Earlier this year, when quarantine kicked into full gear here in NYC and the direct-market American comic market hit a hard, then-indefinite pause, James Tynion IV and I got to talking. Well, we were already talking—I’m editing James on The Department of Truth, his upcoming Image Comics series with Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, and Dylan Todd. But James had started a quarantine reading project, and an early dive for him was the full run of Steve Bissette’s horror anthology, Taboo. The series is best known for running the first few chapters of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s monumental From Hell, but the whole, too-short run is a fascinating, often disturbing look at a moment in comics when “mainstream” and “indie” talents met and poured out their most screwed-up horror ideas into the same vessel.
I had copies of Taboo on my own shelf, and sent a quick picture to James, which quickly turned into lamenting the lack of a consistent anthology scene in America, and a series of thought exercises about what sort of book we’d love to read…or to contribute to…or to…self-publish?
Nah…that’s crazy, right? Bissette basically spent the back half of Taboo and dozens of interviews telling his peers that self-publishing a project like that was a fool’s errand. Well, James and I painted on our clown makeup and donned our jesters’ caps.
Introducing…RAZORBLADES: THE HORROR MAGAZINE.
I could talk a lot more about the genesis of the book, but Chris Coplan at AiPT was kind enough to jump on a call with us the day before launch and conduct a pretty extensive interview. In short, we got a bunch of pals, as well as some very talented strangers, to contribute short comics, prose, illustrations, and interviews to a nearly 80-page first issue of what we plan to be a quarterly horror anthology. Most of the stories are standalone, but we have a few serials starting here, and even projects we know creators plan to expand elsewhere.
Part of our mission statement was to give the rising generation of comic creators, especially those who already work in the horror realm, a place to explore the ideas that won’t fit in the typical mainstream molds—the ones that don’t make for tidy elevator pitches, or fit a marketable five-issue structure. Every Razorblades contributor is paid before the issue goes on sale, and fully owns all creative rights to what they create in our pages.
The response to our launch was, frankly, overwhelming. We were covered in places like The Hollywood Reporter, and we sold out of our limited print edition of 500 copies in under an hour. James and I envisioned Razorblades as a primarily digital product, and have the first issue for sale at name-your-own-price, to ensure everyone can get a taste. The print version was a late addition, half to test the waters on demand and half because James and I just wanted something we could hold in our hands and share with contributors. What we’re learning is that demand for print may well match or exceed demand for digital, even when the digital copy can be yours, legally, for zero dollars. We’re exploring options now on how to address this, and are thinking hard about plans for future issues.
James is justifiably having a fantastic year, between Batman and books like Something is Killing the Children and Wynd; and I’ve got experience in everything from comics press to traditional publishing houses to writing shorts in Kickstarter anthologies, but nothing fully prepares you for creating and launching your own self-published project. We are learning as we go, and now we’re learning in public. It’s flattering, humbling, terrifying, and plenty of other -ings.
But mostly…exciting. James and I wanted to see a cool, scary, modern horror anthology with top-notch talent, so we sat down and made one. Just over 24 hours later, it’s pretty clear lots of other people are just as excited about that prospect as we were a few months ago when we started dreaming it up. Now we get to figure out how to keep doing it. We’re just getting started.
I’ll post again soon, and talk more about my own short in the first issue, illustrated by the amazing Michael Dialynas and lettered by my good friend Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, but I’m going to cut this one off so I can peel my eyes off of a screen for the first time in over a day. For now, please go check out Razorblades: The Horror Magazine #1, which features a perfectly creepy cover by Trevor Henderson, and pay whatever you think is fair for the horrors we’ve assembled.