Digging into Archaia Pt. 1

Archaia Studios Press is enjoying a banner year even though it's only March. David Petersen's "Mouse Guard" issue #1 has sold out its initial 8,000-copy print run, and ASP plans a second printing of issue #1 to hit shelves with issue #2. On the critical front, the hardcover edition of "The Lone and Level Sands" has garnered nominations for the Glyph Award (Best Reprint Publication) and the Howard E. Day Memorial Prize. All of this success comes after an expansion in 2005 into publishing other creator owned properties.

With three major cons behind us, Bags & Boards takes a moment to sit down with ASP founder Mark Smylie and Aki Liao to discuss their books, the biz and the future for ASP.

Bags & Boards: Archaia Studios Press ends 2005 by getting "The Lone and Level Sands" on shelves.  Then ASP starts off the New Year with two new titles, Mouse Guard and Robotika, and more on the way.  How long has ASP had this expansion in the works?

Aki Liao: Mark and I initially talked about working together and expanding the line of Archaia Studios Press offerings in early 2005.

Mark Smylie: Well, it might have been even a year or two before that when we first started talking about it, but early 2005 saw our first official expansion talks with Alex Sheikman’s submission of Robotika. We didn’t want to proceed with the expansion idea until we were sure we had at least one solid book to base it on, and Alex’s book was the one that made us say, "Hey, maybe we can do this." And as we were working on landing Robotika, David [Petersen] showed us Mouse Guard, and I think we absolutely knew that the expansion would work.

BB: What other titles does ASP plan to introduce in 2006?

AL: As announced, we’re looking forward to working with Chris Moeller on the next installment of his Iron Empires series, entitled "Blood und Iron," slated for Fall/Winter 2006. Peter Bergting (The Portent) has been attached to do the artwork. And we’re in very preliminary talks to launch at least one other project in 2006. In general, we’re looking at adding a title once a quarter

MS: We hope to have our late 2006 and early 2007 projects in place by the summer convention season to give us good promotion time. In the meantime, the next Artesia limited series, Artesia Besieged, will begin in June…finally!

BB: Is ASP still looking for more creators to collaborate with in the near future?

MS: Yup.

AL: As we’ve stated, ASP is interested in publishing creator-owned comic books in the fantasy, horror, pulp noir, and science fiction genres that contain idiosyncratic and atypical writing and art. We’ve been very fortunate to be working with such a wonderfully talented and easy-to-work-with group of individuals, producing really fantastic work. What we’re also careful about is not just to publish comics for the sake of publishing comics. So a lot of it will depend on what we come across in the submissions.

BB: How did you find David Petersen (The Mouse Guard) and Alex Sheikman (Robotika)?

AL: First and foremost, it is clear that Mark Smylie is the consummate professional and his reputation as an even-keeled individual precedes us.

MS: Huh?

AL: I’m fairly certain folks are working with us because of him. Alex’s Robotika was pretty much a cold submission. David Petersen was an introduction through a mutual friend, Bill Baker. David also credits Mark’s helpful and insightful portfolio review of his work at a Wizard Chicago Con some years earlier as leaving a lasting and positive impression.

MS: Well, you’ll have to check with David about that. But yeah, I’d met David at Chicago several years ago. Then at San Diego Comic-Con last year, Bill had told him that I was looking for new submissions. I think I pretty much offered to publish Mouse Guard on the spot.

BB: Have their titles met your expectations in terms of creativity, audience demand and critical response?

AL: We’re quite proud of all of our titles. We are very pleased with results of Mouse Guard #1 and #2. Fans and retailers alike have been very positive about the series. I hope the momentum will continue to build throughout the course of the series. David is already hinting at another Mouse Guard series after this initial 6-issue run is completed. Alex’s Robotika has done fairly well considering the odds of getting a new title to market. There’s a strong following already and hopefully this is only the beginning. Alex is quite a talent, and I look forward to the coming issues. Critical response to all of our titles has been really positive. Even our historical fiction hardcover graphic novel, The Lone and Levels Sands (by A. David Lewis, MpMann and Jennifer Rodgers) has been getting high marks. It’s terrific that all of our books including the mainstay, Artesia, are critically acclaimed.

MS: The Lone and Level Sands has already been nominated for a few awards—the original black-and-white edition is short-listed for the Howard Day Prize, it’s up for a Glyph Award for Best Reprint Publication, and it just got nominated for Best Graphic Novel of 2005 in ForeWord Magazine’s annual Book of the Year Awards—so we hope that the book continues to attract the kind of favorable critical attention that it has so far, and that it’s a harbinger of things to come for our other titles as well. And the complete sell-out of Mouse Guard #1 in less than a week (even though we had printed over 2,000 copies over initial orders) was a pleasant, though not totally unexpected, surprise; Mouse Guard in particular seems to appeal to a wide demographic, far wider than Artesia or Robotika, so we thought there might be a strong response from retailers and readers to David’s book.

BB: What’s the common theme that runs through ASP projects?

AL: Great art and storytelling. Our creators and artists have been terrific to work with. We’ve been really lucky. All of them are very supportive of each other, which is wonderful to see as well.

MS: I also hope that the books we’re publishing are all very personal works, true labors of love. For example, Alex’s Robotika has gotten some critical flack over his decision to use a vertical font for one of the characters, deliberately making it somewhat difficult to read what she’s saying. But it’s that kind of risk-taking and personal artistic and design creativity that we’re looking for. I think we hope our books won’t look like cookie-cutter factory product, but instead will look like the intense expressions of stubborn individualists. [laughing] Though come to think of it, there’s already been some talk of having an ‘annotated’ or ‘translated’ collection of Robotika so people can understand what Cherokee Geisha is saying…

BB: How has the RPG Artesia: Adventures in the Known World been received by Artesia fans and the general RPG audience?

MS: It’s still early on that so far. The reviews and feedback from people that have picked it up have been great, but the gaming market and the comics market are two different beasts and in effect I have to introduce myself and ASP as a gaming publisher to a new market almost completely from scratch. It also took way too long to finish (it’s 352 pages) so Artesia’s absence from the store shelves has probably had an effect as well.

BB: Aside from you own titles, what other books excite you?

AL: I’m a closet superhero guy at heart. As I’m fairly new to all of this, I’ve been going through quite the education with Mark handing me stuff to read. Anything from the classics—100 Bullets, Ghost in the Machine to Arvid Nelson’s Rex Mundi and Sean Wang’s Runners to new stuff. I recently picked up DMZ, Queen & Country, Fables, GunCandy, Roach, Dark Mists. So a variety of stuff. I love going over to Midtown Comics in NY and browsing the new releases shelves.

MS: [laughing] I, on the other hand, hate superheroes. 100 Bullets and Hellboy are probably the most mainstream books I read. Normally I tend to gravitate more towards fantasy and science fiction—books like Finder, Age of Bronze, Thieves & Kings, Rex Mundi—and books that have art that intrigues me—painted European books like Raptors from NBM, or Japanese manga by Shirow or Miyazaki. I guess I read books I’d like to publish.

Join us as we continue the discussion with Alex Sheikman and discuss his "Robotika" series in "Digging into Archaia Pt. 2."