Today we’d like to introduce you to John Coats.
Hi John, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My name is John Coats and I make and sell comic books. My brother James is an artist and I’m a writer, and together we have been self-publishing our own comics for years. Dino Beasts, Ninja IV, and Galaxy Gods are some of our main books. Self-publishing is creatively rewarding, but it can also be tough, and in the construction of the current comic book industry it is very hard to get self-published books in front of readers. So, a little over a year ago we got together with some other friends who also self-publish, Chris Anderson and Jamie Jones, and together we created a method for getting self-published material to a wider audience. That method is Power Pulp, and under that banner we sell hundreds of creator-owned comics and zines. We sell our own work and work by creators from the US, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. We sell to individual readers and to retail stores, all from our website, powerpulpcomics.com. Our goal is to not only sell our books, but also to change the way audiences think about what comics can be, and how they can be made.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The support for Power Pup from comics-makers, comics journalist, and comic book retailers and readers has been incredibly positive. We learned early on that their are lots of creators making great comics, and all of them were having the same problems we were. There was a bottleneck preventing small press comics from entering the wider marketplace. We were blocked from the main distributors because our books don’t fit a traditional corporate comics mold, which the industry is designed for. The only way to get on an even playing field was to create a model that caters to the needs of creators first and not big publishers. Power Pulp was created by comics-makers for comics-makers. The main struggle now is just raising awareness and making sure Power Pulp is in consideration when stores make there monthly orders. We are just over a year old and we already have dozens of retail outlets that stock our books, including shops in Canada and Australia! We’ve sold thousands of books in a short period of time and word is spreading, so our momentum is staying steady which is encouraging.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
The comics we sell span a whole range of great genres including sci-fi, drama, auto-bio, humor, horror, fantasy, superheroes, and more. And we also sell some amazing journalistic work about comics like Dummy, the 1986 Zine, and Palmer’s Picks. I’m really proud of the wide range of material and the high level of craftsmanship that is found across the Power Pulp catalog. And everything we stock is 100% creator-owned. That’s very important to us. Some Pulp members are 40 year veterans of the comics industry while others are just starting out, but we’ve bonded over our shared beliefs in supporting the rights of creators, and in generating more opportunity for audiences to experience the comics that we all self-publish.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
It’s hard to foresee what the whole comics industry will be doing in 5 years. I am sure the corporate publishers will be doing the same exact thing they have been doing for 40+ years, so the real question is what will audiences be doing? I hear complaints about ‘mainstream’ books never changing, but their is a wide range of new, fresh, and exciting material that exists in the self-published corner of the comic book world. With Power Pulp it’s much easier than it has been in a long time, maybe ever, to access that creative corner. In the future my hope is that readership for creator-owned and self-published comics will experience tremendous grow, and maybe even reach a readership level that is comparable to what the corporations have enjoyed since the 1960s. If that were to happen, it would be a big shift in comics, and one that would reinvigorate the industry as a whole. I don’t know if that will happen, but America is a big country with a very small percentage of its population actually reading comics. The audiences are definitely out there, but will they start to tune in? We’ll see. We are going to do everything in our power to show them the great comics they have been missing out on.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://powerpulpcomics.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerpulpcomics
