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Summary:
Want to break into comics? This interview with horror author Francesca Maria, the creator of Black Cat Chronicles, is purrfect for aspiring creators!
Francesca, a former comic book retailer and current writer/publisher, shares her journey from fan to professional.
In this interview, you'll learn:
How her love of DC Vertigo comics in the 90s sparked a lifelong passion for comics
The challenges and rewards of wearing multiple hats in the industry (retailer, writer, publisher)
Why collaboration is key and how to build a strong creative team
Tips for getting your comic book on store shelves
Advice for aspiring comic writers and artists, including:
Essential comics resources by Scott McCloud and Will Eisner
The importance of a polished portfolio for artists
Valuable portfolio review opportunities at major comic conventions
Great entry-level comics to inspire your own work.
Intrigued? Dive into the full interview to discover Francesca's favorite comics (including a Neil Gaiman masterpiece!), the creative process behind Black Cat Chronicles, and much more!
Full Transcript:
Carina: Welcome everyone to our pilot episode of the Incubator Interview Series. I’m Carina and I’m a part of Incubator’s creator network. I am our resident librarian, you’ve probably read my blog posts, Carina’s Comic Corner, and today I have the wonderful Francesca Maria here to be our first subject for this interview series with comics professionals. First, I’m going to go through a little bit about Francesca and read her bio here before we dive into some of our interview questions both about the basics of comics and her own personal journey with the medium.
Francesca Maria writes dark fiction surrounded by cats near the Pacific Ocean. She is the award-winning, bestselling author of They Hide: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark from Brigid’s Gate Press which debuted as an Amazon #1 Best Seller. She is the creator and co-publisher of the Black Cat Chronicles, a true horror comic book series narrated by a mystical black cat. Her short stories and essays can be found in various publications including Crystal Lake Publishing's Shallow Waters, Death’s Garden Revisited, To Hell and Back and Under the Stairs anthologies. Francesca is the co-editor and co-publisher of the upcoming Black Cat Tales anthology from Black Cat Publishing, due out in 2025. Francesca is also the co-chair of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Horror Writers Association Chapter. You can find her at francescamaria.com and on social media @writerofweird.
Thank you so much for being here today, Francesca, so glad to have you!
Francesca: Thank you so much for inviting me on your pilot program, I’m honored!
Carina: So let’s start off a little bit with the basics of what got you into comics as a medium. What was really your first dipping the toes in the water when it came to comics?
Francesca: Sure, well, I have my husband to blame for that. We were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time, in our early twenties, and I never grew up reading comics, I always thought they were for kids as you got older. But he was a devout, religious follower of the Wednesday comics, that’s the new release date. So every Wednesday when we were dating, he would take me to the local comic book store, and again, I was thinking “yeah, I’m not really into superheroes, I’m not really into spandex and tights and stuff,” and I also thought comics were mainly for kids, until I saw the cover of Creature #5, the first comic I ever bought, let’s see if you guys can see this.
Carina: Ooh, yes, you gotta take a look at that!
Francesca: Right? So I’m a huge horror fan and like, “oh, what is this over here?” And so I started picking up Creature and that led me to everything DC Vertigo had to offer at the time in the 90s that was horror. Sandman came from Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison did The Invisibles, Garth Ennis’ Preacher. There was Swamp Thing from Alan Moore, the whole plethora of very smart, intelligent, beautiful work being done in the 90s, especially around the DC Vertigo line. So I was absolutely hooked at that moment, and it’s been a love affair since 1994 and I’ve been reading and consuming and now writing comics and publishing comics ever since.
Carina: That is so fantastic to think about that one little date spawning into this lifelong passion that you two share together, because you work on comics together and have the shop together, correct?
Francesca: So we had a retailer comic book store for about twenty years called Black Cat Comics in northern California. We recently retired that store, but we moved into publishing, so now we’re Black Cat Publishing. So we’re publishing our own comics as well as some prose books that are coming out.
Carina: What a fantastic journey! So, I’d like to expound a little on that, then. What has your path to working in the comics industry looked like, knowing now what got you into comics as a reader, did you know that you always wanted to write them, did you know that you wanted to sell them?
Francesca: No, not at all. We were definitely fans first and for many, many years we’d go to big conventions: San Diego Comic Con since 1996, WonderCon, we’d go up to SeattleCon, so we were just big fans and consumers of the medium. It wasn’t until the early 2000s when he and I both worked for an online comic book company NextPlanetOver.com that is now defunct. It lasted about a year, as all the dot coms then did. And so we both got laid off at the same time when that company went under, and I said, instead of like, going out and finding work again, what if we open up our own comic book store? And my husband was like, “you're crazy, there's no money in it.”
Well, I put on my marketing cap and my husband's been reading comics since the age of four, and he's got one of those incredible memories. He can name every issue, every author, every everything. And I'm like, how can I make money off of your infinite comic book wisdom? I know, let's open up a store! So, we actually ended up buying a store in Northern California and converting it with our taste level, our brand, opening up the genre more. That store at the time was very sports card-heavy, and we made it more comic heavy. We had a lot of artists and writers come in. We had Black Cat Comics from 2002 up until when we retired in 2021. Being a lifelong fan, just about, or half my lifetime, at least, you read this stuff, and you're like, “oh!” Especially, you get inspired to create.
I've always been a writer, but I never thought about writing comics until I got into it, into
the fandom of it. And reading things like Neil Gaiman and some beautiful prose from recent writers like Tom King, it was really inspiring. And when COVID hit, I didn't want to leave the planet without giving it a shot. I thought, what are some of the things I'd want to do before I'm not here anymore? You know, I think I really want to try writing a comic. At the time, there weren't a lot of great horror comics that I used to grow up on, you know, there wasn't the DC Vertigos of the 90s, where I fell in love with comics.
We kind of had this idea of writing a comic book series based on true horror events, true horror stories that have a paranormal bend to them. And since we're Black Cat Comics, and we love black cats, we had a black cat narrate the stories, kind of like the Cryptkeeper from Tales from the Crypt. That just kind of spun into this series that we've been doing now for several years, and absolutely love it.
We publish it ourselves. I'm the writer, Kazi is the editor. And we have this wonderful artist named Nate Olsen in New Hampshire who does the art and lettering and everything else for us. It's been this beautiful kind of process of going from fan to retailer to getting lots of new fans involved in comic books through the retail aspect of it, to then creator and now publisher of our own stuff. It's been quite a journey, we've just absolutely loved every minute of it.
Carina: You've worn so many hats in this industry. It's pretty crazy. Thinking about that, what would you say that you love most about comics? Now that you've like explored all these different avenues within the comics industry, as both somebody on the professional side of things, but also just as a hobbyist, where do your allegiances lie? What are your favorite parts of it?
Francesca: Ooh, that's such a tough thing to say, because I love every aspect of it. I love the tangible feel of the paper on my hands. I love when there's a cliffhanger that you turn the page and you're like, “oh, my God, this big reveal” when you see it visually on the next page. I love being inspired by perfect prose that is limited in space and time. So, what do I mean by that? In comics, you've got a finite number of pages. You've got a finite number of spaces you can put words, and in a short amount of space and time, you can really dive into a really in-depth story that's very, not just visual, but has an emotional depth, a mental depth, a philosophical depth. I mean, pick up any comic of Sandman or anything by Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore or Tom King, and I would stand against any of the best literature that we have out there. It's just absolutely perfection. And it's helped me be a better writer, seeing that kind of economy of words that you have to be beholden to in comic books, because you don't have a lot of space. You've got to convey an emotion. You've got to convey a story in a very short period of time and space.
Carina: That's a great way of putting it, like seeing it all laid out like that, those different elements. Everybody is so important to the team when you're building a comic. There are some folks that do it all themselves, but building a team is such a crucial part of the comics industry, working with others, learning how to form a team. What do you think that folks should keep in mind about building a team if they decide to go that route where they have a writer, an artist, an editor, a letterer, how do you think people should navigate that process?
Francesca: It's a great question. So even if the person is super talented and is a writer and creator, I would always recommend an editor, no matter what. Getting another set of eyeballs, you know, “hey, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?” Or “you got a comma there, or it should be a semicolon.” It's really good to always have at least one other person look at your work before you put it out there. As far as like becoming a team, so a writer, an artist, two different people, I think a bit like any kind of good relationship, right? You want to have very open communication, open and honest communication up front. You've got to think about, can I work with this person on a day-to-day basis for three to six months to a year? Do our personalities jive? When I say something, are they understanding what I'm saying? And when they're saying something, do I understand what they're saying?
For me, I need to have really kind of like defined deadlines with my artist, so we will have like weekly meetings, and we'll talk about things together. I love collaborating with my artists. Even though I'm the writer, and the way that I write is very visual, it's like a play that I write, so there's art direction that I'll put in the script that's very detailed for the artist. Like, it's nighttime, the Black Cat's looking down at a snow hole, and it's, you know, Antarctica, and I'll put a bunch of different things specifically for them to draw. Then, when he comes back with the layouts, like, oh, can you make the cat bigger? Can you put it over here? Can you do a little bit of tweaking here? But seeing his kind of take on the art direction is amazing, because he's an artist, right? He can see things and take my words and display them in a way that I'd never thought possible. Having his collaboration, even though I'm telling him kind of exactly what to do, he's doing in a way that is uniquely him and it gives him the freedom as an artist to express himself, even though he's getting specific direction on what to do from panel to panel.
Carina: Cool. So with the Black Cat Chronicles, how large is your full team then?
Francesca: It's a team of three. It's myself as the writer, I'm sorry, it’s four. It's myself as the writer. Nate is the inker, he's the penciler, and he's the colorist. Then, we also have Justin Birch, who is the letterer. Sometimes Nate fills in for that too. And then Mark, my husband-slash-co-publisher, is also the editor as well. So there's four of us on the book.
Carina: That is so cool to hear about all the steps working together, everybody just being copacetic, and having, I'm also a deadlines haver. So it is refreshing to hear that is a standard with other folks that work in comics. When we think about building that team, too, are there certain traits that you look for in people that you enjoy working with, collaborating, either in being a retailer or being a writer as well? What are some of the things you look for in folks you want to collaborate with?
Francesca: Yeah, so people have to have done stuff. It sounds weird, but everyone's got an idea. Everyone's got the best comic book in their head. But until it's actually in my hands, it's just lip service. When I want to work with somebody, I need to see that they've done this before, they've met deadlines before, they've worked with other people collaboratively and successfully before. I don't want to sign up to work with somebody and them not show up or them miss a deadline. And missing deadlines happens, that's pretty common, but having that open communication about why and how we're going to make up the time and all that stuff is really, really important. It's an important thing to have that open line of communication and to just keep working with your team going forward.
Carina: I want to shift gears a little bit then and move more into the retailer space now.
Francesca: Sure.
Carin: So obviously, you were in the retailing space for a while. Now you're in the publishing space. As a retailer, what were you looking for in the comics that you were selling at Black Cat Comics? Were there certain genres that you were really hoping to highlight or certain authors and artists you wanted to see on your shelves?
Francesca: It's pretty standard stuff in a retail business and comic books. You've got all the freedom in the world to order whatever we want through a couple of different distributors. Mainly, Diamond Distributors was the main distributor at the time. You have to, as a retailer, order everything from DC Comics, everything from Marvel Comics, everything from Image, everything from Dark Horse. That's just kind of a granted thing, you have to do it.
Then there's tier two publishers, right? So that doesn't leave a lot of room for independent, for the smaller press, because we've got budgets. We only can really order the stuff that we know that we're going to sell. If there's an independent artist or writer out there that has physical books for us to put in our store, we kind of need them to come to the store physically and show it to us and talk to us about how to sell it and what it is and how to market it.
Or we'll have some of our customers who maybe follow artists on Instagram or on different
social media and say, “hey, this guy I follow or this gal that I follow is producing this really
great book. I'd really love to be able to buy it at the store.” Then maybe we'll do a little cosign thing with that artist or that writer. But that's pretty rare for retailing comic books specifically. If your book isn't in one of the places that we order from--Diamond, Lunar, Penguin Random House--chances are you're not going to be on the comic book retailer's radar to begin with to order. It's really hard running a comic book store, running comic book store takes a lot of time and energy. There's hundreds of titles to keep track of every single week. Breaking into that is really challenging, unless you're in one of those top publishers that I already mentioned.
Carina: Yeah, a lot of self promo for those people who are on that indie spectrum, it goes
back to that comment you made, you need to have done stuff, and you have to continue to do stuff in order to break into the field. That includes that self promotion, going out and pitching yourself to folks as scary as it can be. That's the way to get on people's radar is to physically put yourself out there and have a tangible product that you can present.
I have noticed when I walk into a big box store like Barnes and Noble, they are going to have a few more of the slightly indie comic networks, but at the end of the day, it's because they're a huge organization with tons of money to spend. When you're working with a smaller retailer, you don't have that flexibility. It's really cool to know that it is welcomed for people to come in and say, “hey, here's this thing that I wrote,” or “here's this thing that somebody I know wrote, and I'm going to pitch it to you, and this is why I think it's a good fit.” So you would say that it's not frowned upon for people to go ahead and promote themselves in that way as long as it's not on New Comic Day?
Francesca: Exactly right. Yes, I was gonna say as long as it's not Wednesday or the ordering day on Tuesday. Call your local comic book shop if you've already got a relationship, talk to them casually, or set up an appointment, you know, look professional. Don't show up rolling out of bed in your PJs saying “hey, buy my book.” Present yourself like you're doing a business transaction and treat the fellow comic book retailer as a business person that you're trying to sell to. Respect their time, ask them “would you have time to meet with me so I can share with you my product” and schedule a time. Don't just show up on New Comic Day and expect to get that person's time because that will not happen.
Carina: It's essentially like a job interview, you're having to iron that out and you're building a relationship with somebody that is possibly going to help you make or break in the business. So it's a really, really great way for young or emerging comic artists, writers, editors, all the folks in the industry to get their toes in. Don't have to be afraid, guys. Francesca says it's okay, as long as it's not Tuesday or Wednesday.
Francesca: Another thing, once you get in a comic book store, you know, and your book sells, you can also suggest doing a signing there. So you know, I'm a horror writer, so around Halloween, I'll go to my local comic shop and set up signings around Halloween time. So you can also kind of introduce yourself to their customer base more broadly by going there and talking about your book to their customers.
Carina:That is so, so cool. This is some really, really great stuff here. Thinking about this process of getting comics on the shelf, what would you say that the typical, in your experience, life cycle of a comic is? It could be in the process of ordering it and then how long it takes to get on the shelf, or maybe just like as the perspective as a writer, how long that process works to see a final product. What does the life cycle of a comic mean for you?
Francesca: That is a really interesting question, and it's so varied, so I'm glad you said like, what does it mean to me. because for our comic, it takes about a year to put one issue out, because we've all got other full-time jobs and other things and responsibilities we have to do. But doing that, the level of quality that we want, it takes time. From the idea, to doing the research, to doing the comics, it's about a year or nine month cycle or so. But our comics are a little bit different, because they're based on true historical events, so it takes me about three months just to do research on every single comic. Then, that takes me another a month or two to write the script, and it takes our artists between three to six months to kind of do it from start to finish, including all the steps we've talked about from the sketching, to the lettering, to the inking, to the coloring. So, for us, it takes a long time.
Now, if you're looking at a DC or a Marvel, they put out comics every single month. There's a lot of writers out there and a lot of artists that have to do, you know, an issue a month or several issues in a month. There's also some that have like 12 issues done and it takes maybe, I don't know, a year or two years to do, say, a 12 issue run. Only when the whole series is done, then they solicit that, put that into the Diamond catalogs for retailers to order. Those comics might have been done for years, but we're not going to order them for like another year or so.
The ordering process from the comic book side, there's like a three to six month lead time. Those books do need to be done, and at the retailer, and at the shipping facility, three months in advance. A lot of times, my husband Mark was the main ordering guy. He would have to order stuff three to six months in advance of when it actually came out, so you have to plan quite a bit. It’s not something like, you put it out, and then boom, it's getting distributed right then and there. At least traditionally, it takes quite a long time to get from conception to through the publisher, through the distributor, and into the retailer space. It can take six months to a year.
Carina: It's so nice to see those steps broken down, and also to know that just because something has that slightly lengthier progress, it's because it's a labor of love. When you have a team of three, as opposed to like a team of like 300, it's going to take a little bit longer, so people shouldn't be discouraged about how long a process might take.
Something that I think could be a very cool, fun question here is, what would you consider the perfect comic in your eyes? It could be a favorite of yours, one that you've consumed that really just stuck with you, that you thought the prose and the art and everything was beautiful.
What to you was a perfect comic?
Francesca: Oh man, that is so tough. I've got like a Rolodex just going in my head right now of all the ones that I love so much.
Carina: I know that you're a Neil Gaiman lover!
Francesca: Huge!
Carina: So I was thinking you could have been leaning in that direction, but anything sticking out for you?
Francesca: Yeah, so I was going through all the different Sandman issues in particular. Sandman 50, I think it was called Ramadan, was a beautiful issue that goes into a bunch of different stories, like many stories in one. It was beautifully, artfully done. Let's see, Stardust, I love, so it's Neil Gaiman, they made a movie out of it. It was a graphic novel first with a comic book and a graphic novel with Charles Vess, and that artist was phenomenal. As far as like perfection perfection, Bernie Wrightson is one of the best comic book artists, artist period of our generation. I'm not being overly over the top with that. It's absolutely true.
Bernie Wrightson redid Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. If you get your hands on this book, treasure it, love it, because it's absolutely beautiful. The emotion, the art that comes through, the detail, the ink work, it's like every single pencil stroke is supposed to be there. There's no accidents. It's just absolute brilliance.
Carina: We're going to also compile a list of some of the comics that were mentioned in this interview for our viewers. So we will definitely link that because I am familiar with that iteration of Frankenstein, and I can agree that it is an absolute delight.
I’m thinking about that, as well, we're seeing adaptations in comics are like having a moment, and you write from true historical perspectives with the Black Cat Chronicles, those true stories, those true horrors, but we mentioned Sandman and Stardust have existed in all these different iterations. We see Frankenstein being adapted. My mind is immediately going to one of my favorite comic examples in recent years is Junji Ito adapted Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human.
We’re seeing this growing, emerging adaptation culture coming up. Do you have any advice for folks that might want to draw from real life or from pre-existing media? Any like thoughts or like ideas for people to keep in mind when they are drawing from things that already exist in the world?
Francesca: Yeah, that's a really great question. I would say you definitely want to put your stamp on it, but also be clear about what you want to do. Do you want to just do a straight documentary type of thing, or do you want to add some fiction elements to it? Just be clear with your audience which it is. Don't sell something that's supposed to be completely factual if it's not. Just make sure you're clear and upfront about what you are writing about or what you're creating.
The other thing is if you want to do something based on like historical fact, do your research, do your research, do your research. Don't shortcut it and just look at one Wiki page. Go to the library, listen to some audiobooks, like make sure you immerse yourself in that topic because you don't want to be caught off guard. My biggest fear in doing the comic books is some historian's going to look at this and go, “she got it all wrong,” or “that didn't happen then, it happened then.” Being a kind of control freak, I need to make sure my dates are right, my characters are right, because they're based on true events, so true people as well. You might make sure your spelling of the names of the people are right. Don't shortchange it just because maybe it's a comic book medium, or it's only for your web blog series. If you make a mistake in something factual that people can easily check, that's going to kind of negate your legitimacy and they're not going to look at you the same way again, so don't undercut or don't shortcut doing your research upfront.
Carina: That brings me to a question now, thinking about like the Black Cat Chronicles, would you say that they lean more into that slightly fiction element? You have your little black cat narrator here, but would you say it leans more in that documentary perspective for our viewers? Or would you say that it is a little bit more of a flair?
Francesca: I would say a bit of a flair. Everything in there is based on historical fact, but then there's a lot of theories, like, what actually happened. So there's no facts, or there's a lot of unsolved mysteries, right? Because there's a lot of loose ends, what we can do in the comic is share what people speculate happened, which again, isn't factual, but isn't us making stuff up either, so there is a little bit of a fine line for that. So I wouldn't say it's so much of a documentarian as a storyteller, storytelling of something that occurred that has a lot of open ended questions that still remain.
Carina: We're living in this true crime era right now where everybody and their mother is obsessed with true crime documentaries, and speculating on the internet about what really
happened. I feel like these fans of true crime should definitely check out the Black Cat
Chronicles because you'll have a lot of those theories to explore and to go on this journey and think about for yourself, what could have happened?
Francesca: Just want to show the cover here.
Carina: Yes, we got a little beautiful, beautiful cover there, and we will link to Francesca's website so people can be up to date on how they can purchase Black Cat Chronicles, and make sure that everybody can get their hands on that beautiful, beautiful art and the very fun story that lies within.
I want us to shift a little bit into our personal and professional development section here now. We've learned a little bit about the industry, and it's interviewing your own personal stamp on comics. I would love to hear some of your advice for emerging comic writers or artists that are looking to break into the scene. We've gotten a little bit of your insight about go and pitch yourself to retailers, and don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Are there any other words of wisdom that you would offer up to folks that are trying to break in the biz?
Francesca: There's a lot more resources for artists than there are writers, to be honest with you. Regardless, if you're from the writing perspective, or the art perspective, or both, there's a couple of books that I think are absolutely critical 101s of doing comics. Anything by Scott McCloud, he did the Understanding Comics series, and he talks about panel breakdown, and basically the art and the medium of comic books, it’s absolutely essential.
Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art book, same kind of thing where, again, it helps you understand that this is a different way of storytelling, so you need to understand the medium to do it in a way that can expand it, that you can take advantage of it.
As far as artists go, there’s a lot of the bigger conventions whether that’s the Comic Cons in San Diego or Wondercon or any of the shows in Seattle, Emerald City, or ChicagoCon or New York Comic Con--they will always a have a portfolio review, so take your stuff, make sure it’s polished, make sure it’s done. You don’t have to have a completed comic. It helps, but you don’t have to. Have a portfolio of all of your work and a varied amount of your work, and read through which publishers are doing portfolio reviews, when, and just sign up for every and all things you can. They don’t like it when you just show up to their booth unsolicited and just say “look at my art,” but they usually have, in bigger conventions, specific times where you can sign up and have your portfolio reviewed by a publisher, other artists, and that stuff is absolutely invaluable.
I wish they did something like that for writers, but they don’t. For writing, these days, what I’ve been hearing is it changes from decade to decade, but if you are a successful writer outside of comic books, that helps you to get into comic books. People just starting out as a writer, you’re going to have a hard time getting into DC and Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, et cetera. You kind of need to write and be published elsewhere, have some success outside of the world of comics to be welcomed in it as a writer. It’s really hard to break in as a writer without being an artist as well in comics, and having yourself established first.
Carina: Sure, I think of authors like Clay McLeod-Chapman and Adam Cesare, these folks--me and Francesca are horror people, so that’s where our brains are going--but they’re guys that started specifically in prose that have shifted. I mean, Clay writes everything in comics, it seems, and Adam’s just breaking in with graphic novels. So, I’ve noticed a trend as well where if you already have that pull as a prose writer, people are going to want to work with you and artists will say “I like this style of writing,” which can be a really nice pat on the back for some writers, because the art can sometimes take the center stage. As we see with those pitch sessions, there’s not really a comparable experience for the writers or the editors, even.
I’m thinking as well, it would be really cool to hear about what some comics are that you would say would be excellent for folks to read as introductory. Obviously, people who are connected with Incubator already know a lot about comics, but what would you say are some good entry level comics that people might want to emulate when pitching their stuff to publishers or to retailers?
Francesca: That’s a great question. Of course, Sandman, but I’m going to be really specific here because Sandman did another revision, well, not revision, but they went back and looked at the Sandman universe again recently with Sandman Overture. Neil Gaiman partnered with a wonderful artist called JH Williams III, and JH Williams III really blew me away with how he blew apart the panels. He chose to tell a story in a liquid, fluid form that was like nothing I’d ever seen before in twenty years. If you want to see how you can expand the medium and think outside the box, I would say the Sandman Overtures is a must. As far as other recent stuff I absolutely loved, Tom King’s Mr. Miracle series was great. Anything he’s done, he did a Batman series that wasn’t really an introduction because you kind of have to invest like sixty issues and he did it for a couple years, but it’s well worth it. His run of Batman is some of the best stuff I’ve ever read. The War of Jokes and Riddles with the Riddler and the Joker and Batman, it was just some of the best stuff I’ve ever read in comics, and some of the best art as well. Those would be some of my go-tos if someone’s coming to me and saying “how do I get into comics?” Read this, this is how high the bar is, so good luck.
Carina: Are there other resources then, you mentioned a few books, are there any groups or forums you would say are good places for people to look for those connections that are just emerging and breaking out?
Francesca: We found our artist through a Facebook group called Connecting Comic Book Writers and Artists. It’s still very active and there’s a combination of writers and artists that just post their comic projects and see if they can find a good match. We found our artist Nate, he had posted a bunch of his portfolio work and given that our stuff is very horror-driven but also very historical, we were looking for an artist who was very realistic, not too abstract, not too cartoony, and so when we found his portfolio we were like, “that’s perfect.” So I reached out to him, talked to him for a bit, interviewed him, and that’s how we met each other. There’s a number of groups like that in different--I’m sure there’s groups like that on Discord, I’m not a big Discord person, I’m sure you can find one. These days, I think it’s easy to find groups like that out there but the one specifically that we used was Connecting Comic Book Writers and Artists on Facebook.
Carina: Fantastic! And we’ll link that, too, with all the other books we’ve mentioned, resources that we’ve mentioned. I’m also not a huge Discord user, but I’m sure there is something out there with how social media has moved into how we promote ourselves in this industry as writers, as artists.
To bring us towards the end of our conversation here, do you know of any places that have submission calls where artists and writers can find homes for their work once they’ve built up a team and built up a manuscript of something worth submitting? Are there any places that you know where people can send those things out?
Francesca: Sure, for comics specifically, each publisher will have on their website submissions, if they’re accepting submissions or not, and what the criteria is. So, Dark Horse has an open submission call process. My advice is just read everything three times and do it exactly how they ask for it. If you get one little step wrong, you’re automatically rejected. Image also has a submission process, DC and Marvel don’t take submissions because they’re DC and Marvel. They come to you, you don’t come to them. I would say start with some of the smaller presses to try to get in there. If you’re looking as a horror writer, I’ve got a lot of submission calls in my head for horror writers. Sometimes they’ll look for artists but rarely, to be honest, but if you’re a horror writer, things like Submission Grinder, and then HorrorTree, those two websites have a list of open call submissions for anthologies, for short story collections, a lot of different publishers and magazines have those open calls, and these are two directories that sort of categorize all that.
The other thing I’ll mention is, I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but on Twitter they had something called PitchDark, which is how I got my short story collection They Hide: Short Stories to Tell in the Dark, how I got my publisher. Sometimes there’ll be ways you can pitch your book, your idea, your project on Twitter using different events that are going on in the literary world.
Lastly, one of the ways that we got our stuff out there is Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a lover of comics. A lot of very successful and very well-known comic book projects have been funded on Kickstarter. If you’re looking, you’ve gotten your team and your trying to get funding for it, trying to get eyeballs on it, there’s nothing better to me in my opinion than starting a Kickstarter campaign. Even if you don’t need the money to do it, if you just want to get it out there and get more eyeballs onto it, we had orders in Italy and Russia and all over the world that we never would have been able to access if we were only in two or three of our local comic book stores. So, Kickstarter’s a great way to get your stuff out there and to be known around the world.
Carina: Yeah, that publicity is priceless. Even if you only get a few donations, just having people’s eyes on it whether they donate or not, just saving it in that little folder of theirs saying “I’ll come back to this later,” they’re still going to remember that thing when it comes out.
This has been such a wonderful, illuminating conversation, Francesca, thank you so much for joining us this evening. Do you have any last words of wisdom or advice for those who are watching tonight?
Francesca: Well, thank you so much for having me, I had a great time. I would say, follow your passion and follow what’s in your heart. Don’t die with a book in you.
Carina: “Don’t die with a book in you,” that is a fantastic way for us to end tonight. I want to thank everyone for watching this pilot entry to the Incubator Interview Series. I’m Carina, our comic-librarian-in-residence, thanks for joining us, and we will see you soon. Bye-bye!
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