Not to give The Doors any undue credit, but maybe they were on to something with “People Are Strange.”
It’s ultimately a song about isolation and alienation — how society truly regards the weirdos and the oddballs. In turn, it also celebrates community and finding your place among the outcasts.
It’s also the perfect “theme” for Strangers Publishing. (Sorry.)
Strangers is the brain-child of Eddie Raymond, who describes himself as having no artistic talent and someone who “gets paid to have good taste.” Prior to comics publishing, Raymond was involved in his local hardcore scene for nearly 10 years, booking shows with “a lot of bands that eventually became big bands.” It’s not exactly your standard pedigree for indie comics, but that unique skillset and community-centric focus serves Strangers’ core mission quite well.
“When I first launched Strangers as a fanzine, the whole thing was, ‘A celebration of the forgotten and overlooked,'” Raymond said. “I really wanted to champion forgotten genre comics.”
Raymond added, “I think that tagline reflects what I want to do with Strangers. Now I look at it more from working on a global scale and championing overlooked genre comic creators from across the globe. That’s one thing I’m really proud about…I very rarely work with Americans. A lot of the folks I work with are either in the UK or Argentina. I like bringing them into the fold and giving them an outlet in the States.”
If you look at Strangers’ catalog, though, it can be hard to get a sense of what truly defines the publishing house. Raymond seemingly only has one steadfast rule (“No superhero books”), but beyond that, the weird sky’s the limits. Perhaps it helps to understand Raymond’s own aforementioned tastes to see what Strangers best champions.
“And then as I got more into things and started getting more into discovery, I started getting more into European comics,” Raymond said. “I also got back into manga; I was into it as a kid and fell out of it. And those two things started to really shape my taste.”
Raymond added, “My roommate in college showed me Ghost in the Shell, and that blew the back of my head open. And so then finding comics that match outside of the obvious manga of it all, finding small press comics that reflect those kinds of aesthetics, my taste shifted into what I wanted to publish and what I wanted to look like.”
The Beginning at The End
But then there was the actual process of getting Strangers off the ground. And it’s here, ladies and germs, that things get a little wild and strange themselves.
“The original inspiration for [Strangers] came from walking around Comic Arts Brooklyn, which, I think, 2019 was the last year they did it,” Raymond said. “It took me a few months to put the zine together, but the first official issue launched on Valentine’s Day 2020. And I was going to do shows and all this stuff, and obviously that never happened.”
Admittedly, launching a new project/company near the start of a global pandemic does seem like the worst luck. But in one of many strange twists regarding Strangers, the whole thing worked out decidedly well (aside from, ya know, the loneliness and abject human suffering).
“The spin of, and I wouldn’t say it was better, but everyone was so online all day, all the time,” Raymond said. “And we had government money. A lot of people were buying a lot of products, so it worked out. I got a lot of attention pretty quickly because I think people were just bored and saw it online.”
Raymond went on to say that the occurrence “really helped bubble up a lot of creators and fanzines and publishers, not just myself. And it created a nice little baseline of this network where I was able to quickly establish myself.” It allowed him to be a “fanzine first and then I was doing a distro, where I was picking up folks I met online and curating an online web store. And then it got into publishing around the end of the year, and it was this culmination of all three things.”
It was a golden age, of sorts, and so much of it was from Raymond just being a pro at meaningful community development.
“I had been doing the distro successfully by the time I got to publishing. I already had sold people on my taste, so to speak,” Raymond said. “When I eventually came to publishing, they were like, ‘Oh, I like what this guy distros. I dropped Strangers and some stores, like Floating World and Desert Island and Gutter Pop…they immediately bid on to Strangers. So within the first few weeks, I already had some retailer presence and then everything shut down. There was Domino Books and Wig Shop that were doing online stuff, and they were buying into Strangers as well.”
And then the world when and put itself back together.
IRL OMG
Raymond said that as we got further from the lockdowns, he had to “adapt to real life.” For instance, he previously employed what he’d call “drops,” where “as with with street wear brands, we would put everything up once a month.” But that wasn’t going to work as well for this “new world,” was it?
“I’d sometimes get up to a couple hundred orders in a weekend,” Raymond said. “Because again, everyone has money to blow on comics, which is great. But when the world started opening back up, and brick and mortars were starting to open back up, folks were trying to get a little bit offline. So I started to see that decline.”
But this moment also allowed Raymond to make some important shifts. Not only to cut out some other stuff he’d been doing and better focus on the publishing stuff, but to rededicate and re-focus Strangers’ identity and the kinds of projects it was most interested in selling. Raymond admits that in the beginning, Strangers looked “more on the side of an alternative comics publisher, similar to Fantagraphics.” Not only in terms of their general business model, but the sorts of books released.
“Also, I had been working on shifting my model anyway, to be a bit more long-term because,” Raymond said. “I wasn’t really holding on to stock that much, and that’s not a great way to be a publisher. So I was slowly shifting away from that model while the world was opening up again. So it was a bit of a learning curve for me in that regard.”
The global pandemic certainly clarified that Strangers is a one-man show, and with Raymond doing everything from talent development to packing orders, another big turn would severely impact his ability to release comics.
“Yeah, I don’t want another global pandemic,” Raymond said. “I think if it did come, I could continue to manage the web shop. I think it would obviously scale down a lot.”
Still, even with the growing pains, Raymond was able to come out the other side of all this in a different place. Not only with a new focus creatively, but also in who he’s able to market to and place books.
“The world opening up, and just growing over the years, has allowed me to expand and shows do a lot of great volume for me,” Raymond said. “I wasn’t bound to my apartment – that quickly became obvious. Brick and mortars do a ton of volume for me, especially now with Lunar. Like, if I lost that, I think now I’m at a point where I would feel the effect of it similar to a publisher that was established pre-pandemic. I would be a little bit concerned, but also I am very grateful.”
And there’s another upside, too: “I’ve skirted disaster here twice,” Raymond said. “I never had a Diamond account.” Sure, Lunar isn’t the best fit (“Graphic novels just aren’t as successful to comic shops,” Raymond said), but the move was another vital step to “establish” Strangers in the larger world of comics post-COVID.
“I’ll list my titles on there. I don’t put a lot of promotion into it, but I want my guys to be able to have access to shops,” Raymond said of Lunar. “I’m never going to sell to Midtown directly, right? But they will just buy whatever’s on any of those sites because they just want the stock and they have the money to buy everything. I do a lot of direct wholesale because a lot of these indie shops, like they either don’t use Lunar or would prefer to work direct. So I found a nice balance where losing Diamond didn’t affect me at all. If anything, it maybe benefited me because there were more eyes on the Lunar catalog.”
Cool Friends in Weird Places
None of that’s to say it’s been all gumdrops and puppy dog smiles for Strangers. Raymond said that “I was ready to pack up Strangers at the end of last year,” adding that it he was “doing too many books a year publishing. I had already let go of the distro and this and that.”
Perhaps what helped with that momentary lapse (more than just doing good business, of course) was the community that Raymond was building. Because while Strangers had transformed in all the ways that make sense for business, it’s that aforementioned focus on engagement (via the comics sold, of course) that’s made all the difference.
“If you look at Strangers from 2020 to now, it looks like two different publishers,” Raymond said. “It’s adapted with my taste, right? I hadn’t been into small press all that long. The pandemic really accelerated my interest in it. Again, just being very online and getting deeper and deeper into that community.”
It’s been a matter of finding these “friends,” understanding what works for them, and applying that meaningfully and organically to Strangers’ operations. Case in point: Floating World, which maintains a brick and mortar store in Portland as well as a well-visited online hub.
“I think when I first started, I wanted to be exactly like them – outside of a brick and mortar store,” Raymond said. “I wanted to have my own publishing. I wanted to have an online store. I wanted to distro for other European publishers.”
But Raymond is quick to admit that Floating World’s owner, Jason Leivian, has “other folks that work for him and work with him. There’s just no physical way I could have done all that.” But in all the right ways, they remain quite aspirational.
“I do think they have the perfect model,” Raymond said. “It’s so community-based. Their shop is fantastic, both the old and the new one. They’ve got an incredible vision for comics. Also, they know who to pick up internationally to bring in that is successful. I wouldn’t want to be them now just because of bandwidth – they are such a standard, I think, for independent comics and small press.”
Cool Friends in Weird Places (Vol. II)
Then, of course, there’s Italy’s Hollow Press, which focuses primarily on manga. And, sure, looking up to Hollow is another way for Raymond and Strangers to lean into his tastes as a means of establishing the publisher for the future.
“I almost primarily read manga,” Raymond said. “If it’s not a small press book, almost all of my reading is manga. Being able to do that and put those books out is a long-term goal I had for a bunch of years. Plus, it is more reflective to my tastes and how they match Strangers.”
At the same time, there’s another, more essential lesson from the likes of Hollow: You can totally release what you like, but you must also be fearless in doing so.
“They have this severity to the work that they put out that, to me, is really interesting,” Raymond said. “A lot of the artists they put out are very shocking and very graphic. Some of the manga artists they work with, which I’m totally blanking on the names, they’re literally right behind me, that work’s disgusting. But in a nice way.” Raymond mentioned the books of Ghaaro, whose work lools like “you put Xenomorphs in Tsutomu Nihei comics.”
And for Hollow, it’s evidently less about genres and more about the mood and feelings facilitated by the work.
“They’ve just curated this really interesting angle that it’s not even just horror,” Raymond said. “Some of it is science fiction, but it just has an edginess to it that I think is really lacking, even in European comics, honestly, at least from what I see. I think they’re pushing the needle in that way of what they’re putting out.”
And there’s other inspirations, too, each one a kind of guiding light.
“And the same thing with Holopress and Glacier Bay and all the others,” Raymond said. “They just understand their interests so well and they’ve been able to find an audience that reflects their interests, That, to me, is the sign of, at least in the modern day, a successful publisher.”
In response to a lot of these trends/themes, Strangers has adopted more of a “Kickstarter-first” approach as championed by many indie outlets. Unlike some other outlets, though, Strangers seems especially built for this lean-but-mighty model.
“That means that I have zero overhead on books going into it,” Raymond said. “I’m covering the whole printing of the book and then I over-print so I have copies to sell at shows. I’m not really sitting on anything, so it’s not, ‘Oh my God, I got to make this money back.’ I got a $100 storage unit and that’s it. Everything else is done out of my apartment. I’m paying my guys out from day one, essentially.”
To an extent, as Strangers further hones itself, the work is already having quite the effect.
“I see it with a lot of my returning customers as well,” Raymond said. “They’ll buy almost whatever I put out because they like what I put out. They like my taste. It’s such a community-oriented medium that I’ve met and become friends with a lot of people that I work with and have sold to just on the fact that I see them buy four or five Strangers books. We clearly have something in common.”
98% Perfection
But the real lesson isn’t more Xenomorphs or whatever; it’s about recognizing your audience’s connective might and reflecting that back wherever you can. Raymond admits that his indie comics audience is “small,” and he estimates that there’s “10,000 people in the States at least.” So it meant having to “find your lane and perfect it.”
Raymond added, “You don’t want to be everything for everyone. I think that’s not a good thing. Be something very specific and important for a small group of people.”
For Raymond, choosing books, then, is less of a process and more of a feeling. And as much as he might not want to admit, sometimes trusting that intuition can be a little weird and/or embarrassing.
“I have some friends that I talk about a little bit more intimately, where I’ll send things and say, ‘Man, this is 98% perfect,'” Raymond said. “I have such a hard time with how people draw faces sometimes. This is so stupid. But there’s been more books I’ve just passed on because of the way that they draw a face. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to look at this.’ Which is embarrassing, and is so discounting of work, but I can’t explain it. But that aside, which is a horrible thing to curate a line based on, it’s more intuitive.”
As specific as that gripe might be, Raymond makes up for it by being a surprisingly easy publisher to win over.
“I’ve put out books where I saw somebody draw a still image and I was like, ‘Dude, this is such a cool image. If you made this into a comic, I would work with you on it,'” Raymond said. “I think that was the case for Dungeon Mage, where Nate [Doyle] had drawn this really cool illustration of just like a mage in a dungeon.”
Some of that is Raymond recognizing his “shortcomings” in the realm of comics, adding, “I just don’t like telling people no. I just feel bad about turning down work. I’m not an artist, who am I to judge?”
However, it’s largely about knowing what works, what doesn’t fit, and being able to remain firm to these “ideals” wherever possible. Even if that ultimately means some of his community-building work can be a bit lonely at times.
“But also, I’ve found that a lot of people, they pitch you this project and they’ll be like, ‘This is so great for Strangers, it’s a perfect fit.’ I think we have two different visions of what Strangers is,” Raymond said. “So I found it was a little bit easier to just curate it myself and keep submissions closed.”
And Raymond is absolutely dedicated to what he calls his regular “scraping” of social media’s widest, darkest corners.
“If I can see an artist and I find myself keeping returning to them and obsessing about their work, that to me is someone you want to work with,” Raymond said. “I’ve started keeping a running list over the past couple of years of folks I eventually want to work with. At this point, it lives in the Hostile Planet brainstorming sheet. If it doesn’t work for Hostile Planet, maybe I’ll pursue them for something eventually.”
Cream of The Crop
In some ways, this approach to “talent scouting” is a way to honor something essential to Strangers, an unchanged facet even with the line’s “transformation” over the years.
“I take pride in my discoverability or whatever you want to call it,” Raymond said. “That to me is as important as, again, a celebration of forgotten and overlooked. I’ve found creators that I pulled from anthologies when they had 400 followers on Instagram. I worked with them and they’ve produced beautiful work for me.”
Raymond said this approach often finds him “folks who have never had a book deal before. Or, who have only worked in self-publishing. It’s what makes Strangers truly Strangers.” And, sure, working with newbies can prove risky, but you can’t really argue with the results.
There’s a couple of great books, some of Strangers’ best-selling items in fact, that have come from this celebration of one man’s taste.
“I’m really proud of The Hanging by Aaron Losty,” Raymond said. “He came to me with this really amazing pitch for this dystopian sci-fi novel that was influenced by Akira and Tekkonkinkreet. Like, even down to, ‘I chose the color palette because when Akira first came out in the magazines, it had the same color palette.’ It seemed like Aaron so very well understood Strangers, and especially Strangers at that moment of what I really wanted it to be. ‘Cause I was still sort of in transition, I would say, in terms of where we’re at now. He came in with this perfect project, and to me, it’s the best story I’ve put out.”
Art from The Hanging. Courtesy of Strangers Publishing.
Of course, it’ not just about final sales figures. Raymond is just as happy to work long-term with someone to get the chance to see them develop as an artist/creator. (And if it produces gold, then that’s a happy bonus.)
“Connor [McCann] started off doing a Blackjack bootleg in Strangers #3 in 2020,” Raymond said. “And that turned into us doing God Bless the Machine together, which was the third or fourth book I ever put out. And then we kept working together, and it went from 10 pages in the fanzine to a 40-page black and white comic to a 250-page full color graphic novel.”
Raymond added, “Just seeing him progress over the years in terms of his skills, in terms of his passion, in terms of his just execution, has just been amazing. And Demon Summoner Gash Gash is turning into one of our best-sellers. It flies for us.”
More Uncut Gems
There’s others, too, including Trench Coat by Jake Machen, which Raymond said is “the direction I want to go” with Strangers, adding, “Like, these types of sci-fi and cyberpunk stories.”
But then so much of Strangers’ success happens when it doesn’t even fit Raymond’s “rules.” Or, perhaps it’d be more accurate to say, when he still allows himself to be surprised.
“Very rarely do I take open submissions,” Raymond said. “But I did it one time and actually two of my favorite books came out of it, Mabel & Francine [by Pierre Lloga] and The Hanging.”
Same goes for working only with non-established creators. Just as quick as he’s able to say that “creators that are so established, they can get a book anywhere…they don’t need me, and I don’t necessarily want them,” even Raymond has some “heroes” he’d instantly sign on that dotted line.
“There’s a lot of…I wouldn’t say a caliber because like, look, if James Stokoe or Geof Darrow came to me, I’m bending over backwards to get it done,” Raymond said. (He’d also leap at the chance to drop any “Mœbius edition.”)
But until that minor miracle happens, Strangers has quite a few things either fresh to the market or coming down the pipeline in the very near future.
There’s Book of Fuligin: Honoring the Legacy of Gene Wolfe, which Raymond said is “the first statement of, ‘This is the fully envisioned Strangers I want.'” There’s the aforementioned Hostile Planet anthology, which Raymond said “reflects what I would think is the current and the future look of Strangers.” Plus, there’s a “couple manga licenses that we’re putting out” (including one that’s “half sci-fi, half dark fantasy”) and even some stories collected from AX Magazine.
There’s even more still, like a “super wacky gumshoe detective” story from Argentinian artist Valentin de las Casas. Or, a new book from Will Tempest, who Raymond said made “this short story that I just couldn’t get out of my head. It’s kind of the same thing, right? Where like, if I think about it too much, I’m just like, ‘I got to do it.’”
Mostly, though, it’ll be “more of the same. And when I say that…it’s sci-fi novels and dark fantasy.”
Well, not exactly the same.
Not So Strange After All
Because in the vein of their “contemporaries like Glacier Bay,” Strangers is moving increasingly toward graphic novels. And, sure, as Raymond said, “Maybe it sets us further apart from that typical comic shop retailer market.” However, he’s “not that concerned about that” (even as he further added that “from just a purely financial standpoint, the splits on a floppy suck.”)
What he is interested in, however, is respecting his creators’ time and interests.
“Nobody I work with is a full-time artist,” Raymond said. “So for them to have the pressure or even just have the ability to do a monthly comic is near impossible. And a lot of the stories I tell, too, I think it’d be weird serialized.”
And as an extension of that, graphic novels also translate to much better compensation overall.
“I can print a 180-page graphic novel in Hong Kong and do an offset print run of 1,000 or 2,000 of them for far cheaper than I can a 24-page floppy,” Raymond said. “I can sell it for $18 instead of $5. Just from being able to compensate creators better, it makes more sense for me to be like, ‘Take your time. Let’s not do the monthly. Let’s sit and just get a graphic novel out. It’ll be far better for you.’ And it might take another six months to a year for some of these folks to get the actual book out, but the end product is nicer.”
Even if Strangers does still release these “serialized comics,” it’s only ever a way to give back to some creators.
“A lot of it’s just been me letting my friends just use my Lunar account to get their books out there,” Raymond said. “Joel [van der Knaap] has been nice enough to slap the Strangers logo on it, but I just let him list through Lunar, because he’s my friend and I love Fortress. Eventually (and we were talking about it today) about doing a collective version of it, but it makes no sense for me to take any money off a $7 comic book from him.”
Of course, the move toward graphic novels isn’t just good business for the Strangers “family.” It’s also very much a reflection of where things are going in the industry. The comics industry is perpetually shifting and evolving, and as Raymond is more than aware, more people have to change with it for things to maintain momentum.
“The monthly floppy and the Wednesday warrior…that’s not a young reader,” Raymond said. “It’s old dudes, and they’re so discerning in their taste that they know exactly what they want.”
Raymond added, “Maybe they’ll try something off the shelves, but it’s sort of an impenetrable circle at a certain point. It’s a more shrinking audience versus these younger readers. [Young people] look at it and be like, ‘Oh, this floppy is $8 for 24 pages. This graphic novel is $18 for 180 pages.’ It’s just more bang for your buck straight across the board.”
Raymond went on to call the choice a “no-brainer,” adding, “Viz did a really good job of getting such an affordable price point on some of those books. Like, you’re telling me this is $10 for 180 pages of My Hero Academia or it’s $4.99 (or even sometimes $6) for 24 pages of Spider-Man with three ads in the middle of it.”
And, to an extent, there’s some evidence that big-time publishers are at least picking up on the trend. And they’re making moves to “close the gap,” as it were.
“DC doing those little short volumes is brilliant,” Raymond said. “I love those. Those are amazing. And they look good, but it’s also like, ‘I’ll give a shot at this because it’s the same price as this manga volume.'”
Strangers to Companions Trope
Now, I’m not saying Strangers or their “compatriots” are responsible for any part of that aforementioned shift. Nor am I saying that indie outfits are somehow going to define the new shape of the industry at large. But what I am saying is that the work of an outfit like Strangers is really important for modern comics.
It’s about knowing your audience and how to provide them with a meaningful product; supporting your creators-artists financially as well as personally; creating and disseminating work that has value and significance (even if it’s just for a rather select group); and making comics better than when you started out in the industry. With Strangers doing all of that and more, the publisher’s future looks bright. Strange and weird and perhaps rather niche, but bright enough to push comics ever further into wonderful, important directions of artistic and creative freedom.
Hey, stranger things have happened, right?
For more info on Strangers Publishing, head here.
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