This weekend is the wonderful annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival and I’m proud to be there!

TABLE 213

Come by to grab a copy of Skullkickers Treasure Trove or my brand new graphic novel, Makeshift Miracle: The Girl From Nowhere, which is debuting at the festival!

On Sunday, you can also attend a spiffy panel on comic writing I’m a part of:

Sunday, May 6, 2012
Ristorante Fortuna – Google Map
12 Cumberland St
Toronto, ON M4W 1J5

2:00 – 3:00 – Writing Pictures with Words: Comic Writer’s Craft
Brainstorming ideas, describing scenes, building plot and creating dialogue. Learn comic writing techniques and tips from prolific comic pros Becky Cloonan (Conan, Wolves), Ray Fawkes (One Soul, Possessions), Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics, Adventure Time) and Jim Zub (Makeshift Miracle, Skullkickers).

The short version is that the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo kicked all kinds of ass. I brought a slew of Skullkickers and sold out of it all by Sunday afternoon, giving me a few hours to browse the show riding a wave of good feelings and enthusiasm long after my weary head wanted to lie down. Also, money.

The long version is that the Skullkickers webcomic initiative (man, that sounds too formal) is working.

It’s not pageview numbers versus print numbers. It’s much bigger than that.

I’ve effectively created a whole new audience for Skullkickers. After exhibiting at 4 conventions over the past 5 weeks, I can see already see the trend because of it. There are two audiences now.

Skullkickers is a moderately successful Image Comic series. We’ve shipped 13 issues (our 14th arrives next week) and our monthly sales numbers keep the series very much alive but aren’t anything to write home about. We do much better in trade, where our value-priced $9.99 softcover volume 1 and new hardback volume 1 & 2 combo book (dubbed ‘Treasure Trove’) are doing quite well in comic and book stores.

Skullkickers is now also a webcomic. I started serializing our early issues, one page every weekday, so that readers could discover us, start from the beginning and grow attached to the series, giving us outreach far past comic shop shelves and retailer ordering concerns. I’m thrilled to say that over the past 3 months we’ve generated 1.7 million+ pageviews to 96,000+ unique visitors. That is about twenty times our monthly issue audience and reaches people in places that don’t have comic shops at all.

So, reaching people is great and all but how does that translate to actual sales? If most are getting the milk for free, will they buy the cow?

Good news: Serializing the issues hasn’t negatively affected our sales one bit. Our trade sales through comic and book stores are up, steadily climbing. Making more people aware of the series has made them want the current material more, not less. Quality and good word of mouth is helping build our readership in shops bit by bit.

Better news: At conventions I’m selling a lot more. I’m not twice the sales person I was last year, but I’m selling more than double the number of books since we started serializing online. 9 times out of 10, I’m selling it to people who read the series online. I asked almost every person who came to my table if they’d heard of Skullkickers before. No word of a lie, when they said “yes”, 90% of those folks also said they were reading it online. It shocked me.

Some people were surprised we were being published by Image or that there were physical books at all. Most didn’t care that the comic is put out by the third largest comic publisher in North America. That had no bearing whatsoever on their purchase. They read the series online, enjoyed it, I was at the show, they bought books. Done, done, done and done.

The people who buy Skullkickers in comic shops buy every issue. It’s their little joyful adventure hit every month. They bring the issues up to be signed when they see me at shows. Signing 13 issues in a stack is a thrill and I add a little note or joke statement to each one to make them extra special. I usually end up chatting with our comic readers about other creator-owned books they should be buying or upcoming Image titles that look exciting. Our print readers are very valuable to me. I don’t want any of things I’ve said above to give people the impression that isn’t the case.

The comic shop audience is not the web audience. Those two audiences don’t seem to mix much at all. They’re two distinctive audiences and they’re both valid, especially when they’re both growing. One group spends money every month on issues and some in trade, the other is larger with patrons who almost exclusively spend money on collections over a longer period. Putting content out to both doesn’t cannibalize either audience.

The bottom line is quality and availability, not web versus print. The more platforms, the more options, the better. People read comics and support creators either way.

Everybody wins.

Every year the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo puts together an artbook with pin-ups from the artist guests attending the show. Seven years, seven artbooks. I’m proud that I’ve been at every show and created a new piece in every artbook so far.

This year’s theme was “Dreams & Wishes” so I sketched up a faerie folk. The idea is that he harvests dream energy from his dreamcatcher and collects the energy into the spiffy key there.

Here are links to my previous pin-ups for the Calgary Expo:
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006

Scott Kurtz, creator of the now-classic webcomic Player Versus Player, gives a kindly shout out to Skullkickers and Makeshift Miracle in his latest blog post.

Getting the thumb’s up from one of the online greats is a real booster as I continue to plug away on both books. Thanks, Scott!

It took some time to make it into their reading pile but Skullkickers has hit a new peak with a stellar review from industry giant Publishers Weekly.
Check it out!

“Laugh out loud humour comes from character quips and tangents, as well as the grotesque and the absurd.”…”It’s like a sword and sorcery buddy movie channelling Milk and Cheese.”

307 entries (256 writing, 51 art)

Holy $#%*!

There’s no other way to put it. The last two days of our Tavern Tales Contest have been a whirlwind as over a hundred entries poured in over the weekend right before the finish line. Everyone on the creative team was blown away by the response.

With that many submissions it’s going to take us some time to go through them all, weigh them over in our minds and make final decisions about who our two winners are. We’re hoping to be able to announce the winners by end of May. If things go well, maybe sooner. From the first few entries we’ve skimmed through we can tell that it’s going to be very, very hard to pick winners. Please be patient with us.

Thank you for putting your creativity and time into these art and writing submissions. If this was your first time reading the series, we hope you enjoyed it and will stick around for more of our adventures even if you don’t end up winning the coveted Tavern Tales spot.

Thank you for supporting Skullkickers and other creator-owned comics. We couldn’t do it without you.
@jimzub

This weekend I’m once again happily exhibiting at the Calgary Expo, one of the biggest shows in Canada!

I’ll have copies of Skullkickers Treasure Trove, our soft cover trades, rare variant covers and the Skullkickers World Map for sale, along with sketches and more.

I’ll also be on two panels at the show:

Saturday April 28th
Writers Unite: Pitching Your Creator Owned Comics
Room: Palomino C
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm

Jim Zub will relay funny anecdotal stories of his own creative journey as he illustrates how to write comics, set goals, create pitches, and ultimately get your own work out to the masses. Be sure to come prepared with any questions you want answered.

Sunday April 29th
Convention Horror Stories
Room: Palomino C
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

And you thought horror movies were scary! Jim Zub will regale you with bone chilling and hair raising real life stories of some of the conventions he’s attended.

Bonus weekend update for Skullkickers Online!

The infamous Skullkickers Stew Recipe, created by Andrew Wheeler is now up:

Check out Omar’s retro-style Wonder Momo poster announcing our new series together coming to Shifty Look:

The Sky Kid webcomic I’m writing, with art by Jeff “Chamba” Cruz (Street Fighter II Turbo) continues on Bandai-Namco’s Shifty Look comic site.

We’re now halfway through “season one” so it’s the perfect time to get caught up on the airborne action and adventure.

Click HERE to start reading from the beginning of the story!

I’ve also put together some blogposts for the site all about how I write the comic series you may find interesting and illuminating. Check them out here:

Writing the Story for Sky Kid – Part 1

Writing the Story for Sky Kid – Part 2

Writing the Story for Sky Kid – Part 3