covers- EGOMANIA no.1

T he first drawing (1) is Picasso's well known portrait of Igor Stravinski. I was trying to evoke thoughts of that in my pencil drawing (2) for the cover of the first issue of Egomania. I made several different versions of it, tracing on a light box (ok, a window) over and over. The three above are all different drawings. Mick Evans worked out the design (3) for the solicitation. By the time of the finished version he was wearying of me redoing things over and over and he stuck the logo over my face in an act of flagrant effrontery (4). I liked the joke, a self-effacing egomania so to speak, and said let's keep that.

Egomania ran for two issues, July and December 2002, and was the last thing from Eddie Campbell Comics, publisher. I figured if I dropped Bacchus and started a new mag that was forty eight pages of all new material, not a single hint or whisper of reprint, and all mine too, including articles and interviews with other people, then I'd be starting afresh with a decent level of orders. But alas the orders came in as though it were just the next issue of Bacchus. The only logical conclusion was that I had worn out my welcome. Maybe it was too esoteric. It was designed to be an actual magazine, with well thought out typesetting and design, and my new comic strip work in it was all in gray half tones (the unfinished History of Humour). In fact there was so much 'design' that I think Mick Evans may have made more out of the project than I did.

The publishing model I had picked up from Dave Sim served me well for a few years, but the situation had changed radically since '95. There were eight or nine distributors then and now there was one. I was placing a lot of hope on the bookstore side of things as an altenative route, but that is fraught with difficulty. Top Shelf had been making inroads there for a few years and it was working well for us when suddenly our bookstore distributor, LPC, went out of business owing us around eighty thousand bucks, 50 of which was my business, mostly for the very successful From Hell. Indeed From Hell had been so good for me that I was able to roll with the punch. But I was getting tired of dealing with all this bankruptcy going on around me. A couple of years later it would be Preney, our printer through all this self-publishing, that would go kablooie (owing twenty thousand bucks), but by that time I had handed From Hell over to Top Shelf. The book shown above was the last thing I had printed there. Once again it was a murky thing. I had put up with all that when it was just 'comic books', but now that I was trying to do an art magazine, I needed better. I tried the second issue with Quebecor with more success. That was a much cleaner and crisper looking mag, but by now I wanted to go to sleep somewhere, or at least just draw pictures, and not have to worry about the calamitous business side of things (note that between yesterday's post and this one I've described four separate bankruptcies). More on that next time.