In its third year, the Minicomics of the Month Club is a great subscription service in which for a small fee you get 12 great minicomics, from 12 different artists, straight to your mail box for a full year. What makes the Minicomics of the Month even better is the that you are exposed to some fantastic creators that you may not be familiar with, each of which have their own unique story to tell.
I had a chat to Andrew Fulton, organiser and participant of the initiative to see how it works and what you can expect from the upcoming round of minicomics.
To begin with, what is your definition of a minicomic? How does it differ from a conventional comic?
To me a minicomic is something small-scale, self-published and hand-made, they’re not necessarily just ‘small’ or ‘badly photocopied’, thought there aren’t any hard and fast rules.
How does the Minicomics of the Month Club work?
It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: each month there’s a new minicomic.
We kick it off with a subscription drive like we are doing now, then we close it up, work out how much money we have to spend each month on staples and stamps then every month for the next year each of the twelve artists takes turns putting together a comic and mailing it out to everyone who subscribed.
This will be the third year the Minicomics of the Month Club will be in existence is there anything that you have learned from the previous to years?
It’s only the second year I’ve been wrangling it – the first year it was Pat Grant who put it together, then it went away for a bit and I decided it is too cool a project not to have around. Things I have actually learned? Promoting things is hard.
Who will be participating in the Minicomics of the Month Club?
Kicking off this season is animator Neil Sanders – he does a lot of these little animated loop things that are just bananas, it will be cool to see what kind of comics he makes. After him we have Mel Stringer, Sarah Catherine Firth, Katie Parrish, Christopher Downes, Soft Science, Rebecca Clements, Wendy Mclean, David C Mahler, Erin Hunting, Ben Hutchings and myself. I think its a pretty sweet mix of people like Ben who have been making comics for forever, and Wendy, who hasn’t really made comics at all before now.
Will these minicomics be available anywhere else, or will they be exclusive to Minicomics of the Month Club?
Life’s too short and comics are way too much hard work to not get them out to whoever wants to read them however you can. I’m happy if they come out to the club first, after that it’s really up to each of the artists involved whether they way to make their thing just for the club or not, not everyone does.
Even though this is Australian based will it be open to those all around the world?
All the artists are living in Australia, but people can subscribe from wherever. For the current season I think there was maybe an 80:20 split? Mostly Americans and Canadians, some went to England, one to Brazil and Korea. It’s pretty neat to know they are going all over, the economics are a little more complicated, but it’s cool.
If people are interested in Minicomics of the Month Club where is the best place to find out more information?
The first thing they can do is pop over to the Minicomics of the Month site, if anyone has any particular questions they can hit me up at hey@smallercomics.com
Whatever they do they should do it before the end of August when we close up subscriptions and start drawing.
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