Promoting Exhibit A Press
BB: How much is that your function, as co-publisher—are you out there when something like that comes around spreading the word? Is it a duo thing?

JE: We talk about what we want to do and I do it. We have what we call Exhibit A meetings. We’ll sit down with an agenda and talk about promotion. Say a convention is coming up. What do we want to do at this convention that can get more people to try the comic? We’ll talk about things we can do on the website, banner ads, press releases, that sort of thing.

BB: How much time to you guys spend on non-art related aspects of the company, like production, promotion, traveling to shows, planning shows?

JE: When we first started, we went to a lot of shows because there were a lot more good ones. Diamond Comics Distribution had an annual show where publishers could interact directly with comics retailers. Capital City had a similarl show. We went to Chicago Comic-Con and WonderCon in Oakland a lot of different shows. Now we’re down to about three a year, and one of them is local.

BB: What do you do? You do San Diego, APE?

JE: And Small Press Expo, SPX.

BB: Compare the big one with the small press ones.

JE: At the small press shows like APE [Alternative Press Expo, in San Francisco] and SPX [in Bethesda, MD), the attendees are there for one thing and that’s to buy comics. They pay money to get in the door so they can buy comics. People go to a show like San Diego for lots of different reasons. They’re not all our potential customers. At the small-press events people are all looking for reading material—a very, very different orientation. Of course, attendees at the small press things are often looking for more quirky, handmade-type stuff rather than just a good story. We specialize in a comic that’s for reading. If you like to read a good mystery or horror short story, if you like something with a twist ending, if you like interesting characters, then you’re going to enjoy our kind of book. If you’re looking for something that’s angst ridden or depressing or obscure, our book isn’t for you.

BB: Deni Loubert {also interviewed for the book] talked a lot about that with Renegade and being lost in kind of this middle ground you speak of. She was putting out humor books. She wasn’t going superhero, she wasn’t doing The Comics Journal type books. She just felt lost out there in the middle. There was no real mechanism to drive it.

JE: There’s this term "mainstream," which in comics, means superhero. But in our minds, what we’re doing is mainstream, meaning the mainstream audience out there in the real world—the kind of reader who picks up books for a good read. They’re going to be put off by something where you’re supposed to know the whole history of the characters for the last 50 years and they’re wearing costumes and running around beating up on each other. That’s not something the average reader can relate to. On the other end of the spectrum, the self-indulgent, autobiographical comics don’t have that big of an audience either. You could imagine Supernatural Law as a weekly TV series, like Addams Family, that contrasts mundane ordinary life with one unusual element; that’s what makes it work and makes it funny. Most people can relate to that. When people see the blurb on the cover, "Beware of the Creatures of the Night—They Have Lawyers," they always laugh.

BB: I sense some frustration in terms of being between those two polar opposites. Does Batton talk to you about where he sees growth in this?

JE: We’ve been trying to get into the bookstores. When we first started doing collections of the comic, we did them on newsprint and in the same size as the pamphlets, as far as dimensions, and the books were just four issues bound together. Those were sold in the direct market to the comics people, but they’re not a nice solid book that you would expect to find in a bookstore. We decided that to get into the bookstore marketplace, we needed to do something that was really a handsome book. We did a new format that’s 196 pages on really nice paper stock, with a heavy cover. This allows us to package seven or eight issues for an attractive price.

What we found is that getting into the bookstore market is very, very difficult. That whole book industry is in a big mess right now. Distribution is a mess. Chain store buying is a mess. The distributor we signed with has now filed for bankruptcy, and we don’t expect to see any of the money that our Vampire Brat trade made through them. That distributor specialized in graphic novels, but most other distributors aren’t too hospitable to comics.


Bongo and Radioactive Man
BB: We recently lost Dan DeCarlo, who was one of those guys, who with his work at Archie over the years, appealed to a readership in general—not doing superheroes. I gather he was one of Bat’s idols?

JE: He was definitely an influence. Bat’s character Mavis, the secretary to Wolff and Byrd, is drawn in a little more cartoony style and definitely in a Dan DeCarlo–influenced style. In fact, Bat had Dan do the cover for the third issue of Mavis because he was the guy who inspired her style.

BB: Didn’t Batton work with Dan on an issue of Radioactive Man for Bongo comics?

JE: Writing Radioactive Man is something Bat is having a great time doing. It’s slowing down our ability to get out our issues, but it’s kind of necessary because it helps with the bottom line. It’s is a quarterly comic, so every three months Bat needs to come up with a script for that. It’s something he enjoys doing because Bongo has pretty much given him cart blanche. Bill Morrison and Terry Delegeane said, "This is your comic, whatever you want to do with it, you can." The conceit of Radioactive Man is that each issue is from some different era of comics, so Bat can have fun picking something out and parodying it. Dan drew the third issue, which was a takeoff on Archie’s superhero line of comics in the mid-1960s. He got to throw in things like the spy craze, beach movies, motorcycle gangs, and all sorts of wacky 1960s stuff.

BB: How did Radioactive Man end up coming to him?

JE: Each year in October Bongo puts out a Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror anthology that has stories about The Simpsons by various cartoonists you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with The Simpsons. Bat was invited to write a Treehouse story a few years ago.

BB: Who knew him to do that?

JE: We met Bill Morrison through Mimi Cruz, because she was a friend of his and he’s done signings at her store. He and Bat hit it off, and eventually he was asked to do a story, which ended up being a takeoff in Ray Bradbury’s "The Illustrated Man." Bongo really liked the story, and it actually got nominated for an Eisner for Best Short Story. When it came time for Bongo to expand their line, they called Bat to see if he wanted to write the new Radioactive Man book. At first he wasn’t too interested because he doesn’t consider himself to be a superhero writer. But then he started thinking about all the fun he could have parodying all the various types of comics that have been published over the past fifty years. He just did a takeoff on Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg. So, he had to sit down and read all the issues of American Flagg, which he had fun doing. He even got Howard to draw the cover. (Not many people know that Bat’s first job in comics was as an assistant for Howard.) People seem to like what he’s doing, since Radioactive Man was just nominated for the Eisner for Best Humor Publication.

BB: How does that work? Do you ever get people looking at you strangely because all of a sudden your husband is now getting nominated for an award you run?

JE: Well, anything that Exhibit A publishes is disqualified. So, Supernatural Law and Mavis and our trades cannot be nominated. But if Bat does stuff that’s separate from that, it can be.


The Eisner Awards
BB: This brings up your also being the administrator of the Will Eisner Awards. How did that come about?

JE: In the early 1980s Dave Olbrich had been the administrator of the Jack Kirby Awards, which were based at Fantagraphics. When Olbrich left Fantagraphics, he wanted to keep on administering the awards and there was a dispute over whether they should be kept at Fantagraphics or whether Dave could take them over completely. There was a falling out that pretty much ended the Kirbys. Dave went to Will Eisner and proposed the Eisner Awards, and Kim Thompson and Gary Groth at Fantagraphics approached Harvey Kurtzman to set up the Kurtzman Awards.

BB: When was that, ’87 or ’88?

JE: The first Eisners were in 1988 for publications from 1987. They were presented as a daytime program at the San Diego Con. Olbrich ran them in ’88 and ’89, but 1990 was the problem year. What happened was that everybody kept saying, "When I get the nominating ballot I don’t know what to nominate because I don’t know what came out last year." His solution was to provide a list of everything that had been published in 1989 along with the nominating ballot. The only problem was the list wasn’t complete and it had errors in it. So he sent out a new list and that had errors, too. So Dave sent out a letter to everybody saying, "Because of various problems, we’re not going to have the awards this year."

BB: How deep are you into the con at this point? Are you being paid at all at this point or no?

JE: I wasn’t being paid anything, no. In 1989, I had to kind of pull back because my mother died that year and I had been trying to do too much. In addition to Artists’ Alley and pro liaison, I was back to doing the program book. In 1990 I bowed out of Artists’ Alley and pro liaison and I was just I doing the program book and serving on the awards committee. At the 1990 Con, Denis Kitchen approached me and said, "Will would like to have a meeting with you to talk to you about something." So I had a breakfast with Will, Denis, and Fae from Comic-Con in which they proposed that San Diego Con take over the Eisner Awards and have them under its nonprofit wing and that I be the administrator for the awards. I said, "Okay." (laughter) And the Con said, "Okay."

BB: Still as a volunteer?

JE: No. That’s something where I get paid a flat fee for doing it. It’s not a very big flat fee, but at least it’s something. And I also started getting paid to do the program book, I think that was in 1990, too.

BB: What was it like the year the Eisners got cancelled—disastrous?

JE: No, they still weren’t particularly a big thing. If you went to the awards ceremony there were maybe 150 people in the audience. It was like another program during the day.

BB: When did you get the sense that it was becoming the much bigger deal that it is now?

JE: One of the things I did was change the way the Eisners are done. Both the Harveys and Eisners were done identically for several years. A blank ballot went out to the mailing list of professionals and they had to fill in who they’d like to see nominated—Best writer: put five names here. Best single issue: put five names here. You’d have to sit there and think, "Now what came out this year? What were my favorite things this year?" Then they’d send in their ballot, and all the nominating ballots would be tallied and the top five vote-getters in each category would end up on the final ballot. That’s what got sent out for everyone to vote on.
What I did was, I had noticed that in the publishing industry and in advertising they have judging committees for awards. That’s how the selections are made initially, even if there is a voting. So in 1992, I was in France at the Angouleme festival because it was the year of the Americans. Fae, David Scroggy, and I had been invited to go over there. Denis Kitchen was there. I asked him, "What do you think of the idea of having a judging committee for the Eisners instead of what we’ve been doing?" He said, "Go for it." (laughter)
So, I instituted the judging process, whereby I pick five judges who meet and look at everything that could be eligible in each category and select the items to go on the ballot. This way every book gets considered equally, whether it was something that sold a million copies or 500. The average person who gets a nominating ballot for awards like these has only seen only a handful of books, and those books tend to be the best-sellers. Meanwhile, a lot of really good comics don’t get widely distributed, or you hear about them but never actually see them in a store. My idea was to put everything on an equal playing ground.

BB: How well was that received?

JE: It’s been variously received. The result of this approach has been a ballot with a good variety on it. You get books from the bigger companies, you also get self-published stuff and what might be considered high-brow stuff. The people who are on the "comics as literature" end of the spectrum will say, "How come you have those superhero things on the ballot? All the nominees should be the kinds of things we read." And the people at the superhero end of the spectrum will say—

BB: "You don’t put enough of us on."

JE: Yeah. "Where are my favorites that I buy every month? How come you don’t have Superman on here?" So, each one wants every nominee to be from their favorite niche area rather than represent the full spectrum of comics, which is what you end up with on the Eisner ballot. I’ve had phone calls from people saying, "This is the best-selling title. How can it not be on the ballot?" And I say, "Sales are not going a criteria."

BB: What’s your worst experience in regards to something like that? Do you remember a specific example?

JE: Wizard. Gareb Shamus’s father called me and was just livid that Wizard wasn’t on the ballot, because not only was it the best-selling magazine, but it was color. I said, "the judges’ main criterion was not sales. It was the quality of the publication, the quality of the coverage, the writing, and whether ten years from now, you can look at those issues and feel like they made a contribution to the medium." I became persona non grata with Wizard from that point on. He was going to call the judges up and yell at them. Then he started naming names of people he was going to call, like Beau Smith. "Those aren’t the judges," I said. "You’re thinking of the Eisner Retailer Awards, which is a totally separate program. Those names you named are judges for that award, deciding what stores should be given awards." That stopped him in his tracks, since he’s apparently already put a call in to Beau.

BB: So, you lock all these judges in a hotel for a weekend and force-feed them 80,000 comics?

JE: What I do first is a Call for Entries, which goes out in January to all the publishers with information on how to submit things for the Eisners. The publishers send their books and a cover letter saying what they’re submitting and in what categories. I copy all those cover letters and send them to the judges so they can see what’s being submitted. Even if something is not sent in, we still make a point of including anything that’s worthy of consideration. The judges have a chance to read everything before they come to the judging weekend, but then everything is also available to them that weekend, which is usually in early April.

BB: How many comics in that weekend does one judge read?

JE: It could be hundreds. Often it’s just skimming to refresh their memory of things they’ve already read.

BB: And they assign numeric values to things they think have to be-

JE: We go through a two-step process. I make a master list of everything submitted in every category. The first step is to go through the list and eliminate things that aren’t at the level of the best stuff. They whittle down each category to, at most, 20 items, preferably fewer. We do that on the Saturday of the judging. Then Saturday night, they have access to everything, so that’s the time for each judge to catch up on things they haven’t looked at. Then Sunday is the actual judging. In each category they assign a score from 5 to 1 for each item still on the list—with 5 meaning "This must be on the ballot" and 1 meaning "I’ll be really upset if this is on the ballot." Each judge can’t give out more than five 5’s. After each judge has privately assigned scores, I tally the votes in the category. Usually anything that gets a score of 20 or higher ends up on the ballot. Sometimes if a category is highly competitive, it takes a score of 22 or more to make it.
It’s a very intense weekend, but it’s lots of fun, because all we do is read and talk about comics.

BB: I was going to say, if this was like Hollywood, you would have one of the most political jobs. People would be schmoozing you, people would be screaming at you. What is it like running it in the comic book industry?

JE: Nobody schmoozes me, I’ll tell you that. And so far I’ve never picked somebody to be a judge who has approached me and volunteered to be one. I try to have a cross-section of judges by having one judge who is a comics retailer; one person who represents the distributor ends of things, a journalist or someone who writes about comics or reviews comics, and a person who is a creator, someone who has written, drawn, whatever so they know what’s involved in the creative process. The fifth person has often been from what I call the "fan"’ category. I’ve had people who run other conventions, for instance. At other times it’ll be a person who wears many hats. For instance, I had Tony Isabella one year. He’s been a writer, an editor, and a retailer, and now he’s a columnist. I try to balance it out. I tend to get people who just like quality in general. They don’t fall toward the superhero end. They don’t fall toward the artsy fartsy end. They just like good comics.

BB: How many times over the courses of picking judges have you realized, "God, I shouldn’t have picked that individual."

JE: Just one person.

BB: And we can’t reveal names here, I take it?

JE: No. It’s just a person who didn’t take the commitment seriously. Therefore he didn’t read everything he should have. When it came time for the judging, he’d pick the most expensive thing on the lunch menu just because somebody else was paying for it. When the judges voted, he gave a 3 to everything he hadn’t read,. And he was getting cell phone calls from his business in the middle of the meeting, even though it was the weekend. So we were having to disrupt everything while he was talking to people at his office. It was just obnoxious.

BB: Without naming names, what category did this guy fall into.

JE: The fan.

BB: So, there’s never been a case where you thought, "Well, there’s something diabolical going on here"? Everything’s been good? People have been with the spirit of the-

JE: What’s amazing is that, because comics is an insular business, it’s impossible to get a judge who can come in and not know anybody who did any of the comics. Oftentimes many of the creators are their friends. But once they get in that judging room, they’ll start grading things and say, "I love so-and-so dearly; he’s one of my favorite people and I normally love his work, but I have to give this comic a 2."

BB: I would imagine, like I was saying, in Hollywood people would look upon you as somebody who has way too much power. Now whereas somebody they would look at as somebody they would try to spend a lot of time influencing. But comics just doesn’t have that political mentality, does it?

JE: The kinds of complaints I get—I got a complaint last year from someone who posted online, "Who are these judges you picked? Why aren’t you picking famous people to be your judges? Why don’t you have Frank Miller or Neil Gaiman as a judge? Why don’t you have famous Hollywood personalities?" Of course, the number-one requirement for the judges is that they have the time to read everything. And I doubt if many top comics creators would disqualify their own work in order to be a judge. The other criticism I get is from people who just don’t like the idea of having judges at all. Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics doesn’t like the idea of judges, he likes the idea of the blank ballot, like they do with the Harvey Awards.

BB: So it should just be open to anybody–

JE: Then I’ll hear a criticism, indirectly, from someone who’ll tell me "Comics Company Z was upset that you selected Mr. X as a judge because he bad-mouthed the company in a column once." Meanwhile, that year, Company Z got a ton of nominations." (laughter)

BB: Have you had anybody turn down an award, or throw up some Marlon Brando protest?

JE: The only thing was that Dave Sim said that he didn’t want to be on the ballot.

BB: How far back, when was that?

JE: Many years ago. The judges overruled him and said, "We don’t care if that’s what he says. We think he should be on the ballot, so we’re putting him on it." (laughter)