As I begin to write this week’s blog the East Coast is hunkering down in preparation for landfall of Hurricane Irene. Here in South Jersey all of the shore points have already been evacuated and Irene isn’t expected to hit for two more days! I live inland about forty minutes from the coast and I am getting nervous about the potential for the severe damage that can be caused by this historic storm. Today we received a rolling message from the electric company warning about the very real threat of drastic power outages and informing us that those outages could take days to correct.

Those of you that follow this blog know that Tuesday is the regular day for this to post and fortunately Bill Cucinotta will be finalizing the post from Philadelphia, which is also in the path of the storm but significantly inland. Thankfully the city is not nearly as susceptible to damage and outages caused by trees as we are buried here in the heavily wooded Pinelands, home of the fabled Jersey Devil.

I hope against odds that come Tuesday I will be able to enjoy reading this post and be able to visit all of my favorite places on the internet. More importantly I hope that everyone in the path of this storm fairs well and comes through this ordeal safely.

All of this talk about the lights going out is making me think about how dependant we have all become on our computers and other electronic conveniences for our information and amusement. I’ve started reminiscing about those simpler times when I looked forward to reading a stack of pulpy comics on a rainy day. I have to wonder how kids today will get by without power to supply their iPods, iPads, gameboys, cell phones, laptops and televisions.

Even the creative process grinds to a halt when the lights go out. More and more writers and artists are dependant on their computers as their primary tool with which to create. I know I’d much rather peck away on the keyboard, making corrections instantly as I clack along. The option of writing this blog with pen and paper is now just about as obsolete as writing it in hieroglyphics.

Regularly, I review old-school comic creating techniques, most recently looking at the basics of just drawing a line without the use of a computer program. Sure, artists are always dependant on tools to execute their ideas but in the past primary tools were simple and more dependant on the skillful hand of the creator than a complex program brought to life by the power grid.

Have we become so dependant on creating digitally that we are in danger of losing the freedom of our voice as creators when the lights go out? I think that Irene may teach us a brief yet tough lesson, especially if some of us are without power for several days. Besides the fact that milk will go bad in a warm fridge, some of us are about to find out that we need to maintain our ability to create with analog tools like paper, pencils, ink, ruling pens, brushes, nibs, and rulers.

The ability to create with our hands not cuffed by a computer will give us the opportunity for greater spontaneity, greater freedom and greater control of our own creative destiny. I am not insinuating that we should abandon the use of the computer for creating. Absolutely not! In many ways digital art has opened up an infinite number of doors for creative opportunity. I am suggesting that just as a little league ball player has the fundamentals pounded into his skill set to make him a better player, young artists should master the use of the rudimentary yet traditional tools of the medium to assist in making them better comics artists.

Someday, when and if the lights do go out, It will be the comics artist that has mastered the basic skills that have been used for decades that
will have the advantage and be able to create without the use of a power cord.

Making Comics Because I Want To

Gerry Giovinco

“Location, location, location!” This is the mantra of of real estate investors worldwide and was a dilemma we faced as we planned a promotion strategy for our first full-color comic book publications, Matt Wagner’s Mage and Judith Hunt and Charles Dixon’s Evangeline.

Our first 2 color publications

Comico had proven itself as an aggressive marketer of its black-and-white line by advertising in all of the major fan magazines at the time. Bill Cucinotta made sure that full-page ads were regularly seen in the Comics Buyers Guide, Amazing Heroes, The Comics Journal, and David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview.

Our decision to begin publishing in color raised the bar significantly. We could no longer survive if our titles sold just a few thousand copies each. We knew that publishing in color would automatically cause our sales figures to rise dramatically but we had to sell around 30,000 of each title to see black ink on our ledger sheets.

30,000 seems like a good number when looking at the monthly sales figures of comics today but in 1984 when Marvel and DC were still selling comics for 75¢ we could not compete with a $3-4 cover price. At $1.50, our profit margin was a lot slimmer than it is for books in the current market.

We had great faith in the product and rightfully so. Creators of each comic have gone on to become industry giants but at the time they were all virtual unknowns.

We felt that in order to succeed we needed to promote our product at the point of purchase; in the comic shops themselves.

Bill, who had worked many years in retail at Fat Jack’s Comic Crypt in Philadelphia, knew first-hand how valuable the real estate was in comic shops which were usually quite small.

When he, Phil LaSorda, and I discussed the possibility of posters in the stores to promote our comics the question was, “Where would the retailers hang them if they hung them at all?”

Retail walls were usually covered, floor-to-ceiling, by shelves displaying hundreds of new comics. Valuable older comics in mylar bags were displayed on walls also.

If a poster were to go up on any of the limited wall space that might be left, you could bet that it would be reserved for a Marvel or DC product.

We talked about post cards and rack cards but agreed that counter space and rack space was as much a premium as wall space in the tiny comic shops.

Hell, the only space left was the ceiling and how would we convince retailers to staple our poster on their ceiling?

Inspiration from above

Maybe it was from years of kite flying, model rocketry, and hanging plastic airplanes in my room. Maybe it was from marveling at Alexander Calder’s masterpieces in art school. The idea of creating a mobile that the retailers could hang from a single tack or hook soon gave rise.

We would command a virgin, uncharted territory smack in the center of the ceiling in virtually every comic shop. We would boldly go where no man had gone before!

Mobile Ad

The Comico Mobile, which was promoted as “The First in a series of Promotional Mobiles,” was a simple elegant design though it would be the first and only one of the intended series. It was a cardboard disc that was 18 inches in diameter printed in full color on both sides, Mage on one side, Evangeline on the other. At the top was drilled a tiny hole from which it could be hung.

There was a limited number of 100 that were signed and numbered by the creators and the rest were sent to distributors where retailers would place an order to get theirs for free with their shipment of Comico comics. Just in case they missed the offer we ran ads in the trades to make sure no one was left out.

The Comico line of color comics was off the ground. The proof was on the ceiling!

A Comico Mobile still hangs in my studio today right next to my inspiration for the Comico Blimp, a toy airship hanging from a string.

CO2 Mobile Command Centre

On the wall behind my desk, however, is a new banner proclaiming CO2 Comics, our exciting new foray into the digital world of comics.

Today’s digital environment adds a completely different meaning when speaking the term “mobile.” Computers and mobile devices like smart phones, iPads, and e-readers are quickly changing the landscape of all publishing including comics.

CO2 Comics will give Bill and I the chance to pioneer again but we will still look back to the term “Location, location, location,” only this time we will be looking for a good Wi-Fi connection.

Making comics because I want to

Gerry Giovinco

Gerry Giovinco and Bill Cucinotta

Superman has the Fortress of Solitude. Batman has the Bat Cave. Hugh Hefner has Playboy Mansion. (That lucky bastard…)

The great heroes always had a secret lair, a home base, a castle of sorts. These mythic headquarters become a trademarked extension of the person themselves and ad to the legacy of grandeur attributed to their deeds and accomplishments.

Gerry's space at the Studio

I always had a fascination for a “clubhouse” mentality. I remember being about four years old and having secret meetings with my younger brother, Tom, in a dark closet illuminated only by our dim nightlight which we had drug in before we closed the door. This was our secret place, and though I’m sure my parents knew where we were, it gave us toddlers a sense of independence and awareness of self that we didn’t have when we were supervised by adults.

Two years later, Batmania would grip the world. All my brother and I could dream of was our very own Bat Cave buried beneath our house. We would spend hours scheming secret entrances to our gloriously imagined hangout.

As the years passed, there was always some kind of toy cabin, clubhouse, or tree house that anchored my activities with my three brothers and friends.

Room with a view

This continued into college where I would hole up with Bill Cucinotta and the other so-called Ducks in our commandeered DUCKWORK office on the thirteenth floor of the Philadelphia College of Art.

Given my own propensity for a hangout it is no surprise to me that the defining catalyst for Comico becoming tangible was the availability of office space at 1547 Dekalb Street in Norristown, PA.

Phil LaSorda’s older brother Dennis had just purchased a duplex in which he planned to operate his physical therapy practice. He offered Phil, Vince Argondezzi and me the opportunity to operate Comico from the space in the adjacent half of the building that he had no immediate plans for.

The iron was hot.

Comico, which until this point was as much a dream for Phil, Vince and me as that Bat Cave under my house, was about to become real. This was the moment of truth. It was time to “shit or get off the pot.”

Vince chose to leave the porcelain vacant and, though he would contribute his comic Mr. Justice to Primer #1, his partnership with Phil and me had ended.

Fred the Duck. Gerry Giovinco, Bill Cucinotta and Phil LaSorda

Phil and I had grown used to the idea of a third person in the partnership. It especially came in handy breaking stalemates on important decisions. We turned to Bill Cucinotta who had been my right hand man while publishing DUCKWORK at PCA.

Bill knew the Direct Market of the comics industry very well because of his experience working retail at Fat Jack’s Comic Crypt in Philadelphia. As a partner, his knowledge gave us an edge that we did not have before.

Partners

Comico’s partnership was once more a triumvirate and we had our own headquarters dubbed simply “Comico Studios”. We generally would refer to it just as The Studio never intending to confuse or compare it to The Studio in Manhattan where Bernie Wrightson, Jeff Jones, Michael Kaluta, and Barry Windsor-Smith hung their hats.

Recently I have heard stories from various Comico fans that had found their way to Norristown and decided to look up the Comico headquarters which, in their mind, was a shining tower of architectural wonder. They were surprised to find that it was simply an old three-story, stone-fronted, duplex building that was once a family home with a wooden porch located on the corner of a busy street in a tired industrial town whose glory days had long passed.

Our main activities took place in what would have been the living room and dining room of the original house, complete with very dated orange, shag, wall-to-wall carpet that covered beautiful hardwood floors. Eventually the bedrooms would become offices as our staff expanded.

At the time all of the guys that hung out at the studio were college age and we had a very fraternal sensibility that had carried over from our DUCKWORK experience.

We tended to play as hard as we worked and seemed to never leave the building, often crashing on the couch or cots that we had brought in for the many all-nighters that were pulled to meet deadlines or to just hang out. The pizza shop on the opposite corner made it easy for us to always have food and drink.

Our families forgot who we were.

Posters and art covered the walls. There was a riddled dart board that was used to shake out those punchy moments in the wee morning hours. It was not unusual to find the mantel of the fire place lined with empty beer bottles.

Bill Cucinotta and Bill Anderson, Trashed and too close for comfort

This would all change eventually as Comico became more of a business and less of an adventure but those early days harbor all of the most romantic memories of young guys setting out to conquer the world of comics as they knew it with little more than hope, a dream and some talent.

Reggie Byers and a new shipment

We would get visitors. Many with portfolios or scripts in hand. Some just curious. The visitors that thrilled me the most though were heros that provided inspiration so great that I get misty thinking about their visits even today.

Murphy Anderson whose Visual Concepts Inc. was our flat color separator and would visit often.

Joe Kubert, whose school we offered a small scholarship to, and whose sons eventually worked on our books, stopped in to say hi.

Dick Giordano along with Pat Bastienne would stop by for holiday parties.

All of them are comic book legends.

They would marvel at our humble space and it would take them back to stories of the good old days when they, themselves were kids in the industry holed up in hotel rooms knocking out an issue by committee overnight.

The twinkle in each of their eyes as they reminisced is something I’ll never forget.

When I write these articles, I get that twinkle and I remember why I love making comics.

It is more than the art of it. More than the love of the medium. More than the camaraderie of other comic artists.

It is being part of it all.

Being part of the history of all the folks that made the comics that put a smile on the face of a reader young or old.

Gerry Giovinco, Reggie Byers, Phil LaSorda, Bill Cucinotta. Neil Vokes (in back), Matt Wagner, Rich Rankin

Being part of a unique tradition of a wonderful medium and passing it forward to the next generation.

Snowmageddon trashed the front porch

The clubhouse is a lot different today. It exists in a technological wonder called the internet. It is not bricks and mortar like the old duplex in Norrisown. It is digital and the visitors stop in from all over the world.

Our new headquarters has a name. It is CO2 Comics.

It has an address: www.co2comics.com

Stop and visit.

Visit often.

Making comics because I want to.

Gerry Giovinco

This week the comic industry is bracing itself for the forty-first installment of the San Diego Comic-Con International. The San Diego show is by far the preeminent comic book convention in the world and has been for decades.

In the early 1980′s, when we first started to attend as Comico, International was not yet tagged onto the name. Even then it was the biggest and best Comic Convention though in those days 4,000 attendees was an exciting number, nothing compared to the audience that piles in today.

1st five Comico Covers

1983 was our first year attending with a booth and we were quick to realize how easy it was to get lost in the vast auditorium of vendors, publishers and artists. Comico was a small black-and-white publisher at the time featuring five titles: Az by Phil LaSorda, Grendel by Matt Wagner, Slaughterman by myself, Skrog by Bill Cucinotta and our new-talent anthology, Comico Primer. We had our sites set on publishing color books and had begun to promote our intentions.

Colorful AD-spirations by Matt Wagner and Andrew Murphy

When we had decided to attend the convention our first priority was to make sure that we presented ourselves as professionally as possible. We had a number of sales representatives from display companies stop by the studio and pitch their product. Most of them were very expensive and very boring. I made a point out of examining each display meticulously, focusing on how each was built and what features best suited our needs. My conclusion was that I needed to build the booth myself because it was the only way that we could afford the type of booth that we wanted.  I designed and constructed a booth display out of foam core that was quite impressive. It was covered with vinyl graphics that I applied with a tacking iron. It came complete with plexiglass pockets that displayed our books and had overhead lighting built in. The whole thing folded flat and we transported it in an oversized portfolio.

Rich Rankin and Matt Wagner at Comico Studios christening the newly constructed Comico Booth

The design and construction skills that I had developed as a model and costume builder along with the 3-D and sculpture training that I had acquired while attending the Philadelphia College of Art proved to come in handy when it came to selling comic books.

Mage-or Hijinks with Rich Rankin and Matt Wagner in front of the Comico Booth

The booth, which would last us for the next three years, gave us an air of professionalism that we had not yet been awarded by our peers. When fans approached our booth we looked as impressive as Marvel, DC and all of the other major players at the time. Our books then were a bit crude but we were slowly building our reputation on grit, perseverance, creativity and ingenuity.

We left San Diego that year proud of the inroads we had made. We had proven that we could be part of the landscape of industry and we had done well networking with fans, distributors, retailers, artists and other publishers.

When we returned to San Diego in 1984 there was a lot more at stake. Our decision to go to color had been realized but not as we had initially planned. The five titles that we had touted the year before were gone. Our commitment to color forced us to recognize that if we were to succeed we needed to send better work to the presses. The new lineup included Elementals by Bill Willingham, Evangeline by Charles Dixon and Judith Hunt, and Mage by Matt Wagner.

Comico's 1st Color Books

We knew that it was going to take much more than a fancy booth to make sure that our product would be noticed by the attending crowd of comics enthusiasts.

We had come back from San Diego the previous year with a huge pile of brochures, flyers, buttons business card, postcards and photocopied samples of art, most of which had been picked up at the entrance of the convention hall. It was easy to lose even the most lavishly produced piece of promotional material in this wild collection of potential paper cuts.

How was Comico going to separate itself and its promotional material from this knot of collateral material?

Stepping outside the box is a long used cliche but one I have always adhered to, especially when it comes to promoting a product. Ironically, it was the box that was the solution for our marketing approach for Comic-Con that year. The box was the vessel for the usual and the mundane. Once outside of it, all I saw was valuable marketing real estate on the box, itself!

We needed a vessel of our own that everybody else’s promotional material would go into.

I went to S. Walter Packaging in Philadelphia and researched bags and found a plastic one that was reinforced, strong enough to carry a lot of paper goods, and printable on both sides. I designed a catchy slogan that featured our logo in two colors and incorporated an ad that we were running in our books. Finally, I plastered the thing with black-and-white go-go checks that made it pop across the room.

Comico Convention Bag Front

As expected, we were the only company that had a bag that was capable of holding all of the goodies that anyone could pick up at registration and around convention hall. The bag was not only popular it was in demand. When bags ran out at registration a line formed at our table. Nearly every attendee carried a Comico bag that year and it was nearly impossible to not see our logo anywhere at the convention center or in the streets of downtown San Diego.

Comico Convention Bag Back

Our success at San Diego Comic-Con that year was clearly “In the Bag!”

Gerry Giovinco

Creation Conventions produced by Gary Berman and Adam Malin from 1971 till today were where I first discovered a sense of community in comics that has hooked me for life.

Thing costume by Gerry Giovinco

I made my first mark in comics not as a comic creator but as a costume designer. In the summer of 1979 my costume creation of The Everlovin’ Blue Eyed Thing, Ben Grimm himself, impressed everyone who saw it. I was soon a popular guy at the Creation shows.

I think that I had made the biggest impression on Bob Schreck who was working for Creation at the time. He was generally the first guy you would see as you came through the door. Always friendly and welcoming, Bob loved my Thing costume. He would call me and have me do promo spots on the local Philadelphia “Dancing on Air” television show to promote upcoming Creation Conventions.

Hulk Meets Thing cast photo

Bob and his friend, Larry Ruggiero, wanted to make a fan film starring their buddy, Kevin Van Wagner as the Incredible Hulk and they wanted me and my Thing costume to be his co-star.

On the set of Hulk Meets Thing

The Incredible Hulk Meets the Everlovin’ Blue Eyed Thing was filmed in Long Island, NY and completed in 1982.

Hulk Meets Thing movie Poster by legendary artist Joe Sinnott

The short film became a staple at the Creation shows, featured in the movie room with such classics as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Phantom of Paradise and Plan 9 from Outerspace.

The relationship that I developed with the people at Creation during this time enabled me to negotiate table space in the artist alley at the shows. This is where Comico was first introduced.

Bob Schreck eventually became part of the Comico family and later moved on to be a mainstay as an editor in the comics industry.

The great illustration that was made for the film was created by the legendary Joe Sinnott.

Enjoy the film that is posted here.

Gerry Giovinco

What a revoltin' development!