 :: Thursday, June 19, 2003 :: Ohhh-kneeee, Ohhh-kneeee, Ohhh-kneee (Or Making Comics Like Demons) Okay, I’m being lazy, but since I’m late anyway I’m going ahead with my unfinished Oni interview. I’ll do better next time, sorry folks. Although I do advise finding out more about Oni Over at their website www.onipress.com there are some very nice people in those parts. Oh yes, could people just let Jamie know we do love him no matter what a bastard he likes to think he is and give the guy a hug? SUPER UNFINISHED Lets do a quick little introduction here: Who are you guys and why should we love you? Joe: Joe Nozemack, publisher. Cause I sign the checks. Jamie: I know I'm unlovable. You don't have to tell me. This question is a cruel joke. I am Jamie S. Rich, and I am tolerated at Oni Press. When did you start reading comics, and what kept you reading them to the point that you’re now publishing some of the best comics around these days? Joe: I was one of those G.I. Joe kids in the 80s. Every time I got bored of the medium and be on the verge of not reading comics anymore, some new creator would come along (Matt Wagner, Mike Allred, Paul Pope, Scott Morse to name a few) that renewed my interest. Jamie: I always remember having comics around, the Harvey and Disney stuff, when I was younger. I really got into comics when I was 10, though. It was G.I. Joe's fault, just like so many other people. I hate to admit it, because I look at my taste from when I was a kid, and I think I was a pretty stupid kid. But we were only a couple of years away from Grendel and Dark Knight and Watchmen, and I found Love & Rockets pretty quickly, and Eclipse and Viz started importing manga. As for why I stuck around--well, why do I keep watching movies? Reading novels? Listening to music? I like stories, I like entertainment, and comics are as natural to me as any of those things. What is the genesis of Oni? How did it come about and how did each of you end up getting involved? Joe: After a bad experience working for another company, I decided I'd only put my best effort into something that I owned. While having a talk with friend of the family who is a successful business man, I mentioned what bad shape the comic industry was in. He said that that was the time to enter an industry. It's cheaper to get in and you make a bigger splash. Bob Schreck was going nuts at Dark Horse, so I approached him with the idea and he and I decided to start Oni. Jamie: Well, God had to do something on the 8th day... In the November previews of 1997 you solicited the first Oni Double feature, featuring Kevin Smith’s first work in comics and the Pander Brothers. On the cover of that previews is the announcement of “Alternative Image” year two which features characters by Lea Hernandez and Brian Wood, talents who later came over to Oni to do some work. Oni has consistently introduced new talent to the comics world or brought in some of the most acclaimed artists to work with you, you even had Bill Sienkiewicz’s first comic work in years. What is it about you that attracts such a vast and diverse amount of talent? What do you offer to your talent roster that a company like Image doesn’t? Joe: Everyone at Oni has a ton of interests outside of comics. We aren't here to recreate the comics of the past. That's boring. We're trying to do something new, or at least different from what everyone else is doing. We look for creators and ideas that are mainstream to the outside world and not just a continuation of the same ideas that have been driving the comic medium for decades. Jamie: Having never worked at Image, I can't honestly say what they offer that we don't and vice versa. We're just different publishing houses with different goals and likes and dislikes. Our main thing has always been to look for work that interests us, regardless of who that person is. We like to be entertained by the work that we do, we like to enjoy it as readers. We might pass on something because we feel it doesn't necessarily fit our niche, but overall, we're pretty open. Oni Double Feature managed to have a rather devout following, so much so that it’s still asked about and mourned four years later, you also have published a great deal of one shots that have somewhat been lost to the sands of time, has there ever been discussion of collecting any of this work into one sizeable anthology collection? Joe: Anthologies don't sell as comics and they don't really sell as trades either. We are putting together a few projects that will be announced in the future though. Jamie: What is this Oni Double Feature you keep asking about? You must be reading your father's comics. Having started the company off with an anthology title, you’ve still kept in touch with those roots with the Oni Summer Color specials and your on-line Sunday comics. Were these things intentional? Joe: Nope. Color special was just away to let the creators do something in color and the Sunday strips were just a marketing idea. Jamie: Not really, no. They were just different projects we've done to try different things. A little over a year after Oni started putting books on the shelves Bob Schreck left the Oni offices to go work at DC, shortly afterwards James Lucas Jones was brought on board to help with the website and is now an editor on a few books. How did Schreck’s departure affect things stylistically? And what did James bring to the table? Why did you bring him on board? (James, so you’re not left out here, what do you think you bring to the table?) Are only people with ‘J’ names allowed to work in the Oni offices now? Joe: Jamie, the editor in chief, was already on board at Oni before Schreck left. Jamie actually passed Geisha to Bob and I when Dark Horse turned it down. So the main change from Bob leaving was just loosing what Bob's tastes and contacts were. Oni then became Jamie and my tastes and connections. James is always finding new artist. How he does it I don't know. But he's always got a link to a site or samples from someone young and fresh, which is exactly in keeping with what we're trying to do. Jamie: Well, every person has their own take on things, so of course there will be some projects that might catch one eye and not another. I would imagine there were projects that came by that may have had a bigger chance had they been handed to Bob, but I don't think there was that noticeable a chance. Bob and I had worked together already for a couple of years, and shared a sensibility, and he and Joe had formed Oni because they shared a sensibility. Plus, Oni had always been a democratic process. It's never been about one person's vision. James was brought in because we needed another pair of hands, and he had always shown he had good taste and interesting ideas about comics. There are certainly people who we wouldn't have been aware of if not for James. Bryan O'Malley, Mike Norton, Jason Alexander--these are all folks he ushered in to the company. But his main function has always been to keep me and Joe from eating one another like rabid dogs stranded in the Andes after a plane crash. It was seriously starting to look like The Shining around here when it was just the two of us. Oni’s titles have a great variety of subject matter and feel to them, on top of that you guys seem to try to avoid letting things turn into a “same shit, different day” from your talent, how do you guys keep things from becoming too repetitive? Do you consciously push your talent to keep things fresh and new or do you only deal with people who are willing to stretch themselves artistically? How do you keep from falling into a rut? Joe: We just keep an eye on what we're doing. Ted Naifeh approached us with a project called Eva, Iron Kitten. At the time we had too many girls kicking ass projects. So we asked Ted if he had anything else. He showed us Courtney Crumrin and we went with that. It also helps that our creators are great at a multitude of mediums. They tend to have diverse interests and inspirations just like we do. Jamie: Well, we just tend to look at the work honestly. We've certainly turned stuff down in the past to avoid having too much of the same thing. That even got skewered a bit in the introduction to Pounded. I think, though, the main thing is that we also work with a lot of talent who will get bored way too easily if they just kept doing the same thing. We like to work with storytellers, and storytellers like to tell a lot of different kinds of stories. That's why even when they have a successful series, something like Queen & Country or Blue Monday, Greg Rucka wants to follow it with a project on Mount Everest or Chynna does Scooter Girl. What do you expect from new untried talents that you bring in? Almost all of the talent you’ve brought in have the look and feel of seasoned veterans, how do you make sure that they can keep up the quality from the initial proposal? Joe: Well they certainly aren't doing it for the money, so they have to be doing it for the passion of doing it. We've found that if they don't have that passion, it usually doesn't work out in the long run. So we just try to find people who understand what an upward struggle it is and are game for the challenge. Jamie: A lot of prayer. Also, a little bit of just playing it smart. You don't hire someone unless you genuinely like his or her work. If I wouldn't pay money for a book by the person I am looking at, I won't hire that person. You don't hire anyone off of one set of samples. You have to see that they've been able to do a consistent amount of samples with a consistent level of quality. And then it's just trusting your gut. It's almost like fortune telling. "Steve Rolston is not a crazy weirdo, he will be excellent." We also rely on the belief that magical things happen when you say to someone, "I trust you. I trust you can do this." They often find they are better than even they realized when they sit down to draw a real life comic book. Jamie’s “yell at the lazy talent ‘till the work shows up” editorial method is well documented, what may not be known quite as well is that this seems to have been inherited from Bob Schreck, as shown in the one page comic at the end of Paul Pope’s One Trick Rip-off. At the end of Pope’s comic Schreck is announcing Pope’s genius to the world, have there been any comics depicting Jamie declaring anyone’s genius, does he ever do that? Has James picked up a similar style of dealing with your talent? Does all this yelling ever upset the mood in the office? :) Joe: The talent only gets yelled at when they need to be yelled at. And nine times out of ten, they’d probably agree that they need to be yelled at. And hey, those strips only document the occasional outbursts. No one would be interested in scripts about, “hey thanks we got the package.” Which is how things normally go. Jamie: This version of me is highly exaggerated, yet highly encouraged. I am the bad boyfriend of comic book editing. So what exactly goes on at the Oni offices? What do you guys do all day, what are your various responsibilities? What’s the best part of the job and what is the worst? Joe: Basically just all the business and editorial work of the company. It's pretty boring. Three guys sitting at computers and talking on the phone. There are tons of boxes of books everywhere. All three of us have our own mp3 playing so there is usually music going nonstop. Nothing really remarkable. Which is why we don't do tours. People always ask, but we don't want to destroy the myth. Jamie: Personally, I think we all come in each morning and, Homer Simpson-like, dream about lunch. To try to take our minds off the various treats we could be eating, we shuffle a lot of paper around, read scripts, answer odd online interview questions. Every day is different, depending on what project is underway. The best part is when something is coming together and it's going to be a really great book, and the worst part is when events conspire to try to keep it from being a great book. We'll call them "technical difficulties." JAMIE ALONE You guys mentioned that there is always music playing in the office, Oni seems to have much more of a Pop attitude towards comics than other publishers out there. How much attention do you guys pay to the trends within other media? Are we going to see “reality” comics coming out of Oni? What have you been noticing and what would you like to see move into comics in the next year or two? Jamie: With the pop element, I think there are certain things that are universal and will always remain popular. Like, we've had great success with love stories, which never go out of fashion. But, we don't really worry about trends, overall. You will drive yourself crazy trying to chase the popularity train. You'll just end up looking like a johnny-come-lately chancer, since particularly in comics, with the long lead time, the trend might be over before you even get a book out. There seems to be a strong sense of community or even family with everyone who works with Oni. Even amongst the fans and on your forum there is a strong community there, have you developed your own version of the Marvel zombie? Jamie: Quite possibly. It's a little harder to keep up with everything we do these days, but most of our hardcore fans really try. We have maintained a creative base that is as friendly as we can make it, and we all tend to get along. We fight and disagree like any other family, but overall, we can work through it and things end up being copasetic Now for a slightly grisly question: The lot of you are killed at a convention this summer by a rouge old school Marvel fan blaming you for the fall of the male purity in comics, who would you like to keep things going with Oni if you guys fell of the face of the earth? (We’ll assume Bob Schreck is out of the picture as well here.) Which publishers do you guys see as having a similar eye for comics as Oni? Jamie: Kodansha. Other big publishers in Japan. I dunno. It dies with us. I don't need a bad cover version of Oni out there. I'm already a bad cover version of an editor. Do you guys spend time with each other socially outside of the office and conventions or do you get sick of each other? What do you like doing on you time off? Jamie: We see each other, but we don't go out of our way to do so. I am the worst of the bunch, going to my home under the bridge and terrorizing billy goats. But we all do spend a ton of time together, and it seems smart to not spend every waking hour hanging out, as sometimes each other's presence can just serve as a reminder of the things stressing us out in the office. We all have mammoth DVD collections, and we all love music--so a lot of the activities tend to revolve around that. Is there anyone who did some work on Oni Double feature but hasn’t done any work for Oni since that you’d like to have come back into the Oni fold? Jamie: I bet each one of us will say Paul Pope. But jeez, man, when you gonna let go of Oni Double Feature? I have girlfriends who I didn't whine about this long after. What projects are you guys looking forward to over the next few years that you guys have in the pipeline? Any announcements or hints you can make here and now? Any talent that James has on file we should be checking out and getting familiar with? Jamie: I look forward to everything we do. It's the benefit of a company like this, we don't have to do stuff we don't feel excited about. That said, we have a lot of great projects just starting or just about to be solicited. We have ongoing series (Love Fights by Andi Watson), miniseries (Too Much Hopeless Savages! by Jen Van Meter, Christine Norrie, & Ross Campbell; Scooter Girl by Chynna Clugston-Major; Warren Ellis' The Operation), and original graphic novels (Last Exit Before Toll by Neal Shaffer, Christopher Mitten, & Dawn Pietrusko; Union Station by Ande Parks & Eduardo Barreto; Jingle Belle: Dash Away All by Paul Dini & Jose Garibaldi; Follow Me Closely by Daniel Krall; My Destroyer by Neelam Arora & Arthur Dela Cruz). And those are just the ones I'm editing. Are there any projects that seem to have been lost to the sands of time (finished or unfinished) that you guys would like to pick up and put out there for the world to see? Jamie: Anything Matt Wagner has said he was going to do but never got around to. I'd donate vital organs to his vitality to make that happen. Another hypothetical: I’m going to give you guys 5-10 million dollars to help boost Oni’s out put, after some serious pay raises and new cars how would you put the money to use? Who would you want to be waving money at? Jamie: The same people we already work with, who deserve a nice raise after all this time. I appreciate those people more for putting it on the line when there was less cash to spread around then the ones who would only dip their toe in this kind of work when there was a larger immediate reward. Fantagraphics is currently having some financial trouble, and have made a relatively hypocritical call to the comic reading audience for support (after mocking the “team Comics” mentality) how long do you think a company can last in the comics industry if they are consistently mocking fans, and being hypocritical and moaning about the state of comics instead of trying to change things either within the company or without? Jamie: Forever. The comics industry is one big abusive boyfriend. From the point of view of both publishers/editors and fans what do you look for in comic writers? What do you looks for from artists? What would you like to see worked on in general from each camp? Jamie: I just want to see more stories people are passionate about. I want people to stop thinking about the preconceived notions of what comics are supposed to be, and not be afraid to just tell any story they want. Too much of the people trying to break into this industry are busy trying to retell the stories they liked as young readers, and we need more people telling stories that speak from their hearts. Can the comic community look forward to seeing you names on books at any point in the future in a creative capacity? Jamie: I have nothing comics oriented in the works, outside of my work at Tokyopop. Currently, the book Gravitation, and the CLAMP titles Man of Many Faces, CLAMP School Detectives, and CLAMP School Defenders: Duklyon will all bear my rewriting stamp. I am working on my second novel, and anyone who wants to keep up with my progress can go to www.confessions123.com and follow the target. Final question: If you could Supersize anything on the planet, what would you like to have Supersized? (Aside from your pay check.) Jamie: My apartment. **** Okay, for more Oni filled goodness go check out The Sunday Comics, for a new free one page comic every Sunday from various People from throughout their talent roster, then if you want a little more meat check out their collection of free comics which grow periodically, and then go ask these good folk about what else they can recomend. And I'm serious, Jamie needs a hug, or alot of hugs. Somebody show the boy some love... I'd do it but he'd shoot me. 9:17 PM + Jay D'Ici + permalink |