Being one of only a couple of domestic publishers interested in comics, we are often asked by people to review their projects for publication.

On our old website, we even had a submissions page encouraging anyone to contact us with ideas. When we updated this site late last year we purposely did not include a submissions page and I want to both explain why and lay out our position on taking on new comic projects.

When we had the submissions page up we encountered the full range of creators.

We had top notch, experienced creators bringing great ideas we would have loved to have published. But being newish and given our business model, we have to be careful of taking on too much, so we have had to say no or not yet to some achingly good stuff.

We had some new creators come along with a range of ideas and projects, some with heaps of potential and some not so hot.

Some we have said no to because the idea/team needed more work or they weren't a fit with what we are doing. It's a real pleasure seeing these works, even the bad ones, because in almost every case if we offer a criticism it is taken in good spirit and the creator goes away to try harder and this benefits everyone.

Others again were declined because we are wary of taking on too much. Others because the ideas were close to other books we already had or have in progress.

And then we had the last group, and this is the real reason we removed the submission page. Abusive, difficult, condescending or just plain mad/bad, we have had people email fifty Word docs with little more than gibberish written in them and demand to know when we were going to make each of them into movies. Umm, yeah.

We have had submissions from people obviously without a clue as to how to write a sentence. Yet they will happily send us a single prose paragraph full of errors of grammar, spelling and punctuation which they just knocked off and want to know how much we are going to pay for the graphic novel they plan on writing. Oh and could we recommend an artist.

We have had people send us material which is so beyond the pale of normal human experience that it takes days to scrub your brain clean. Now I am no prude and I'm a big supporter of free speech - gory horror is fine with me and sex in comics doesn't phase me a bit - but some of this stuff is so off that the idea of meeting these people in person is a little freaky. 

Anyway, the point of this post isn't to bag people for having the courage to submit their art. Even with the mad/bad stuff I can appreciate the work that's gone into it and applaud the guts it's taken to put their ideas out there.

More I just wanted to be clear that while we seem to have retreated from taking submissions that's not quite right. At the moment we are just bedding down the ideas we are already developing in house and the books we are already producing. I would still love to hear from you if you are the next Alan Moore, Mark Millar or Jack Kirby but I just don't have the time or patience to deal with rude, ignorant or insane people. So if you are planning on submitting to us, please be nice, know what you are doing and be sane!

Til later

Baden