Marketing—What Works Now (for me, anyway)

Having moved my business to Portland from Oakland some 11 months back, I was faced with the task of attracting some new clients. Granted, I brought my core clientele with me, but any business needs to continuously market itself, indeed it is essential to recreate a business daily to survive.

Wanting to create a high profile for my custom screen printing shop in my new location, I opted for a display ad contract with the leading local “Alternative Newsweekly”, Willamette Week. I know from experience that this type of advertising is expensive, and it is unrealistic to expect a dollar for dollar return on it, but I was confident that it would successfully present my new business name, logo and selling proposition to the local market.

I was not disappointed on any count; it was expensive. While I attracted several clients from my 36 ad campaign, they have yet to pay for the ads (but they might; one new account attracted by the ad shows great promise). I am satisfied that slamming my logo and sales pitch at the local alt weekly readership for 36 of the last 48 weeks has indeed had the desired effect: Readers of Willamette Week undoubtedly know that Manx Media means quality custom T-shirt printing!

Next, I began sloggin’ away at an ambitious direct mail campaign within a couple months of getting to Portland. This is labor intensive, detail oriented work: Developing mailing lists of prospective customers and creating a series of postcards to mail to the lists, constantly updating and adding new lists while honing my marketing message. Direct mail is a big effort to properly execute, but over the years, these postcard mailings have developed into my number one tool (next to recommendations of course) for attracting new accounts. I should mention it always works best when I develop my own lists, rather than with a list purchased from a broker.

Once I had my display ad and direct mail campaigns under way, something amazing and wonderful happened—I discovered Google Ad Words. Focusing on the Portland metro area, using this online advertising service brings me quote requests from people who have searched for exactly what I am selling. And I only pay for people who actually click through to my web site. The unique tools offered by Google allow me to set my budget where I need it to be.

It is essential that my site very clearly states my selling proposition, and directs the potential client to email me for a quote, but here is the bottom line: It bloodly well works like a charm!

As the world becomes inundated with more and more advertising messages, I have noticed that direct mail returns less of a response over time. Well, I’m here to tell you that for a given budget, Google Ad Words has outperformed direct mail, and display advertising, by a ratio of at least ten to one. No lie.

It is worth noting that Yahoo and Microsoft are both nipping at Google’s heels to provide this type of focused advertising, so keep an eye on those companies offerings.

So here I am, busy as hell with tons of work. I went to Google the other day and turned my campaign off, for the time being. Whoa! Who knew? I suppose I could power up and add capacity to my business and expand and all that horseshit, but honestly, I’d rather smoke a fatty and draw some comics!

Read This Before You Give Up

What defines success as an artist? Money? Groupies? Perhaps fancy cars, vacations, houses, etc.? Nope, not even close, none of the above.

From the start, I’ve always paid myself generously in the commodity that an artist values above all others: Time. Plain and simple, success as an artist is defined as ample time to make art.

Yes, we are assuming that you have a roof over your head, and food to eat. Whatever scrambling you have to do to make that happen, do it as efficiently as possible with no waste—no wasted time that is!

What does an artist do? Make art. An artist, I believe, should be less concerned with their end product, and more concerned with process. Engage in the process, and you improve technically, you get real darn good at your craft. Engage in the process, and your muse finds a way to sneak boatloads of good ideas in the back door in the dead of the night. And what does a body need in plentiful supply to engage in the process of making art? Time!

The art life is not about ending up with pretty pictures. Or sculptures, films, songs, drawings, comics, novels, whatever. It’s about the process of creating all that stuff; the journey itself, the illumination, the epiphanies encountered along the way are the true rewards.

Clean Energy/Clean Tech and the Future

Recently I have become obsessed with the Clean Energy and Clean Tech fields for the simple reason that I have kids; being a parent tends to make a guy want the earth to thrive and the human race to survive.

A Scottish scientist (what the hell was that dudes name?!) was in the news a couple months back, predicting that within 100 years, the only remaining habitable areas of space ship earth will be the artic region. With rising temperatures, melting polar ice, desertification of much of the planet, and rising sea levels, this guy thinks we will have billions of people dying off, with just a few breeding couples left, as we’ve made the earth sick with all the fossil fuels etc.

I’m sure there are varying opinions on how bad Global Warming is now, and how fast it will get worse, but only greedy jerks like Bush/Cheney and friends can still pretend it ain’t for real.
I hope the aforementioned Scottish scientist is just a wee bit off on his scheduling of the extinction of 99% of humanity!

In any case, there have always been lots of great arguments for Clean Energy and Clean Tech, in terms of what is good for all the creatures on the planet, not to mention Mother Earth herself! Up until recently, “it’s good for business” hasn’t been one of the arguments for Clean Energy and Clean Tech, quite the opposite.

Guess what? That has changed, big time! It appears that investors, venture capitalists and other money oriented types see big opportunities in all this Green & Clean stuff!

Here is a link to an article that posits, among other things, that Clean Tech/Clean Energy investment may offer 5-10 year compound annual revenue growth rates as high as 35%:

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=42742

I’ve blogged plenty about self-employment, and naturally I stand by every word. But if self-employment ain’t your thang, especially if you are young, I strongly urge you to consider Clean Energy and Clean Tech as great fields to pursue. Solar, Wind power and Fuel Cell tech are especially promising, but really are only the tip of the iceberg; these and related industries are growing fast!
As for the die hard self-employment personalities, of which I am one, there has to be ways to be an independent contractor within these new industries.

In any case, I recommend Googling these terms:

Clean Energy

Clean Tech

Bounce around the web looking at stuff you find there. You may find not only your future, but the future (hopefully!) of all of us.

Senator Russ Feingold has Nuggets

Yes, there is a Democrat in the Senate with balls: Russ Feingold.

On March 13, Senator Feingold said that President Bush should be censured. Feingold wants Bush to be held accountable for breaking the law, arguing that Bush's unauthorized domestic wiretapping is illegal.

Here is a link to the text of the speech calling for censure.

I heard a broadcast of the speech on Democracy Now, and it made my day. It's about time the Bush/Cheney creep machine gets taken to task for their deceitful, reprehensible ways.

Goddamn Economic Outlook

So am I crazy, or has Bush pretty much completely messed up the economy? Let’s face it, the tax cuts were a give away to the rich, and the Bush/Cheney (failed, illegal & immoral) war is driving the deficit over the cliff. The dollar is taking a serious pounding, real serious. The Chinese lend us money to buy more stuff from them.

This, my friends, has bankruptcy written all over it. Looks like the United States of America has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy by the moronic moves of the Bush / Cheney junta. The only thing I can see propping up the U.S. economy for awhile longer is the possibility that the Chinese will keep buying U.S. treasury bonds, and lending us money to buy more stuff from them, because they never had such a good customer!

Meanwhile, author Barbara Ehrenreich has published Bait and Switch, the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. Ehrenreich illuminates the current corporate thinking about it’s white collar employees, as expendable liabilities. Time was, a company was only considered as good as it’s staff, but no more. Here I quote from promo copy for the book from Ehrenreich’s web site:

“Today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus” employees -- plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers -- and little security even for those who have jobs.”

All the preceding is a preamble to today’s screed on the Goddamn Economic Outlook. I hope for your sake you are not in the market for a white-collar job! If you are, perhaps you should avoid Ehrenreich’s book! No, go ahead and read it, at least you will know to trust your own counsel in a job search, rather than hire some phony high priced asshole “career coach” to make you feel shitty about yourself for doing things like engaging in critical thinking (they prefer you embrace herd mentality, so it’s easier to take the stick up your ass a corporate job gives you when you are hired).

As usual, my advice would be to carve out a niche working for yourself, doing work that is close to your heart. I’ve written a lot about self employment in this blog, I’ll just send you digging through the archives for my nuts & bolts advice on working for yourself, and how to get started.
But what if you prefer to work a regular job? The core of my advice is the same, take a hard, honest look inside your head and heart, and identify what you love to do. Track down work related to the best impulses of your soul (If you like to smoke crack, on the other hand, you may want to detox first, you probably won’t be getting paid for that. On the other hand, if jacking off is your thing, you may indeed be able to find work there).

It is necessary at this point for all of us to think, where are we going to be in three, five, ten, twenty years? Where will the earth be? Where will the human race be? It’s time to take Thoreau’s advice to advance in the direction of our dreams, trusting that more open and liberal laws governing events will emerge as we embrace our faith in our own best selves. Okay, so I didn’t quote verbatim, but trust me, there is indeed a fine passage echoing those very sentiments in Walden.

I advocate pursuing careers in Alternative Energy, perhaps the most promising field. Wind, Solar, Hydrogen, Efficiency, there will be a growing mega-industry there. Hell, I frankly believe the hope for the human race will be in clean energy technology that is so spectacular, so unprecedented that we don’t even know what it is yet; some genius kid out there is already brainstorming on it.

There will be lots of careers in Clean Energy much sooner than we now imagine. Remember, even that knuckle-head Bush talked about Alternative Energy in his State of the Union Address.

Whatever else happens, the price of oil will continue to rise as the demand increases. Meanwhile the supply will be shrinking. I am confident that Clean Energy will be cheaper than oil in a relative blink of the eye. Don’t buy this crap that we need to return to building nuclear power plants either—that’s just another old school, big money crock of shit that leads down a dead end alley. Frankly, people like Bush and his gang of big money/big oil goons will cease to matter at the point when, due to it’s poor cost/benefit ratio, no one wants to consume oil anymore! Clean Energy will have evolved technically and marketwise to the point where the oil greed creeps will be out of business.

We will need engineers and overtly smart techies for sure, but we’ll also need business innovators, sales people, mechanics, and the whole range of support staff. Of course, visioning the future isn’t just based on one industry; farming and food production will no longer be based on petrochemical fertilizers, you can bet your behind on that. The demand for organic food is already huge and growing fast. As with Clean Energy, there will be technology and market models we can’t know, because they have not been envisioned yet. Trust you heart, your head, and your intuition. Move confidently forward in the direction of your dreams, towards your best self. Isn’t life too damn short to do anything else?

Media is changing too. Hey, that’s what I’m doing here and now, standing up shouting like a maniac from a new kind of soap-box! Now, if I could only get free burritos for mouthing off like this…

The Zero Overhead Model

The following is an exerpt from one of my original posts to Self-Employment for Bohemians. I have edited it and reposted this piece, as it truly gets at the heart of the matter of successful Self Employment.

I want to tell you about my foolproof concept for starting your own business—it’s called the Zero Overhead Model. The idea is that your clients are going to finance your business for you! I use my own business model here for a couple of darn good reasons. First, it’s a business I know well. I’m qualified to hold forth on the business of wholesale custom screen-printing. Second, my business is built around both a service (custom screen-printing) and a commodity (t-shirts/apparel). I believe that the Zero Overhead Model can work for both a service based or a commodity based business.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell. Your potential client comes in to order 100 t-shirts imprinted with their logo. I quote a price on the job and they agree to it. I write up the order, detailing the particulars. The client signs the order form, acknowledging their agreement to the deal. Let’s say that the total on the job is $700.00. I tell the client that I require a 50% down payment to produce the job, with the balance due upon delivery. With costs of about $250.00 total to produce the job, not only have I enlisted my client to finance production of the job, but I’ve gotten a little pocket money up front in the deal.

When I started producing custom screen printing jobs as an undergraduate, it didn’t take me long to figure out that my customers were also going to be my financiers. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

This little schema does bring up some obvious questions. For example, why the heck is any potential client going to trust you with the aforementioned $350.00 downpayment? Based on what do they trust you? Okay, I admit it’s a con game! A confidence game, that is to say. When you meet a prospective client, you are projecting confidence in your ability to deliver the goods. Your appearance and demeanor project professionalism. If you are indeed in the t-shirt game, you show them samples. They are welcome to walk if they see red warning flags in the course of your meeting. I’m a proponent of the soft sell; as such, I am very comfortable with a perspective client who decides not to place an order at any particular meeting. My attitude is, I’m not so much gunning to close a sale no matter what, rather I’m helping the client fulfill there need for some quantity of screen printed t-shirts. If the price is too dear for them, or if we aren’t a good fit to do business, I’m quite happy with that.

Another question: What about production equipment? What about samples? What about office or production space? Phones? Computers? Etc.? Well, when you are starting out, you just need to improvise. You (hopefully) have a roof over your head, whether it’s your place, your parents house, a sublet garage (ideal!), a dorm room, or even if you are couch surfing.

Work with what you have and build from there. If you can borrow a friend or family member’s phone and/or computer for even an hour a day, that may be enough to contact initial clients and produce that first job. I’ll dust off an anecdote as an example. I began freelancing t-shirt and illustration jobs while still an undergraduate at Umass, printing jobs in my dorm lounge. I took off for the west coast half a year after taking my degree. After several months of traveling, I found myself in Eugene, Oregon. I spent the little money I had securing an apartment. I placed some ads in the local university newspaper advertising my screen-printing services, then I copied up a couple hundred flyers and papered the phone poles in the college neighborhood with them. I was down to about eight bucks when the first job came in (phew!).

It was a small job, which would take only about $30 bucks in supplies to produce… yet somehow I had neglected to hit up the client for a down payment. Oops! I needed a can of ink, four blank t-shirts, a squeegee, a yard of synthetic silk and a wooden frame. What to do… I borrowed the money from my girlfriend! From there I sold more jobs, just scraping by, until a bounty of dorm, frat and music festival gigs rained down on me in the Oregon spring.

You do not want to always ask friends or family to bail you out. And if you do borrow money from them, be sure to make it your first priority to pay them back. But you will rely on your network of friends, family and colleagues again and again. Community is a very good thing! When someone comes to you for help, gladly give it to them. (Unless they are a serial leech, in which case giving them a kick in the ass is the best favor you can do them… ).

The Zero Overhead Model may be the only way to fly for BoHo entrepreneurs, but believe me they aren’t the only ones. Look at a guy like George W. Bush. Is that guy a self-made business man? Hell no! Everything that guy ever owned was procured with sweetheart loans from his daddy’s fat-cat friends and stuff like that. Do you think the super rich ever buy anything with their own money? NO! They get it with O.P.M. (other people’s money). OKAY! That’s it for the Zero Overhead thing for now. I’m getting off track talking about these darn oligarchs and plutocrats.

Bitter Old Cynic Thinks He's Funny

Time to define today's archetypes of the hip fringe...

Hipster: Semi-employed twenty-something hapless formless dweeb in second-hand clothes with no girlfriend, no money, a My Space page, and a starter drug/alcohol habit.

Handy Man: Middle-aged former hipster, failed artist/drunk on his way to a liver transplant, who charges too much for third-rate light construction.

Self-Employed Bohemian: The balding bitter cynic writing this piece.

Feel free to add your own slap-happy definitions!

Ain’t it Great to be Broke?

When I started out as a self-employed artist/screen printer, I was often scrambling to sell enough work to make ends meet. As I worked hard to build my reputation and my clientele, I saw many cycles of feast or famine. I was flush when a fistful of orders came my way, but things could get pretty tight if the flow of work slowed.

Through some miracle, not only did I manage to pay my bills, but I also managed to avoid having a regular job (I did take a detour in the middle of the Eighties, purposefully working at regular full time jobs for about a year and a half to see how it felt—and I fucking hated every minute of it!).

Interestingly, I was rarely unhappy on the occasions when my funds dwindled to near nothing. Once I penned a cartoon about how content I was when my whole estate consisted of clean laundry and two beers. What else could I possible want? Let’s face it, the two beer buzz is the best anyhow, no sense chasing that mild euphoria further to a sure hangover.

Being self-employed and running out of work and money brings on a peculiar active state of mind in me. It’s rather akin to sitting on a hot stove—you better do something fast! It is a state of affairs that always brings on a brainstorm, a surplus of ideas about how to pump up the volume (and bring in the orders) in my self-employed life.

I’d get a burst of energy and be on the phone happily cold calling prospective clients and enjoying it—after all, wasn’t I going to help them get a really swell bunch of t-shirts for a very reasonable price? Yup, you can actually enjoy selling if you believe in the value of what your hawking.

Other times, I’d design some postcard, ad or flyer that was gonna sweep the ocean and put me on easy street. I’d print up hundreds of flyers and wall-paper the town with them, paving my way to the Zona Dorado.

Somehow or other, it usually worked. I’d earn myself a decent stake of cash to tide me over. Being myself, I’d often blow my gains publishing comics books which were harder to sell than ice to Eskimos, but that’s another story.

Getting Started in Self Employment

With the new year I feel compelled to return to my central subject: Self-Employment for Bohemians.

How does the creative, self-directed person start down the path of self-employment? I've written about my own process of falling into the life--in fact these writings are buried deep in the archives of this very blog. I'd like to address the question of getting started in the general sense, maybe put out some information that will be helpful to souls ready to take the plunge.

Simply put, there is a self-selection process involved. How the hell else are you going to end up working for yourself?! But really, let's assume we have a creative, independent individual with no desire to hold down a regular job. In fact, the very prospect of having a job should put this person in a cold sweat. If this sounds familiar, we're on the right track! Our candidate made hold a regular job even though self-employment is preferred (in case they want to eat, buy toilet paper, stuff like that...).

What happens as our prospect works a regular job for some other person or company? They spend every working minute scheming about how to escape. For me, any time I had a nine to five gig, I would spontaneously generate marketing plans in my mind for the self-employment scheme that would allow me to escape. It was the central focus of my life. Get the hell out of this shit hole dead end boring job now!

Again, I've written elsewhere about my personal experience on the road to being gainfully, happily self employed; I've covered the specifics about what got me there. What about those who wish to start with self employment now? It's twenty years later than when I took the plunge. The market place is different. Technology is wildly different! While some of my experiences and anecdotes are still valid, there has to be new wrinkles that an ingenious person of modest means can bring to bear on the project of self-employment.

Clearly, a lot of them have to do with using the web in an informed and effective manner. Me, I just worked my way through The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business With Google by Dave Taylor. I highly recommend it. I will also say, if you want to make it on your own, you have to talk to people. Yes, actual people. In the field, face to face. Potential clients. Competitors. Anyone who has anything to do with your area of expertise. So don't just sit staring at a screen all day, wondering where all the clients are!

The preceding is my way of admiting that I might have limited insight into the nuts & bolts of starting in self-employment in today's environment. I know what has worked for me in the past, and I know what works for me in the present. I also know what fails for me! I must conclude that my best advice for a brave soul embarking on self-employment today would be specific to their case. Given that, I would like to extend an invitation to one and all to comment on this entry with specific queries about their situation as they consider self employment. I will answer one and all to the best of my ability.

Steve Lafler

Enemies List Lost

The following proves that there is a little Dick Nixon in all of us...

I’m not a New Year’s Resolution type of guy. Mostly because I have my life in (relative) order. I work for myself and I like it. I don’t have piles of high interest credit card debt. I've been a runner since I was a kid; it keeps me both sane and fit.

But here’s this funny thing—I’ve always been one of those “turn the other cheek” types. It works for me. Recently, however, I have been going over things and people that have pissed me off—major and minor—over the course of my whole life. Is this repressed anger? Some latent volcanic eruption that I just can't hold in anymore?

Beats me, but here it is, a partial list of long forgotten enemies & their crimes:

1. The people who beat up my brother in high school because he was gay (I don’t even know their names!).

2. Reviewers for the Comics Journal who don’t like my work.

3. An old girlfriend who boffed a clown behind my back. Yes, the guy was literally a clown!

That’s enough of that. We could all make similar lists that go on and on and on. The question is: Why do I care now? This is stuff that happened decades ago, for the most part!

I’m fond of saying hindsight is 50/50. I know, it’s really “hindsight is 20/20”. Somehow, I think the 50/50 works better here. I leave it to the reader to ponder that one.

This brings me to my New Year’s Resolution for 2006. I’ve finally realized what I need to do! I will compose a detailed ENEMIES LIST.

Then I will promptly throw it away.

The Making of a Cartoonist

Why would an intelligent human being embark on a "career" in art comics??? I try to answer this question with an essay that appeared in the back of Scalawag, my latest graphic novel. I also had the chance to read this piece over the airwaves recently in an interview with Bill Dodge on Radio KBOO 90.7 here in Portland, OR.

My brother John and I read and collected mountains of comics starting with Archie, Harvey, and Disney (Carl Barks!) comics, and moved onto Marvel when I was ten. After several years of obsessing over the amazing chops of Jack Kirby, I got published at age 16, illustrating faux Barry Smith barbarian stories for cheesy fanzines. There were scads of these sleazy “fanzines” in those days, often mimeographed, that would publish my output of aforementioned barbarian stuff, along with attempts at superhero strips and adaptations of Greek Myths. Somewhere in there, Eisner and Crumb got thrown into the mix, teaching me how it is done with regard to A) storytelling and B) sex.

Although I drew comics through high school, my focus turned to running the mile on the track team, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I really dug in. I started attending UMASS Amherst in the fall of ’75, and it wasn’t lost on me that the Massachusetts Daily Collegian had slots for four or five daily comic strips by students. WOW! What an opportunity for a green kid full of ambition!

At the start of my second semester, I landed a strip there and continued daily publication until I graduated in December of 1979. I experienced such arcane pleasures as strolling campus on Halloween, tripping my nuts off, seeing numerous kids dressed as my characters Benb & Gerald. What an education, and what an ego I developed after having an audience of 20,000 daily for four years… yup, I was a typical know-it-all college kid. I was the complete holy fool during the run of my strip, Aluminum Foil. I was full of the hedonistic yet metaphysical spirit of the times. It didn’t hurt that at the age of nineteen I had the classic coming of age experience: Being turned inside out on psylocibyn mushrooms. The Catholicism of my youth fell away, replaced by a certainty that physical reality is but the tip of a very large iceberg, and that death (seemingly included in the mushroom experience) was but a transition to greater awareness. The singular vision of that day pretty much informs everything I’ve done since. Oddly, subsequent LSD and mushroom experiences never again punched me through the threshold to the realm of the completely other.

Several months after graduating, I caught the publishing bug and put out Benb & Gerald, a collection of my college strips. Publishing seemed a viable business! I sold the run of 500 books over several months, turning a modest profit.
Wanderlust, love and the lingering dream of becoming a decent runner found me relocating to Eugene, Oregon. By the spring of ’81, I began publishing my work in earnest with a one shot comic entitled Mean Cat, which garnered positive attention in the pages of The Comics Journal and The Comics Buyers Guide. I worked out my chops over a 3 issue run of my next title, Guts. Issue #3 was a landmark for me, as I introduced my Dog Boy character while getting picked up for distribution by Last Gasp and Capital City.

Dog Boy was a wholly improvised comic. I would sit down to draw, divest myself of any assumptions about the nature of reality, and trust to the muse to sing through me. In truth, the lead character was a stand in for me, a sort of zen terrorist rampaging through a post punk landscape on blotter acid and beer.
It was a thrilling time in comics. A network of seven to nine comic book distributors had sprung up over the preceding several years, and they were willing to try new titles.

Sure, a lot of dreck was published; faux mainstream superhero universes sprang up by the dozens, only to disappear just as quickly. But there was cool shit too, Love & Rockets had appeared and was being frantically hyped by Fantagraphics. Crumb showed signs of life for the first time in years with Weirdo, publishing the sultry work of Dori Seda, and Raw appeared from the slick confines of New York. R.L. Crabb had begun to publish some fine work, and the first intense wave of mini comics was underway with talents like J.R. Williams and Steve Willis honing their chops.

I sat down in the summer of ’82 to draw the first issue of Dog Boy. Pencilling and lettering ten pages that first day, I was a man on a mission that would sustain me for years. Dog Boy #1 (special shoe issue) appeared in March of ’83, the first comic book I published under the Cat-Head Comics imprint. Working hard through the next couple years, I published seven issues and built a modest but loyal following. By 1986 (soon after relocating to the Bay Area), I managed to convince Fantagraphics to take a chance on Dog Boy. We published ten issues together as the so called “black & whites” market fluctuated wildly. Dog Boy #1, volume 2, shipped 10,500 copies and suddenly I was actually making a living creating comics, just in time for my 30th birthday! The good men of Fantagraphics pumped out Dog Boy’s for me at an alarming pace, but sad to say by issue ten sales had dipped below 2000 and the Dog was cut.

In retrospect this was appropriate, the arc of inspiration for the series had run it’s course. The freewheeling, beer guzzling, acid dropping persona that had worked so well for me for years became rather an albatross by the time I hit 31. I had become an egotistical lout with no money and a drinking problem!

After floundering for a year or two with an ill-advised title, Femme Noire (great drawings but weak writing), I hooked up with longtime friend Stephen Beaupre and we began publishing together under the Cat-Head Comics imprint. At the dawn of the Nineties, Weirdo and Raw had ended, and we figured it was time for an edgy new comics anthology. We launched Buzzard, inviting such standouts as Joe Sacco, Julie Doucet, Mary Fleener, Mario Hernandez, and Lloyd Dangle to contribute. The first issue was a hit artistically, but the market was weak, especially for anthologies, and it sold a only bit more than 2000 copies. Undaunted, Beaupre and I soldiered on with Buzzard, publishing 20 issues between 1990 and 1998. We featured the work of many great talents known and unknown, from Jeff Roysdon to Mats Stromberg and Phoebe Gloeckner. Even Adriane Tomine and James Kochalka managed to find their way into the pages of Buzzard.

Each issue saw me contribute a short piece of my own work (including some new Dog Boy material), but the real fun for Beaupre and I was our collaboration on his Forty Hour Man. Written by Mr. Beaupre, it’s the saga of his wage slavery from teenage years to the present. Since we met as 17 year old dishwashers at the Rustler Steak House, Stephen Beaupre and I have been friends on an almost telepathic level. I was in the zone with Forty Hour Man, interpreting his narrative into a Will Elder inspired laugh fest, four pages at a time starting in Buzzard #8 and running to issue #20. The Forty Hour Man collection will appear in the summer of 2006, the first book on my new Manx Media imprint.

Meanwhile, also in Buzzard #8, I published 9 pages of my new strip, Bughouse. I was called to arms by the avatars of Bop—Miles, Bird, Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman—
and spurred on by visual mavericks like director David Cronenberg (The Fly, Naked Lunch). Thus inspired, I set out to create my own indigo toned, insect-noir world.

The idea of Bughouse rattled about in my head for a while. I wanted to address the nature of addiction in artists; my own slavery to beer (of all drugs), and of so many great musicians to heroin. I wanted to draw and write my way to healing my wounds and make myself whole (and it worked!). Just as important, I wanted to convey my delight in live music, the more raw and impassioned the better. I wanted to create a visual iconography to put across this gestalt of concerns.

Bughouse enjoyed a six issue run and two graphic novels as a Cat-Head Comic. And now, here is Scalawag, the third volume of Bughouse from Top Shelf Productions. With this volume, Top Shelf has all existing Bughouse material in print.
And now, for me, it’s back to the drawing board!


Steve Lafler
Portland Oregon
manxmedia@msn.com

New Dog on the Blog

I have a favorite new blog! Hey, it could be your favorite too. It's an online continuation of the feminist culture and humor zine Have You Seen the Dog Lately?

Check it out at:
http://www.haveyouseen.blogspot.com/

While I freely admit that the blogger, Serena Makofsky, is my wife, no one will argue that she is anything but a fine writer, humorist and commentator. She is a published author of short fiction, and a former professional travel journalist.

One recent evening I was extolling the virtues of www.blogger.com to her. I peeked up from my book maybe a half hour later and she already had her blog up and running. Check it out!

The Direct Market is Such A Bore.

Anyone out there in the indie/alt comic book business? I've been in the game since '81. Seen my share of ups and downs in the so-called direct market, where publishers sell to specialty comic book distributors and stores.

To say it's an ingrown turd of a market is to belabor the obvoius. It's just boring and no fun. Mostly the same old-same old pointed at a peculiar smallish sub market. What passes for "cool" is so often lame, mainstream and shallow. Yeah, the kind of stuff I thought was cool too when I was fourteen years old!

The market's only saving grace is that a relative few great artists can survive and thrive with at least part of their career parked there. I'm thinking anyone from Dan Clowes to Joe Sacco to Phoebe Gloeckner, stick your favorite half decent cartoonist's name here.

For my own part, I've had comic books and graphic novels move through the "direct market" with varying degrees of sales and notoriety. I freely admit to feeling sour about the lack of sales for my trilogy of BugHouse graphic novels from Top Shelf. Certainly I'm not alone among artists with (intact) self esteem who, having put their works into this market, are disappointed with sales figures.

Okay Mr. Sour Goddamn Grapes, what's to be done??? You got a better idea? What do you propose?

First, no need to burn your bridges. Keep a toe in the direct market wading pool with future publications.
That being said, pretend that the aforementioned specialty market doesn't exist. Cool! This calls for a plan. In fact, how about a complete manifesto? Why not!

Manx Manifesto

1. Art should challenge received notions held by the public, in particular strictly defined elites, styles or cliques within the medium/discipline that the artist is working in.

2. The artist should not be bound by any established convention in their field; they are free to smash convention or use any mutation of convention in the execution of their ideas.

3. The public face, delivery and media notion of a work of art, be it object or performance, is recognized as part of the art itself.

4. The conceptual (business) model of the artists engagement with the world, through business activities such as publishing, gallery shows, public performance and such should be subjected to the same creative process as the actual art itself.
4.5. The artist shall engage in keeping accurate accounts of their income and expenses. Also known as "basic accounting".

5. The artist should follow their own personal inspiration and heart, to belabor the obvious. The artist should avoid being trapped by the dogma of others opinions, as Steven Jobs recently said.

Tips & clues--If the preceding appears opaque, oblique or prosaic to you, try the following:

A) Divest yourself of any beliefs or assumptions about the nature of reality.
B) Turn off your internal dialog.
C) Be.

Got that? Good. Now read the Manx Manifesto again. Better yet, don't. Just stick to the tips & clues.

I'm publishing now under the imprint Manx Media, and will proceed in tune with my manifesto.

Manx will release Forty Hour Man in July 2006. Stephen Beaupre wrote it and I drew it. This volume collects the strip that ran in Buzzard comics anthology over 13 issues, with 24 new pages, the perfect book for anyone who has ever had a shitty job--hey, that's pretty much everyone!
It will be a 272 page trade paperback retailing for $16.99. ISBN 0-9769690-0-9

Also next summer, Manx will release (you guessed it) Manx #1, the first issue of my new comic book. Should be about 50 saddle stitched pages, perhaps with a screen printed cover. It's gonna be a fucking art object. It's written and almost half drawn. No need to talk too much now about this one, suffice to say there will be a tour and it will be wild.

Steve Lafler
http://www.stevelafler.net

Ain't the Library Great?

Libraries are the type of institution that the founding fathers musta had in mind when they were looking to establish a viable democracy. Your local library is so many things; not only is it full of great ficiton, non-fiction, childrens and reference books, but it serves as a community resource as follows:

1. Information for job seekers

2. Information about colleges, universtities, and vocational schools.

3. Public access to the internet.

4. Available public space for formal meetings.

5. The "third place", not work or home, that Starbucks aspires to be (but isn't).

Those are a few library uses that I can remember. Without further ado, here is my current library anecdote.

We've been going weekly to score books for my son Max, who is four. Life is much more interesting with a constant flow of books through our lives! Thus, the library. Naturally, Serena and I grab reading material for ourselves when we are there too. So, I pick up "The Complete Idiots Guide to Growing Your Business With Google".

Huh? My business needs a web site???? All my web energy so far has been pitched towards maintaining a decent site for my cartoon/comic book business. I always had enough T-Shirt clients that it did not matter if I had a site.

NO MORE! With my move from Oakland to Portland this year, ME NEED CLIENTS! So, Manx Media needs a T-Shirt web site. It took this book to bonk me on the noggin' and see how I could make it really work, in terms of generating clients, putting up a site that makes good use of google resources for business sites.

SEE THE RESULT: Yes, another stupid web site to look at!
http://www.manxmedia.com

Manx Media: Sweeping the Ocean (just like the mud shark did)

Okay, I suppose the preceding post begs the question, what is Manx Media?

It's my new business name; I want to return to publishing comic books and graphic novels, yet I still operate my custom t-shirt printing business. Thus I have a new umbrella name for all my business adventures.

Hats off to Francis Vincent Zappa for inspiring me with a silly song name, Manx Needs Women.
Hats off to Frank just for being Frank, too.

Comics News from Manx Media

The big news from me on the comics front is that I am done with Bughouse. I've published three "Bughouse" graphic novels with Top Shelf; I've mined a very rich vein of material, and now it's done!
So, after recharging my creative batteries, I have begun drawing and writing a new body of work. It features a tongue in cheek character called Manx, a guy who goes clubbing in a cat suit! Manx is not a superhero so much as an explorer of the nether regions of human consciousness.
In the tradition of fictional work by such writers as Henry Miller and Paul Theroux, this character's alter ego is named after the author (that's me!). So, when Manx is not prowling the night in his cat suit, he is actually Steve Lafler! This will confuse some as they will indeed see it as straight up autobio, which I assure you in advance, it is not!

I just started working on this material, so with any luck, and some hard work, I'll have something in print by summer 2006. We shall see!
Meanwhile, anyone who wishes to pick up a copy of Bughouse, Baja or Scalawag (my existing graphic novels) can do so by visiting http://www.stevelafler.net

My Socialist Experiment – A Tale of Give and Take Between Best Friends

Yes, it’s true, I have lived the dream! In the fall of 1979, I was officially admitted to a cooperative living arrangement at the “Hadley House”, a beat up, very charming old house in Hadley, Massachusetts, tucked between the academic burghs of Amherst and Norhtampton. The idea was to share household expenses and work while upholding the socialist and feminist ideals then in vogue with college students. A big influence locally was the University of Massachusetts economics department—one housemate, Michael Hilliard, was sprinting his way through the undergraduate program quickly and efficiently, bound for grad school, and ultimately the academic life (Michael is now an economics professor in Portland, Maine).

As a freshman, I had taken Economics 101 to fulfill a gut requirement at my father’s request. He had advised me to take some economics, accounting or management courses. Maybe he hoped I would major in business. Although I figured I was heading for the Art department, I indulged dad’s request. To my amazement, and ultimate delight, the professor was none other than Samuel Bowles, a brilliant proponent of economic justice who had been booted out of Harvard for his leftist leanings. The simplest fact about distribution of wealth in our society was news to me. Five percent of the people in this country own far more than 50% of the wealth, etc., etc. Stuff like that. It was the beginning of real-world awakening for a naïve suburban brat (me). After a couple weeks, dad asked me how the economics course was going. “My professor is a Marxist.” Great!

Back to Hadley House. There was room for five students. The idea was to keep the house balanced between male and female. So there would always be the slightly skewed three to two ratio. It was three women until I moved in, then it was always three guys until I moved out the following august, escaping to the west coast. I believe I was the first coop member who was not a worker at the student run veggie coop lunch restaurant in the UMass campus center called “Earth Foods”. I loved Earth Foods! You could get a huge lentil loaf and salad for two and a half bucks or something like that. Hippy Heaven! They had good veggie pizza too. I got a kick out of the serious, doctrinaire demeanor of the workers there.

Anyway, my “in” to Hadley House was my old pal Andy, who I’d known since we were ten years old. Andy was the funniest, craziest, crankiest person I knew. I didn’t like him either when we were first acquainted in fourth grade. But by sixth grade, we were tight because of our mutual love of Jack Kirby in particular and Marvel Comics in general. Andy is the guy who turned me onto Robert Crumb. He showed me Uneeda comics, one of the most frankly sexual comics Crumb has done. Sadly, I borrowed it from Andy and my dad confiscated it, never to return. But my brother, one year older, and I got quite a graphic eyeful from that comic as junior high students.

So the other members of the coop aren’t too sure about inviting ‘ol Steve to join the commune. Sure, I’m friends with Andy, but am I a vegetarian? No meat in Hadley House! Indeed, Fran (another Earth Foods alumnus) was against me coming in, as she didn’t know me and was suspicious. She was going through her own drama, and was on her way to living as a separatist feminist. You have to be voted into the house, and my commie vegetarian credentials are in serious doubt. After all, isn’t this the infamous campus cartoonist who drew a typical Joe college farting uncontrollably after eating lunch at Earth Foods? The same John Bircher who penned a cartoon making fun of Prof. Sam Bowles himself? Guilty, guilty, guilty! Except for the John Birch part. My entrance into Hadley House society came down to whether Andy could sway Michael into voting for me. He could. I was in.

Over the course of the next year, we cooked vegetarian, bought food from, and contributed labor to the Amherst Food Coop (my job was cutting the cheese, no lie!), and fought over which girls to vote into the house when an opening came up. Andy started dating someone named Jill, a smooth talking pre-law student, and stirred quite a brouhaha when she cooked him a chicken dinner in the house one night! Michael, Andy and I engaged in a cooperative transportation experiment when we bought our landlord Doron’s beat to shit Ford Pinto off him for $200.00 bucks, and took turns running out of gas. Michael did a good job handling the heating oil bill, while I failed with the phone bill, resulting in service being shut off. Andy and I were concerned to bring out Michael’s fun side (he was obsessed with his academic work and Hegelian theory), we made sure he ate an ever increasing amount of blotter acid as the year progressed! All in all, a really good time was had by all while we learned a bit about shared responsibility.

With this Marxist indoctrination behind me, I embarked on a socialist work experiment when I opened my screen printing shop in Oakland in the spring of ’87. I was coming off about a half year period where I had earned most of my living from my Dog Boy comics, then being published by Fantagraphics. As the so called “black & whites” comics market caved in that spring, I decided I better go back to screen printing T-shirts as a back up. But I didn’t want to give up my cartooning life, so I hit on the idea of taking on a production worker to run the press. I would concentrate on marketing the service and handling the logistics of producing the jobs, thus keeping a big part of my schedule open for drawing comics. My idea was that the press operator and I would split the profits 50/50 after expenses. That way, they would get a fair share of the fruits of their labor, while I would get a highly motivated individual to produce jobs for me. My reasoning was that the worker would do a good job, as they were making an owners share of the profit. The system worked, by and large, but to say that I was naïve about how it would work is an understatement.

I invited my friend Rolf, a promising painter, to join me and run the press. He did, and for eighteen years we have worked together, splitting the profits. We are now splitting up the assets of the shop, as I am moving to Portland and he will remain in Oakland. We have both consistently made decent money for the amount of work involved.

That being said, here is where I made my miscalculation. I expected Rolf would respond to the shared work/shared profits arrangement with the same enthusiasm I had. I did not recognize he would have a different idea than I of how the working world is organized. As I am someone who is not comfortable having a job, it’s hard for me to see that most people are not comfortable doing contract/freelance work. Being more risk averse than I, Rolf has maintained a permanent part time job throughout our business relationship. He prints shirts in the shop on Fridays, and will pull shifts in the early morning, and occasionally on weekends, when the shop gets very busy.

As the business grew, and Rolf maintained his part time job, it became necessary for me to operate the press on a regular basis. This bit into my cartooning time, subverting the reason I looked for help to begin with. Ultimately, I solved the problem by hiring other printers to work Monday through Thursday, leaving just enough room in my schedule to get some artwork done. This was tough also, as I couldn’t afford to offer anyone a truly steady job. Rolf was drawing just enough cash out of the business to prevent me funding a full job for another person.

I provided employment for Rolf that fairly compensated him for the services provided. Over the years since ’87, he’s averaged more than $50.00 / hour for his press work, not bad. As we dissolve our business relationship, he is walking away with more than a dozen viable accounts, a great client list to start on his own with. We have had bumps in the ride, negotiating the terms of our arrangement along the way, but we both worked hard and pulled decent money from the shop. I am proud of this, and I believe Rolf is too.

For my own part, it was frustrating to realize, a few years in, that Rolf was not going to evolve into a full time press operator, running all the jobs I sold. Indeed, he made it clear he did not like the work, considering screen printing physically demanding and rather nasty, what with the ink and solvent involved. While that is true enough, I had a production problem to solve. I had to step up to the plate and assume control over more and more production, until it was pretty much my show, with Rolf as an able adjunct in a more minor role.

Although it slowed my progress, being unable to afford a full time worker with Rolf in the picture, I remained loyal to him. As a friend, and as a matter of honoring my word, I didn’t feel it would be right to rescind my offer of part ownership in the business. I had to respect that Rolf was finding his own comfortable level of involvement. I have been conflicted over this. Part of me considers that I have learned valuable lessons in living and in human nature with my involvement in this business relationship, while part of me wonders, why did I sacrifice my time to honor this cooperative experiment that clearly didn’t pan out for me?

Certainly, I believe that it is in the best interest of my business to pay my press operator well and treat them with respect. However, when I move to Portland, I will be hiring a press operator rather that seeking a partner. My challenge will be to create a decent job for one person, and to be sure to serve my own needs at the same time. So, you ask, where the hell did Steve’s purported socialist ideals go??? Bottom line, I’ll say it again. I’m in the position to create one job, so my goal is to make it a decent one. What does that mean? First and maybe foremost, it means above average pay. Many shops try to pull too much profit out of their labor force. This results in a bad vibe amongst the troops. Why work hard when the boss is a greedy asshole? Indeed! So figure out what the industry average is in your town, and pay more. You will get more loyal workers who will do a better job. This helps foster a good esprit de corps, but it’s still the boss’ responsibility to set the tone of mutual respect and mutual integrity.

As for my socialist ideals, how about this list from the Green Party. It sounds good, it’d be a tall order to live up to it, but it’s sure worth a try:

Ten Key Values of the Green Party

1. Grassroots Democracy
2. Social Justice
3. Ecological Wisdom
4. Non-violence
5. Decentralization
6. Economic Justice
7. Gender Equity
8. Respect for Diversity
9. Personal & Global Responsibility
10. Future Focus & Sustainability

To Job or Not to Job?

"But what about the benefits? The pension? The security?"

These are the questions asked by the proponents of throwing in the towel on self employment and getting a regular job. No, let me rephrase that. These are the questions asked of me by those whose lives are ruled by fear of the future and the unknown. As such, they are driven to ask me questions that really have an underlying assumption: The assumption that I share their values and beliefs about jobs and the working life. The assumption that their dogma is my dogma. It ain't.

I have never been a person who has been inclined to be trapped by O.P.T. (other people's thinking). I reckon I fancy myself a maverick. In any case, I've almost always followed my own heart and intuition when it comes to decisions about my work life (I'm slightly allergic to the word "career"). I know myself; my beliefs and mode of being make self employment not just an elegant choice for me; it's the only choice for me. I have in fact had jobs. I'm here to tell you, I hated every minute of it.

But what about the Benefits? the Pension? the Security?

First and foremost, to me, it just ain't worth having that particular log shoved up your ass known as A JOB. I just can't trade away control over my time and life for what is offered in return. But in fairness, I will address each of these concerns.

Benefits; the health plan that my family has, Kaiser Permanente, is decent. It's also expensive. But as I am established in business, it is an affordable prospect for me. I split it with my wife. We can debate the fairness of that, but it makes my contribution very do-able.
If one is just starting in business, health care could be a tough expense to make, true enough. So, I recommend the following: A) Be young and healthy when you start your self employment scheme! B) Buy a high deductable catastrophic care plan. I used to have such a plan before I was a family man, and it was very affordable.

Pension; go and start an IRA or 401K or some goddamn retirement plan yourself. Start young. Pay it every week. Or just have a savings account, put something away on a regular basis. Pay your taxes, and you will be paying into Social Security, which Bush hasn't destroyed yet. By the way, I figure it's even money that the world economic system will even exist in it's current form by the time I retire. What do you think? If the glass house crashes, so does your precious retirement plan. So keep some fresh water and canned food around! And some good weed.

Security. Don't make me laugh. Where do I start? I've kept myself gainfully employed though three or four economic downturns of varying degrees of intensity. As a young man, I started my business and looked for a regular job simultaneously, early in the Reagan era. Never did get a job offer, but I sure as hell did build a successful business. Working for myself is simply unbeatable for security. I have built a cash flow engine that no one can take away from me. End of subject.

Do I seem testy on this subject? Ha ha, I am! Let's just say that my socio-ecomomic status has been commented upon lately by persons ignorant of my splendid philosophical outlook and business acumen.

Letter to Dennis

I recently wrote a letter to a friend on mine describing an experience that I had on April 10, 1976. Make of it what you will.

By the way, it's safe to say that this piece is a bit out of the perview of "Self Employment for Bohemians", but on the other hand, the events of that day have informed almost everything I have done as a worker and artist since.

YO Dennis,

Ha ha, you noticed that bit about the "singularity of the eternal now". What I know about that, I was told by a mushroom. No kidding.
It was quite a set up. When I was a freshman in college, Beaupre and one other friend and I ate some 'shrooms. I'd never tripped before. It was all fun and games, but after awhile it was clear I was way fucking higher than the other guys.

The clue was, Beaupre and the other fella seemed frozen on the couch; they looked like jagged outlines of themselves, pixelated into jumbled shards of color. Their eyes, however, remained constant, even piercing, and were alive and alien. They spoke to me through their eyes, without sound. They said something like "Steve and Rob have consented to let us use their bodies for a few minutes to speak to you. We are ancient travelers, and not from here (earth). We are going to tell you some secrets that are gonna kick your ass, that all people know, but few remember".

That was the intro. For the next hour maybe, the peak of the trip, I had an experience of dying, and splitting into possibly millions of shards of light, each one representing a life, or at least some separate energy field. I had to become each of them, immersed in time, they I had to be born as myself again, live my nineteen years again, to get back to where I started.

As I wove in and out of these lives over several eternities, the basic idea I was left with is that all our lives exist at once, that is, simultaneously. They are separated by a matter of electrical pitch or frequency, or some form of focus in a specific location in physical reality. But time, linear time as we think of it, simply does not exist. It is a construct of human comprehension of the physical system we are immersed in.
As it is always the present, there is indeed only one moment, a singularity if you will, out of which constantly emerges what we perceive as physical reality.
The constant property of the singularity is change; these changes we record as "history", or a notion of linear time.
Considering the nature of change, I propose that the motive force behind all action is creative curiosity, a will to have fun. If we're lucky, really lucky, we could define that will to have fun as "love". I'd like to think we're that lucky, but I'm not sure.
The other good news, I believe, is that when human beings wake up to the true nature of "time" in some fundamental way, we will realize that we are indeed capable of solving our knottiest problems, as a lot of received "knowledge" will drop away like last week's cheese.

Hey, you asked for it buddy!The mushrooms did indeed present themselves to me as interstellar sage/tricksters who really enjoy having a laugh at the expense of a rube like me.

Welcome Genevieve!

Genevieve Rosa Lafler was born September 1st at 1:09 p.m., weighing 8 pounds, 11 ounces, at 20 inches tall.
She's a red head like her dad Steve, and is gorgeous like her mom Serena!