continue reading from where you left. We have this whole section, like Netflix, you know, if you want to continue reading and you can jump in straight away, into the progress that you had left off last time around. There’s obviously a lot we can do there.

I’m trying to not announce this, but we are also talking to another DRM-free reader. I can’t name them right now because of our contractual obligations, but they’re quite big. They have over 700,000 downloads on the App Store. We are reaching a partnership with them so people can completely sync their library between Comix.One and the other reader I’m talking about. Between us and them we want to give readers more options to read and choose whatever experience they like the most.

The thing that we have planned but not really worked on…I personally like the “guided view” but a lot of people don’t. So we’re still researching what the appetite for readers on having a “guided view” in their readers. I don’t know…what’s your preference like? Do you like a guided view?

DS: It depends on the size of the screen. And also the content.

SB: Yes. Because some the comics have full page spreads and I think a lot of creators are getting really creative with how they’re creating these panels. I read some comic books where the whole page is actually a panel, and then there’s sub panels within, like they have split-panels within the page as boxes. And I’m not sure how a “guided-view” would actually work on that. They’ll have to render an entire page because the original comic did not plan on filling those gaps. They had panels overlaying parts of the page, so they might have to go in, fill in the whole page and create a special one for that.

DS: They usually just simulate the eye movement. At least that’s how comiXology did it. And they used to let you view the whole page on entry or exit. I miss comiXology… [laughs]

SB: Oh, I miss comiXology. I miss their reader. It was so good. That’s probably the gold standard in comic book readers. That’s one of the other things that kind of prompted me to do this in a big way. Because of the whole demise of comiXology…I don’t want to call it a “demise”, because they’re sort of still there in spirit, right? But I think when Amazon switched the main comiXology app, that kind of drove me a bit nuts. I was like, “No, I think we have to do something about it.” 

I think even before that, when this idea was marinating in my mind, comiXology still had an issue where indie comics did not stand out as much because mainstream comics were doing… That was the place where I got all my Batman comics and all my X-Men stuff. I did buy occasional indie comics there but oftentimes I would just not be able to find them. It was just too hard to do that. Before comiXology launched comiXology Originals, indie comics were still a significant part of it. But post-Originals, I think they were just buried deep inside.

DS: Do you mean the Submit system?

SB: Not the Submit system, just the whole piece where you can go in and see the category for indie comics and just find them on comiXology. I think also a big thing for me when I was reading their business model was how much Amazon actually took as their platform fee. If you add all the numbers, it comes to close to 65-70% of a transaction which is pretty much everything, you know. I think they can give you some volumes, but it was still a significant portion of a creator’s earnings.

It sounds kind of like a utopia that I’m trying to create for the creators but that’s the aim. We always start with this and I feel my intentions are good enough for the creators – in the sense that I want them to succeed and gain more fans, earn more money. Because at the end of the day I know comics is an expensive hobby, but it still needs to be profitable for a creator to keep creating, to keep making more books – and if they lose money on one comic, they may not come back and make another one, or maybe they will do two or three, but not ten, you know?

DS: Where did the name “Comix.One” come from?

SB: If you think about it, C-O-M-I-X is another name for comics but it’s more for underground, alt, and independently created comics, right? This has always been a mission for independent comics. I have absolutely never thought of getting a big publisher on board. Hence the name. It’s by design. 

And “dot-one” [.One]…in my mind, I want this to be an ecosystem. The fun place where everyone comes for indie comics, whether it’s fans, the readers, or the creators. If they want to come and publish their books: yes, for sure. If readers want to come and discover new books in the categories they like: for sure. 

Oh, one more thing I remembered. I’m sorry, I’m just circling back from an old question that you asked: You asked me about the readers, right? And one of the big things I faced as a reader myself (and I’ve talked to hundreds of readers as well about this) is the shipping fee [on physical books]. When people back a comic in the US and they ship it to Australia, they pay like $23-$25 to ship across the border. It’s actually US$23 to ship to Canada from the US now. 

We have a very ambitious plan and we did a pilot on that front: we want to create local hubs for print-on-demand. These local hubs are going to do the print and fulfillment on behalf of the creators, and people will have to pay the shipping fee that they pay within their country, not an international shipping fee – which kind of opens a lot of avenues for creators if they want to go cross border without actually going to another country, or trying to ship to another country without breaking the bank for their readers.

DS: Wouldn’t the printing fee be variable per country – not by exchange rate but the general cost per country be different? 

SB: Yes. Both the printing and fulfillment fee will be different based on the country. We are still working out what’s the best model, because we have tried two models. One where we’re doing individual books, people can order one unit at a time, which kind of makes it more expensive for the reader. We also tried last year a pre-order campaign. It’s not really crowdfunding – books are already ready, and people do a pre-order where they reach a print minimum. If they reach 25 orders, they unlock the print version. That’s when we can actually provide them a good quote in terms of reducing the cost for printing, shipping, packaging, and everything.

So, yeah. We’re currently working with a company in Australia. They’re like a distributor. They already have this whole network with comic book shops, and they can actually print, ship, and package books to shops and people directly. We’re still working out how that partnership will work for the creators – do they have to pay a monthly fee, or if they can just print and stock certain books with them without paying a monthly fee, or just pay for the stock. And people can actually create pull codes directly for the comic book shops. I don’t know. It’s still up in the air.

DS: I can see a lot of possibilities but also a lot of logistical things you need to work around.

SB: Yeah, we’re working through the details. There’s a few ideas we have. We’re doing a pilot with this company called Wild North Comics. They are from Darwin, Australia. It’s run by an indigenous Australian group of artists. They have this book called Future Tales. It’s just a really pretty book.

Their story is very fascinating. They literally bought a printing press because they wanted to start a comic book company. That was literally their first step. Before the printing press, they learned how printing works. They started drawing comics, printing them and shipping them. But they’re the ones who actually came up with this distributor who has all these relationships with comic book shops, and they already are on Diamond and the Previews World network. They know how distribution and all of these logistics work so we’re seeing how we can lean on them to actually work some of these things out because they are the masters of the industry. The good thing about this is I don’t have to do this alone. I have a team with me, you know, and I have partnerships and people who are willing to come along on the journey and help out in whatever way they can.

DS: How big is the Comix.One team?

SB: We’re a team of five. It’s me. I’m the founder and I make the website, I did the whole website myself. There’s my sister [Garima Bhatia], she works as the app developer; she built our mobile apps. There’s Anthony Pollock, he runs a podcast called My Kind of Weird in his free time. He’s the copywriter, and he does additional copy, SEO, all those kind of things on the website. There’s Ron Cacace, he’s doing the PR and marketing. And then we have a creative support person, Megan Marsden, she used to work for Diamond and Previews World, She’s the one who’s working with some of our creators to do exclusive launches on the website, reach out to the press, and create press kits for the creators – help them tailor the story a little bit for every press contact.

DS: How do you vet books coming in? There’s probably a lot of people out there trying to sneak AI-produced books onto the Comix.One platform.

SB: I’m terribly scared of that. [laughs] We do not support AI art. There are two things I can never get behind – still being in the tech industry – AI and NFTs. Those are the two things I can actually never get behind because of how much scam and grifting happens in both those streams of technology.

I would say we have a close eye. We ask for a few things. We ask people to submit some review copies of the books and their social media. We do a thorough check of both the things before we go ahead. In case we do spot any AI stuff we do reach out to the creators and clarify those things.

Oftentimes people who use AI do not hide it. They use it as a symbol of pride. They actually show it off rather than hiding the fact that they are using AI art. So we don’t have to do much to actually find it if it’s there.

So we do have big filters – no AI/NFTs. We also do not want any hate speech. We do look for that. Those are really strong criteria because that doesn’t sit well with our ethos. And as a platform we want to be as human as possible. That’s our main aim: to tell good stories without hating on anyone. Be a very open, accepting and good vibes platform.

DS: What about more explicit comics?

SB: They have a place. I mean, we are actually launching a Not Safe For Work category very soon. We have a creator who has NSFW books, and we’re going to launch it. It’s a market. Personally – that’s my personal take – I don’t like to read explicit books that don’t have a proper story, and they’re just explicit for the sake of it. We don’t want pornography. That’s not what we want on the platform. But we do want NSFW books because they are part of the whole storytelling thing. We want them to be there. We don’t want to cut out that market. There are legitimate creators doing legitimate work in that side as well and they have a voice. They have a unique voice. Don’t want to stop that.

DS: Are you able to allow readers to sort of partition things off so you can have a kid friendly version of the Comix.One app or website which locks certain categories out?

SB: By default we don’t show any explicit images on the home page, and we have segmented the website on different categories, and NSFW is one of them. We also have age ratings on all our books and people can actually see, when they’re browsing the pages for comics, they can see the age rating on the books. They can also see if there’s some sensitive material or explicit material or extreme gore or something like that. There’s definitely labels for that.

DS: You’ll probably be storing the comics yourselves on the cloud. How are you going to be managing the cost of that? Because costs often seem to be jumping these days.

SB: I think that’s when I use my tech industry experience – and be frugal about it. We use something called DigitalOcean. I’m pretty sure you may be familiar with them. They’re one of the cloud tech providers. We have a good long-term deal with them, pretty reasonable. And we also use a lot of credits that we get from startup accelerators. We always keep participating in those programs. We usually have credits that take us through a few years of cloud hosting. Hopefully by then things pick up and we’re able to pay those bills ourselves but so far we’re just taking any help we get from these startup accelerator programs and credits we get from there. These costs are heavily discounted when you go through some of these programs.

A couple of years ago, I went through this whole accelerator program where we had three months of working on the idea, sharpening the idea. We had mentors and things like that. Comix.One was one of the top three startups that emerged out of that program. So we won the grant…[and] we made the most progress in those three months on our business and how we want to take it forward.

DS: When did that startup accelerator for Comix.One take place?

SB: October 2022 and we did it for three months.

DS: You’re taking quite a small cut, you said about 15%, is that enough to maintain and run the Comix.One app and pay everyone involved?

SB: Not at the moment. I mean, I do want the volumes to go up, of course, right? And I think, according to the estimates, if we reach a certain volume within the next six months, we will start reaching a break even point. I think that’s why I want to keep both crowdfunding and this [marketplace] – because I want, obviously, bigger volumes on the website and it almost is like crowdfunding is discounting the marketplace and this whole commission, because it just generates the amount of volume we want to. That’s the first step. What you see on the website is just the first step. And I think once all these pieces are put together, these volumes will start making more sense.

DS: I’m just wondering – because there’s been startups that have come and gone – so do you have a plan for staying the course?

SB: Yes. I mean, there’s another podcast I was on and I was talking about three-year and five-year plans there [laughs]. We are in this for a long haul. We haven’t taken any external funding just yet. I’ve just been bootstrapping it myself. I think if things go well, we may take a very small angel investment or funding from a really small investor who is probably from the same industry and comes on board as an advisor from the comics industry. I don’t think we’ll take big external investment, and we want to stay the course.  We want to keep working through the problems of readers and creators.

The amount of love that we have received from creators in the past year. Creators have started promoting our website themselves which is a sign that we are doing something right. Also the fact that I’ve walked a mile in creators shoes myself and I know some of these problems firsthand, I feel like we’re in a good position to solve these problems and being in this game for a long haul.

DS: You mentioned bootstrapping Comix.One yourself, that’s quite a risk.

SB: It is. It is. I’m willing to take that bet because I truly believe in what I’m doing. I’d want to take external funding but not the amount that will come in and dilute the idea. I was speaking to Ron about his previous startup, one of the issues that they were facing was that took so much external funding, there was an inherent pressure on them from the investors to actually go and do things to turn a profit at a certain speed. And if they don’t, then they have to go and ditch the whole comics thing and go to the next thing that is popular and will make them money. So they ended up pivoting from webtoons, like webtoon-style comic books to NFTs to now an AI platform. They’ve gone away from comics completely to movies and summarizing movie scripts and stuff like that. So, yeah, that’s probably the reason I don’t want to go and get money from a big VC. I want to stay pure to comics and I want to stay close to the community that I’m building. 

I think, to answer your question – both the previous one and this – the bills are not big enough at the moment for me to not be able to cover them myself. And I’m hoping the volumes on the website are good enough once we launch the crowdfunding that we are able to sustain the business, cover all the fees and pay people on time. All those things.

DS: So when are you hoping for the crowdfunding aspect to come in?

SB: We’re doing a very small trial campaign in November. Mid-October to November. We’re working with a white label platform to take some tech from them and then on the side we’re building our own crowdfunding which probably will take more time. We will test the ideas that we are thinking of in a small way and then slowly scale them over the next few months.

DS: Trialling with one indie comic book?

SB: Yeah. We signed up with this person called John Holland, whose book I was showing you earlier. He runs his label called Die Bold Comics. He’s from New Orleans, and he’s been writing for over 30 years now. He wrote for Fantagraphics and EC Comics back in the day, and Antarctic Press. All good indie comic labels and stuff. He writes a lot, you know. So he has, like, 28 books on the offer. We’re going to put his entire 28 book catalog for crowdfunding. Yeah, going to be fun.

DS: There’s a lot of indie comics dotted around all over the world, so it’d be interesting getting them all on one platform.

SB: Yeah. That’s the idea. I have some creators from Australia, UK, Canada, US, of course, like, large part of creators are from the US. That’s the biggest – I think 80-85% of the creators are from the US.  My hope is that creators here [at Comix.One] are able to find readership globally. One of the things that I love seeing is that a creator from St. Louis, Missouri, they basically created this whole young LGBTQ series. They’re non-binary and they wanted to create something for the queer community. And a reader from Ireland bought it, and they loved the book so much. They wanted to read more of it. They emailed me, and they asked me, “Can you suggest me any more of such books?” And I was like, “Yeah, I can email you a few.”

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The Comix.One app will be launching in October