Getting Published as a Teenage Fan Girl (part 2)

Alright, so in my last post,  we left off where I was discovering one specific art forum as a teenager and making online friends...

A small band of us really bonded and started doing collaborations and visiting each other one-on-one in real life (with parental chaperones tagging along, for those of us in the Teenage Girl category). Eventually, we all made plans to meet up for the first time as a group at the San Diego Comic Convention in 2002. Most of us were still in high school, but one person was in his early 20s and actually had a Real Job with access to a fancy copy machine, and he proposed we make a black and white minicomic to give to our heroes at the convention. We needed a name for our group to put on the comic, so we came up with Pants Press.

(Vera Brosgol (R) and me folding our first Pants Press black and white minicomic in Dylan Meconis' teenage bedroom. 2002)

(ASIDE: I MET COMICS REVOLUTIONARY AND PERSONAL HERO WILL EISNER DURING THAT 2002 TRIP, the creator for whom the prestigious comics industry award is named after)

We didn’t have a table, we were just fans at the convention going out to meet our favorite artists and giving them our little handmade comic just as an excuse to interact with them and give them something back for all the work they’d given us.

After the first couple days, we’d start to approach creators at their tables and then these comics professionals would ask us for our minicomic before we even had a chance to offer it because they’d already heard about us from the other pros we'd given our comic to. They invited us to the dinners and gatherings after the convention, stayed in contact with us online, and started passing us gigs and projects. 

This is how I first got for-reals published in an actual book.

A fledgling webcomic guy in his early 20s wanted to print a black and white minicomic with a bunch of his friends.

He invited one of the Pants Press girls to participate and then she got us all invited (including me!). He kept adding more people until this thing was going to be hundreds of pages and would have to be printed as an actual square bound book, which meant he was gunna have to self-publish it-- which was a risky out-of-pocket expense to take on before crowdfunding and print-on-demand existed. 

He had a normal job, but this passion project was taking up so much of his time that the job told him he either needed to pick it or them, and he decided to take a massive gamble by picking the book. He took a portfolio of the completed pages to a convention, showed them to a guy at Image Comics, and next thing you know he has a book deal with them to print it in full color.

That 20-something year old kid was Kazu Kibuishi* and our book became the first volume in the widely acclaimed Flight anthology series, which launched so many cartoonists’ careers. 

*Who, of course, went on to produce the Amulet series and illustrate the Harry Potter covers, among a variety of other accomplishments.

(Jen Wang, Dylan Meconis, and Vera Brosgol at our Pants Press table at SDCC in 2003)

My teenage friends and I wound up getting paid and published in a famous, successful book series because we made a black and white minicomic to give to our art heroes at a convention for fun. And that was only the first professional book we worked on.

 Pants Press at our table at SDCC in 2003. L-R back row: Jen Wang, Clio Chiang, Vera Brosgol, Bill Mudron. Seated center: Erika Moen (meeeeee. In the fez.) and Dylan Meconis.

We're all still working full time as creatives now, twenty years later. Between the lot of us, we've worked on groundbreaking animated films (Vera: Coraline, Bill: Isle of Dogs, Clio: Raya the Last Dragon) and published beloved graphic novels (Jen: The Prince and the Dressmaker, Vera: Anya's Ghost, Dylan: Queen of the Sea).

Back then... it was just fun. For me, at least. I didn't think I could actually make a career in art. This was just something I did because I loved it and it's how my friends and I socialized with each other. The fact that I got swept up in a Real Published Book felt like a fluke, like a once-in-a-life-time accident.

It was all just fun with my friends.