Interviews from APE: Oni Press
I need to read more comic books from Oni Press. Their selection is more literary than whatever is going on in most superhero comics and they’re much more diverse in terms of genre and creators. We met Editor-in-Chief James Lucas Jones at the Alternative Press Expo and he says that no matter what you like, Oni Press has a title for you.
Pink Raygun: I have to be honest.� Local is the only title from Oni that I’ve read. Where would you recommend someone new start with Oni books? Are there titles that are more “female friendly” than others?
James Lucas Jones: I think the whole term “female friendly titles” is loaded in that it’s not like there are comics that are going to be universally loved by any single gender. It depends on what readers usually gravitate toward in other media, be it a novels or film or television. If they’re a big Tim Burton fan, we have Courtney Crumrin, which is a little bit spooky. Our book Blue Monday is a coming of age story about a group of friends, but the focus is mainly on two female characters and it’s set in an early 90s high school with a lot of new wave and British Invasion inspiration.
Hopeless Savages is another book that has a pretty high female readership for us and it follows the lives of children of hippies, like Moonbeam and Dweezil and Rainbow and all that. You wonder what happened to the punks from that age and their kids. So, its about a family where the mother and father are punk musicians and they’re a family now with the kids growing up.� The oldest son is Rat and the other kids are Twitch and Zero. It’s the marriage of Dirk Hopeless and Nikki Savage, so they’re the Hopeless Savages.
Twelve Reasons Why I Love Her is a book we published last year that’s a romance title, perfect for fans of films like Before Sunset or Before Sunrise or that type of material. We also publish historical fiction, like our graphic novel Capote in Kansas which is all about Truman Capote and his time in Kansas researching In Cold Blood. It’s also kind of a ghost story as well as he comes to terms with the brutal crime that happened and how he has to depict it in his novel.
Wet Moon is about a group of art students in the deep south who are kind of dealing with the town they’re in not really respecting their new cultural influences. We literally publish such a wide range of material that there is something for every reader.
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PRG: Oni publishes creator owned properties, correct?
JLJ: For the most part. We occasionally dabble in licensed books. We have a book coming out later this spring and will be released throughout the summer based on Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen character. That’s a big sci-fi farce that should be a good gateway for anyone who enjoys his show and that type of comedy. But, for the most part we publish creator owned and driven comics.
PRG: Are the creators coming to you or does Oni go out looking for the stuff?
JLJ: It really depends on the title. We have people that we have gone out and seen their work and approached them, saying “we think you have a really unique voice, do you have any ideas you want to do for comics?” We publish novelists, screenwriters and comic writers as well as really talented cartoonists. People who can both write and draw with an equal level of skill and finesse.
PRG: What are you looking for in the properties Oni publishes?
JLJ: We’re really only about quality. We kinda think that the whole North American, at least the direct market, comic industry is a little ridiculous with how superhero driven it is. It’s like if there were only police procedurals on television. You don’t want to watch the same type of show or read only crime novels or focus on any one genre in any other media and we don’t think comics should be any different, so we really just look for a standard of quality and let the creators work in whatever genre or literary influences they have.
PRG: But, Oni does still dabble in that superhero genre. Didn’t Oni do a Madman special a while ago?
JLJ: Yeah. Madman is an exception rather than a rule. Mike [Allred] is someone we’ve all known and adored for so long. We’ve always said that while we’re not looking to do superhero comics because that audience is being served,� if it’s something that’s truly unique and special, then of course we’ll consider it. And there are superhero elements to some of our books. Even Scott Pilgrim, which is such a melting pot of influences, still has it’s similarities to some aspects of superhero comics, even though it’s by no means a conventional superhero comic.
PRG: What’s your background? Were you an aspiring writer or comic artist yourself who fell into publishing or was publishing your goal from the start?
JLJ: Publishing was my goal. It’s such a different mindset from editing to creating and I think that when creators get into editing as a stepping stone on their way to creating, they’re doing a disservice to the editing profession as well as the creative profession. It’s not always that way, but I’ve always said that I’d rather be a good editor than a mediocre writer. So, I studied journalism and communications in college and worked more in traditional print media, like newspapers and that kind of thing while I was still in school. Then I moved into comics after that.
PRG: As a publisher, what would you say is Oni’s strength as a publisher as opposed to other independent publishers like AIT-Planet Lar or Slave Labor?
JLJ: I think quality and diversity. I don’t think that there’s any kind of book that we haven’t published. The kind of approach we’ve always taken when selecting books and projects is to ask ourselves if this is a book that we would want to read? If all of us would pay our hard earned money for it, then it’s something that we’re gonna want to do. All of us in the office have very different tastes, but there’s a certain amount of overlap as well.
Oni hasn’t done a ton of sci-fi books, but that doesn’t mean we’re opposed to doing them. We actually have a sci-fi ongoing that’s going on right now, Wasteland. It’s a book that people wouldn’t have expected from Oni two or three years ago, but the quality of the material the creators were generating was such that there was no way we could ignore it. It had enough other elements to it and there was such a political and human undertone to even the pitch that we knew it was something that we needed to do. Likewise, we have largely steered clear of fantasy as a genre, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t dabbled in it when we found a project that we feel is different and appropriate enough. Even though we may not be drawn to that material by default, we still appreciate a good story.
PRG: I’d like to go back to the upcoming Tek Jansen title for a second. The way the direct market is set up can be seen as somewhat silly. If I’m a reader and I don’t go to the comic shop on Wednesday, I can’t always get the books that I want because they’re sold out. What is Oni is doing to get the Tek Jansen book to a broader audience beyond the new comics shipping list on Wednesday?
JLJ: First of all, I think that there is an important distinction to make and, while I do think that the way the direct market has evolved has been almost as counter-productive for comics as a medium as it’s been very lucrative for the big superhero publishers, there are still a lot of really good, really fantastic direct market stores out there. There are shops where you don’t have to worry about being there on Wednesday to pick up a copy because they’ll rack it for two or three or even six weeks, as long as they feel that it’s a viable product for their customers.
With Tek Jansen, we’re gonna be doing a very aggressive overprint to make sure it’s still available to direct market stores. We’re going to offer it through some more traditional online mediums and I think we just got confirmation that it will be available through the Colbert Nation website as well and through Amazon and those venues, so that people who may not be familiar with comics or the direct market can find the book. We will eventually do a trade paperback collection that would be in bookstores and would have a wider life outside of the direct market. For the five issue mini-series, Tek Jansen is a traditional comic book. We’re encouraging people to get out to their local stores and we’re hoping that it will bring people in who haven’t been into their local comic book stores to find something they might like.
Comic books are such an exciting and versatile medium and it’s very depressing to me that it gets pigeonholed in the “BANG! POW!” type so often that it loses what it is capable of as a medium. In terms of visual storytelling, it’s such a personal and tightly controlled medium. If you look at other visual story telling mediums, theater or television or film, it takes such an incredible array of talent to assemble those things. The art of collaboration can be something that’s very special, and incredible things can come out of it, but there’s something unique about comics. All a person needs is a piece of paper and a pen to be able to tell a story. It really is incredible. I don’t think other media can offer anything close in terms of the intimacy between the creator and the reader.
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