CA: Don’t you think you’ll be making that up with the trade? Lots of good comics aren’t selling well, why do you think your lack of financial success precludes a third volume down the road? Why not explore other publishers or imprints like Vertigo or Marvel Icon?
KG: There’s a difference between making only a little money and starving. We’re very much in the latter. Jamie’s lucky to get a couple of hundred dollars from an issue. While he didn’t tell me about this until after it was all done, there were three occasions when Jamie was seriously considering throwing in the towel. The problem is that Image’s deal is a back-end one. Will we make some money off the trade? Maybe. And that’s a big maybe. But that means Jamie not earning any money for the six months it would take to draw it, which is the main reason why we took over a year to do 7 issues. As in, every time Jamie ran out of money, he had to stop and do something else. A couple of hundred dollars doesn’t cover rent or pay for his fashionable haircuts. And doing this bitty work f–ks up the production anyway, because you can’t concentrate or plan. You just spend your entire life in low-level money panic.
Frankly, Jamie is just shy of thirty and one of the most talented illustrators of his generation. Even I’m not a big a bastard enough to want him to spend another year in “Phonogram”‘s brand of hell. He deserves a paycheck.
Other options? Vertigo would never publish “Phonogram.” The stuff we do with real bands is far too grey-area for Warner [Bros]. I’m not Bendis or Brubaker, so Icon would never fly. Most companies you suspect would be interested aren’t, from what I understand – though I haven’t actually pursued it with any seriousness.
Best plan I have is just writing series 3 and then writing into my will that assuming I die young and Jamie’s still around, lob him whatever’s in my bank account to draw it. Which is assuming he’d even be willing to do it then. It’s not that we’re bitter about it — well, not just because we’re bitter about it — but that it’s been emotionally exhausting. We’ve been doing “Phonogram” for over 4 years, not including the years before the first series came out. Imagine if we could have just done the comic and not had to deal with any of the shit we’ve had to. We’d have been up to issue 44 now. Instead, we have 13 issues.
I feel frustrated. Enormously lucky, sure, but frustrated. We’ve done this wonderful thing we’re crazy-proud about. But if the whole economic system was just a couple of degrees to the left, everything would have been different. I mean, just to give you an idea about narrow the margins are between what we are and what we could be, if we were selling 6K instead of 4K, we could have done those 44 issues. The difference between breaking even and actually being able to do it in comics is insane. It’s like being kept under ice, clawing. I feel like a bonsai plant.
Read More: Fadeout: Kieron Gillen on the End of ‘Phonogram’ |
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