A DECADE OF PVP III: DORK STORM AND IMAGE

[MattBrady]

by Zack Smith

Click here for Part One, and here for Part Two.

Our look back at PvP continues with creator Scott Kurtz offering his reminiscences on 10 years of snarky humor, good-hearted trolls, and the occasional panda attack. In this installment, Kurtz looks back at his time doing PvP as a comic through Dork Storm Press, and the events that led to his taking the book to its current publisher, Image Comics.

Newsarama: Now, the next stage of the strip’s history is the Dork Storm books you did. How did that era begin?

Scott Kurtz: That started right up with UGO kind of dying. Right around the dot-com bust, but right before the bust, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who I had just met and we were talking about UGO and all these other content web sites. He was suggesting that I set up some other strips on my site under the UGO banner and get as much money as I could from UGO while it lasted, and I was like, “Wait, it’s not going to last forever?”

And he said, “No, it’s not. None of these sites are making money, and sooner or later the venture capitalists are going to figure this out, and it’s all going to go under. But you’re going to be fine, because you have something that you can make. You’re not a web site about EverQuest that no one needs – you’re about entertainment.”

I panicked. I decided the best thing to do was get as many revenue streams coming in as I could, because if UGO went away, then I’d have no money coming in. So, there was still time to get other revenue sources in, and I decided to do comic books of the strips. I talked to Brandon Peterson, who at the time was working for Marvel and Top Cow, and he said, “You should go to Image.” This was 2001. I said, “Image? They wouldn’t be interested. They’re superheroes.” He said, “No, no, no. You’d be surprised. Image is really looking for interesting stuff. They’re not just superheroes. They’d love your stuff.”

And I told Brandon, “I don’t think PvP is ready.” My fear was that if I took PvP to Image, and it didn’t work, because PvP wasn’t ready yet, then I would blow my shot. And you only get one shot with Image! If the book does poorly, you can’t come back in four years after you’ve figured it out and gotten better and say, “Well, I’m going to do PvP again through Image,” because the retailers will say, “I bought this from Image already and it did horribly. I’m not going to buy it again.”

And I wanted to learn the business. I wanted to learn how it worked, and how Diamond worked, and how comics work. So I figured I’d go through a smaller publisher and self-publisher. You know, in the back of the book, you’re safer, and it’s okay if you screw up, because it’s not as visible a screw-up.

So I was looking for a smaller publisher – I think I looked at Fantagraphics, and at Top Shelf, and I think at Oni, who at the time who were doing the Clerks books. But a friend of mine recommended Dork Storm Press, which was Aaron (Williams) and John (Kovalic). I was familiar with it, because I read Dragon magazine and all that, and I thought, “This is great, because it’s geek-centered, and they’re the right side, and they seem to be doing this all themselves and they can teach me, so I can learn about self-publishing from them and do it all on my own at the same time.”

I called up John, and said, “Would you be interested in PvP joining Dork Storm Press?” And he said, “Well, there is no Dork Storm Press, it’s just me doing my thing and Aaron doing his thing, and we just kind of split the costs.” I said, “That’s perfect. That’s just what I’m looking for!” And he said, “This is great, because we’re looking to get a business manager, and if there’s three of us, we could afford the cost.”

And so we all met in St. Louis, at a restaurant. It was me and John and Aaron and Aaron’s wife Kristi. We all met there and talked it out, that we would split the cost of the business manager, who would look for advertising possibilities for our book, and get ads in there. The advantage of Dork Storm Press was that John had great connections in the gaming shops, not comics, but gaming shops, which don’t usually sell comics. But because John’s book was about gaming, they bought it in those shops, and PvP was perfect for that.

And the numbers for PvP at the time were great for a self-published book, because the gaming shops were like, “Well, you’re a friend of John’s, we’ll give it a shot.” It did really great in those stores. That’s my one regret about going to Image, that the gaming stores don’t really like ordering through Diamond. I think PvP suffers from that, because it’s hard for those stores to get it in their shops.

Anyway, yeah! That’s how I got to Dork Storm Press. And we agreed to split the costs three ways at the conventions, for booths and stuff like that. There you go.

NRAMA: On a storytelling level, what was it like getting to do PvP as an extended sequential narrative?

SK: Well, it was…horrible.

I was doing the script seven days a week, and now I was trying to do this, and it never occurred to me to just reprint the strips in the book! I figured the only people buying it were people who already read it online, and they wouldn’t buy it if it didn’t have any stuff in it. So I would have to do 30 strips a month, plus 22 pages of a book a month, and it wasn’t working out. The book was always late, and it just never occurred to me to put some strips in there…I think I would put some strips in the back of it, and I was just terrified that people would complain.

But it never occurred to me that there were two separate audiences – those who were reading it online, and those who found it in the comics shop, and they obviously weren’t mixing. It wasn’t until my first year or my second year at Image that we figured out they were two different audiences…at least they were then, I’m not sure it’s the case any more.

So yeah, it was very difficult. I would love to go back and do that stuff again, because I know my fans really enjoyed that format, but it was tough.

NRAMA: After six issues at Dork Storm, you moved on to Image. What made decide to go to Image, and why did you decide to do just strip collections at this point?

SK: That was all Frank Cho. I had met Frank in 2001 at San Diego, and he saw the strip and we started talking, and he was doing Liberty Meadows, which he had just moved over to Image. He was putting out the book side-stitched, where the stapling was on the wrong side of the book, and I think Jim Krueger had just started doing widescreen comics for Marvel and stuff. Frank really wanted to do that with his book, and he encouraged me to do the same with mine and come over to Image.

At that time, things were kind of souring at Dork Storm. We were having trouble with different people, different companies that were vendors of ours, but they were all relationships that Kovalic had, and they were all friends of his.

John and I had some disagreements, where I was, “Look, I want to fire our warehousing people because they’re not keeping track of my inventory and not getting my books out, and I don’t like the way they’re doing business.” Then John would hem and haw and say, “Well, you know, he’s a friend of mine, and he’s down on his luck, and I’m not going to bail on him now, and so…” I was getting fed up.

PvP was really taking off, and it was doing well, and I think at cons, John was kind of used to being the star. Our business manager actually warned us that John was going to be a bit of a diva at cons, and that we should try not to take the spotlight away from him, because she had known him for a while.

Aaron is a very timid guy. He’s very talented, very self-deprecating, but he does not have that thing in him that lets him self-promote. He’s…I don’t know, I think Aaron feels like if you self-promote, you’re bragging. And you have to do that, you have to push yourself and promote yourself. Otherwise, you won’t advance.

So here you have this very strong personality in John, who was nothing but self-promotion and self-gratification, and he would show up at the booth and set up and take up a big portion, because he had a lot of product…and then he’d get up - he’d leave and you’d never see him. He had meetings, tons and tons of meetings with everyone. Meetings with game companies, other publishers, other creators, and once in a while, he would come by the booth and pick up something, but we were there selling all of his stuff! And I got fed up with it.

We went to this trade show called “Gamma,” in Las Vegas. It was a trade show for the gaming industry, and I didn’t want to go, because it was a huge expense, and you don’t sell anything, it’s just to schmooze. And our business manager said, “No, you have to go, you will make so many contacts. You will not walk out of there without a game, or a new product, or some new marketing idea. It’ll be good. It’ll be worth the expense.”

So we went and it…it was like I was there to be a booth monkey. We sat there at the booth, John was gone, and he’d come back every once in a while and go, “Great news! I just talked to these people about making a toy, or making a game…” and we’d go, “Great! Any interest in our stuff?” And he’d go, “Well, let’s see how the Dork Tower stuff does, we’ll see if there’s any interest…”

I said, “This is retarded. This is dumb.” And I just got up and went around and started talking to people. And he was right. I’d talk to people and (explain what I did), and how I thought it would be good for a game, and they’d go, “Yeah! We’re doing a Dork Tower game. If it does really well, we’ll consider it.”

And that’s when I realized I just had to get out of the gaming industry. I had to put more into comics. It was always going to be that John was out there first, so what was the point?

So there was a lot of strain and stress between the three of us, I would say. And around that time, I had met Frank Cho in San Diego, and we got to talking, and he said, “Look, we should do a comic strip together.” This was before Frank got all this Marvel work. He said, “Come to Image, and PvP will shoot off like a rocket. It’ll build up your popularity some, and get you out of the gaming market. And when we do our strip together, it’ll really be great, because you’ll have built your popularity up, and Liberty Meadows will have built its popularity up.”

I said, “Ah, okay, sure! I’ll come on over to Image.” And he was like, “Ah, I’ll talk to them.” So, yeah! It was like a month later that Image called me and said, “We definitely want to offer you a contract.” I think it was also because Wizard had just done an article on me, a two-page article, and it was after that that Jim Valentino and Eric Stephenson called me and offered me the contract.

So I accepted it immediately. I was actually at Aaron’s wedding in Kansas City when we got the call at like one in the morning that they were going to offer us the contract. Frank had a hard time tracking me down, and when we got back from the wedding, I saw on my cell phone that as I’d left the hotel, he’d left a message saying he was going to call me.

So I got into Image because of Frank Cho, yeah. He totally set that up. He really believed in the strip, and he really believed in me, and he called up Image, and they saw it and they really liked it.

I think at that point I had submitted to them already, and they had respectively declined, too. But between Frank and the Wizard article…you know how it is, Wizard says you’re awesome and everyone assumes you’re awesome. (laughs)

Next: PvP finds its home at Image, and Kurtz reflects on life 10 years later.

[ticknart]

Thank you!

[AbacusComics]

Dork Tower? Never heard of it...

[wildcard9]

Ah, finally, the story behind why PvP quit Dork Storm. This interview included a lot of details I had not heard before. The way I had heard it previously, Scott got a call from Image and jumped at it, leaving Dork Storm in the lurch. Instead, there were a lot of behind the scenes reasons for the move, which sounds like would have happened anyways (if not to Image then to someone else). Nice to finally hear the whole story instead of just rumors that painted Scott in a bad light.