Antarctic Press . . . Especially Rod Espinosa

I was looking over this week's releases on Comixology this morning and happened upon Antarctic Press's Steamship Enterprise #4. I'd not heard of this book previously, and although I haven't bought or read much in the Steampunk genre, I am interested in and attracted to it. 1 So I took a look at the preview available, and found it pretty interesting and well-drawn. It was also only 99¢ (only 15 pages, though), so what the hell, right? I put it into my basket. And then I looked at some other Antarctic Press books. Which is when I saw the cover of Steam Wars: Princess Legends. It was a pretty remarkable cover . . . especially the coloring. So I took a look inside. Yowza. Very nice. I checked to see on the artist was. Rod Espinosa. Ah, yes. I've run into Mr. Espinosa previously on The Courageous Princess and Neotopia, both of which have amazing artwork. (Reminds me quite a bit of Miyazaki's movie work.) And  SW:PL was only 99¢ (32 pages), so into the cart it went. And then I started looking at some of the other Antarctic Press books, and ended up with Steam Wars: First Empire #1 (99¢, 25 pages), Steam League #1 (99¢, 33 pages, but this one is black and white), Cadmus #1 ($1.99, 25 pages). The last of these had artwork by Sam Beck which looked a lot like Paul Pope's work to me . . . and I can't give a compliment much higher than that. I took a little look around to see what else he had done . . . and found out that he was a she, and that she also had a book from Necromancer Press entitled Songs for the Dead ($2.99, 36 pages) which looked brilliant. So, of course, into the cart it went. Sidebar: Looks like this is the only book Necromancer Press has put out at this point, and it came out November 9, 2016, so this crew needs some love if you have $3 to spare. And that's how I ended up buying $10 worth of very Indie comic books from Comixology this morning.

32+25+33+15+25+36 = 166 pages. For less than ten bucks. That's a pretty good bang buck. You'd have to spend over $20 to get that much comic books even at DC prices. ($30 at Marvel's.)

And you know, if not for Comixology, I probably wouldn't have even seen any of these titles. Every once in awhile I'll see an Antarctic Press book on the stands at The Great Escape . . . but not very often . . . and I'm sure that they only get one or two copies of any book they do put out. Hell, they were only putting out two or three copies of Usagi Yojimbo when I was still buying that title, and it had been going for over thirty years! Which, of course, is no reflection on TGE; they can't put out comics that people won't buy. 

It's sad, though. Antarctic Press has been in existence since 1984, and had put out some hella good titles: Box Office Poison, The Courageous Princess, Hepcats, Robotech, Strangers in Paradise and Warrior Nun Areala. And one of their titles, Gold Digger, just reached its 240th issue. There aren't too many comic books that can claim to have published that many issues. (Especially not as of now, wherein most comics re-start every couple of months. Sheesh.) Yet when I check Comichron (comichron.com) to see what kind of sales figures Antarctic was posting, not a single one of their titles showed up in the "top 380" comic books for February, 2017. And #380--Black Eyed Kids 11 from Aftershock Comics, sold only 2,027 copies, so that gives you some idea of where Antarctic Press stands. I also took a look at the sales figures for January 2017, wherein no AP titles appeared, and the lowest selling title was #392, Spirit Hunters 3 from Zenescope, which sold 1,940 copies. December 2016? No. November 2016? No. October 2016? No. September? No. August, July, June, May, April, March, February 2016? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And finally in January 2016 I found an Antarctic Press title. Not on the comic book sales list, though . . . it was on the trade paperback list. In January 2016, the Sherlock Holmes Steam Detective collection sold 289 copies. 

Oh.

And I found an online article which said that the lowest selling comic of September 2014  was Gold Digger #213 from Antarctic Press, which sold 1,680 copies. 

I don't know anything about the breakdown of wholesale to retail or royalties or production costs or any of that stuff, but I am going to guess that the retailer pays 50% of the cover cost of a comic book, which would mean that Gold Digger #213 grossed Antarctic Press about $2 per issue, for a grand total of $3,350. And if half of that money goes to production costs . . . just guessing here, and aiming to lowball it . . . then that would mean that the take home pay for the creative team would be $1,675. Since Gold Digger is a one man (Fred Perry) creative operation, maybe he gets to keep that whole egg . . . and if that was the only book he did per month (I don't know if that's true or not, but writing and drawing a comic book by yourself would take up quite a few days, for sure) then this would be a minimum wage rock and roll operation.

But now ahmo go read these books, cause it's still not a good deal if the books suck, right? Right.

News at 11:00.





1 In fact, I think I was reading Steampunk long before there was Steampunk. What else is Jules Verne or Richard A. Lupoff's Into the Aether?