Invader Comics is coming for your heart, mind, wallet, and sensibilities

Mike Perkins didn’t exactly start out as your ordinary comics fan.

“Me and my brother [Will Perkins] have been making comics our entire lives,” Mike Perkins said during a Zoom chat in late 2025. “I sent in my first Spider-Man script to DC when I was, like, eight years old.”

But even that rather unique start didn’t protect Perkins from a common occurrence among fans: walking away from the hobby at some point.

Added Perkins, “I grew up reading and collecting comics and then girls happened and I put them down for a couple years in high school.”

So, what brought him back to land of true comics obsession? Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, that’s who.

“I was at my buddy’s place and hanging out and being the brooding teenager that I was, and she had a copy of Preacher – I mean, she had a bunch of them,” Perkins said. “I picked it up and I just couldn’t put it down.”

And that book, in all the most important ways, became the basis for Invader Comics. With Perkins serving as the editor-in-chief, Invader is a publisher like few others. The company’s “About Us” page reads more like a manifesto, with threats like “we’re everywhere, and we’ll find you” and “an army of hundreds of creatives [amassed] from all over the world.” But before Invader was comics’ worst (read best) nightmare, it’s origins were decidedly less terrorizing.

In the early 2000s, the Perkins brothers sold their book Beware! to a Philadelphia-based publisher called 215 Ink. Despite the book experiencing some limited success, Perkins said the publishing outfit struggled as comics was entering a new golden age.

“This was right about the time that digital comics were starting to be a thing, and 215 was getting flagged when they were trying to upload to Comixology and things because they really didn’t have an editor at the time and there were issues,” Perkins said. “I’d worked professionally as an editor my entire career, amongst other things, and so I offered to start helping edit the books.”

What started as an offer of help eventually saw Perkins become not only the editor-in-chief but eventually the owner. And, again, 215 had some success under Perkins, but it’s annoying to run a company named after something to which you have zero attachment.

“Frankly, I was sick of people coming up to a booth full of comic books and asking me if we were a tattoo parlor,” Perkins said. “So, about five years ago, I needed a rebrand, and if I was going to rebrand, I’m just going to rebuild the company from the ground up to make it something that is exactly what my vision would be.”

And that vision of change very much hearkened back to the weird and wild inspiration of books like Preacher. Other books that Perkins said were genuinely great (at pushing boundaries and landing like a gut-shot), but they weren’t getting the traffic and attention they needed.

“And the whole inspiration behind Invader comes from way back to when I went to my very, very first Comic-Con and I walked around and I saw all these amazing books from indie creators that were better than the stuff that I saw coming out of Image,” Perkins said. “And I would say, ‘How is that possible?’ Why is this guy not famous?’”

Perkins added, “And it’s like, ‘Oh, you know what? He must be doing the typical artist thing where, ‘I create, I finished my book, give me fame and money, please.’ But that wasn’t the case. These are guys who are going out there and doing the work and they’ve got a social media following and they’re touring around doing 30 conventions a year and they’re still just not breaking through the noise.”

It’s not just that the books were being ignored. Perkins said that the very business model at the core of many indie outlets is downright broken.

“And my experience, what little I have with the bigger publishers, I really, really don’t like the business model of ‘We’re going to put out 100 books a year, throw them against the wall, see which ones stick, and not put any effort into promoting the ones that don’t get some dumb luck natural momentum,'” Perkins said. “You’re basically betting on 10 books while sacrificing 90 books on the altar of profitability. It’s one group of people in a room deciding 10% of these 100 stories are going to be the ones that work. And that seems criminal to me at best.”

Invader, then, is different; it’s a “curated, boutique publishing house that puts the same effort behind every single book because we really, really believe in them,” as Perkins noted. It’s a model that focuses less on overwhelming readers with new books, but instead capitalizes on word-of-mouth.

“We wanted to build something where somebody would say, ‘Hey, you know what? I got this book from Invader and it was great,'” Perkins said. “And then it’s, ‘Now they’re putting out something that is a genre that I don’t actually read, but every single book I’ve gotten from Invader is of a high quality, why wouldn’t I take a risk?'”

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It may seem simple (and novel enough), but in some ways, Perkins said it dates back to his own experiences as a kid at his local comic shop. He’d be right there every Wednesday, where he’d “belly up to the indie table. And you flip through and like, ‘This is great.’ And you take it home and you’d read this thing that you’re like, ‘Holy shit. I feel like this was made for me.'”

Of course, deeply resonant books in the realm of indie comics don’t always mean sustainability.

“You want to tell everybody. Then you wait for that next book, and it’s an indie book, so it might not be next month. It could be six weeks. It could be two years. But then sometimes it’s never,” Perkins said. “There’s some books, I still think about it and you never heard from that creator again, because his book got canceled after two or three issues because of all the things we’re talking about. Now he’s working at a gas station in Pig’s Knuckle, Arkansas.”

That’s why Invader doesn’t just release exciting and cool picks, but the company tries to make the creation of said books a singular focus.

“I wanted to take as much of that off of the plate of creators as possible,” Perkins said. “I’ve worked in production and marketing and branding my entire career. My partners and I, we’re all creators as well. So we know this game, and we know the bullshit that you have to do. And we wanted to take as much of that away from the creators as possible so they can just concentrate on making good books. You have to be among the best at three different disciplines just for the standard. It’s not sustainable to have three careers.”

Part of that is that the promotional model for many creators is downright flawed. It’s a structure that places huge demands on these folks without little option for meaningful ROI.

“How many conventions do you need to do before that’s actually doing something? Unless it’s New York and San Diego, then its chance of making any progress is very low,” Perkins said. “If you do 15 shows throughout the year, well, that’s, like, a $40,000 bill. Tickets and printing up the books and the plane tickets and the hotels – that’s a lot of money to expect somebody to do.”

Although if we’re talking about things like ROI, it’s not always a concern for Invader. Rather, it’s about doubling down on that approach to support and uplift creators every time.

“I’m not going to allow that to happen here. If a creator keeps making the book, I don’t care that there’s low sales,” Perkins said. “I picked the book because I believe in it and I’m going to ride through.”

Not that big sales performances wouldn’t help everyone involved. Rather, Perkins and Invader seem more interested in the long-term. That’s why Perkins made the comparison to Sub Pop, a beloved, long-running indie record label from Seattle that’s not only discovered major bands (see Soundgarden and The Shins) but also served as a springboard for these same acts.

“We’ve had several creators who started out with us and then would go on to bigger things, which I’m not salty about at all,” Perkins said. “Obviously I would love it if they’d ride or die with us, but if you get an opportunity to make more money, do it. That’s what I want – I’m developing talent here. I’m not just picking books. We pride ourselves on when we work with a creator and they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this other thing though. It’s not like this thing. I don’t know if you’d do it.’”

And even if a partnership with a creative is only for the short-term, Perkins said “we can have a six-month relationship here and you’ll get a crash course. I don’t want somebody spending 10 years banging their head against the wall when I can tell them in an hour-long conversation.” The end goal, it seems, is to cultivate a better breed of comics creators – and that applies across the board.

“The one thing that I always think about is, funnily enough, [Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood],” Perkins said. “There is a character in there who wants to be a writer and his shtick is that he just keeps going around and going like, ‘Wait a minute – what about space mummy?’ He’s just throwing shit against the wall.”

Perkins added, “There’s the kind of creators who are just constantly going, ‘Well, maybe this would work.’ Or, ‘Oh, this is really popular right now. Why don’t I do one of those?’ I don’t want that. I want the book that you had to create, even if you knew you were never going to make any money on it. I can tell when I come across one of those books. And I think the reader can as well.”

Some of that dates back to Perkins’ own origins as a comic fan. He and his brother noted that one of them read the dialogue and then looked at the art, while the other operated vice versa. It’s a lesson about the intriguing nature of reading comics.

“You’re engaged, you’re part of it,” Perkins said. “And I think that just in general, that process alone is what makes comics special – it demands your engagement. I think people reward stories that they feel engaged by following creators wherever they go.”

For Perkins, that engagement also means knowing what they can’t do as a collective. He tells of a recent submission where he thought “this feels more Fantagraphics than us. Now, I can’t easily define what that means, but we all understood.” And so that’s partially why Invader’s deciding process is as earnest and direct as possible.

“We are hoping to continue to expand,” Perkins said. “We’ve doubled our output in the last year, especially since we started going with Lunar. But there’s still only so much you can do. But we pick our books literally by saying that if two out of the three people who are reviewing the books say, ‘I love this,’ we do it. It can’t just be because we think it’ll sell well; we get a lot of books that we think would sell well.”

Invader then operates on what Perkins calls a “‘rising tide lifts all boats’ approach.” Sure, they’ve worked with their fair share of big-time creators, but they’re just as likely to team with a shiny new rookie.

“My hope has always been that the one will help amplify the other, while the first-timers will now have a whole new audience to expose other people to as well,” Perkins said. “I’ve talked to a lot of my colleagues about this rebrand, and a lot of people said to me, ‘You should focus on one or two genres and really build your identity.’ And I thought long and hard about that and then said no.”

Because if you’re going to call your publishing enterprise Invader, you’ve really go to show that level of commitment.

“I don’t want to be constricted when I come across one [story] that I really feel deserves to be elevated and to be heard on a larger scale,” Perkins said. “So that’s part of what the Invader branding is. We’re constantly invading new spaces. We’re constantly trying new stuff.”

Check Out: The Devil in the Herd Kickstarter!

For instance, they recently went against some other folks’ advice to fund their first illustrated novel via a Kickstarter campaign.

“It was funded in six hours. It’s a project we love and people said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’ Bullshit; it’s words and illustrations,” Perkins said. “We’re now talking to a whole new audience that I hope will also come and check out some of our other stuff because another thing.” Added Perkins, “When Jennie Wood wrote A Boy Like Me – a young adult novel, not even illustrated, just a novel – she asked if we’d be interested. F**k yeah!”

They’ve also tried to use their available platforms and resources (like Kickstarter) to get clever and inventive with how they market and sell books.

“With the Animals Kickstarter we did [alongside creator Keith Foster], that story takes place in Olympic National Park,” Perkins said. “So we made up a fake park brochure that had circles of all the animal attacks that happened in the park. We had hints to future stories in the copy of the brochure. It was just something cool that we were talking about one day during a meeting and we wanted to put it together. I can’t do that generally doing the traditional distribution model.”

This devil-may-care approach has, as Perkins readily admitted, meant they’ve continually had to smash through people’s expectations and publish things that seemingly won’t work. All of those efforts to zig when others would zag became a vital component of Invader’s operating model. It’s not just about being rebellious, but rather trying to get people to question basic assumptions.

“We’ve put out a few books that people told us this is un-publishable, and for years our slogan was, ‘Weirder than is commercially viable at the moment,'” Perkins said. “I would like to think that we’re building a reputation that can break through that.”

Still, does Invader have limitations, or things they just won’t publish? Perkins sums it up by saying “No porn.” But beyond that, the skies are pretty much the limit, and the proof truly is in the pudding.

“If you look at a book like Ravage…it’s just a 100-page murder spree. It’s wordless. He just comes out of the woods and murders people for 90 pages,” Perkins said. “But the art is stunning and raw and visceral, and I couldn’t stop reading it. We put it out and it did not sell very well at the distribution level, but it was our No. 1 seller at conventions that year. Because if you pick up that book, you can’t put it down.”

Perkins readily believes that “anything can be done well. We want to take B+ [stories]…and do what we can to make them an A+.” That means not only letting creators focus just on creating, but avoiding trends almost entirely.

“I want to allow [creators] to explore the space in a way that is unfettered by financial consideration. Or even the back and forth, swaying trends of what’s popular right now,” Perkins said. “If you said X is super popular right now, and I’m going to make that book, it’s not going to be popular by the time you’re done. You can chase that forever.”

And aside from Ravage being a success for Invader, there’s other, equally important “wins” for the line. Take, for instance, artist Adam Cahoon, who Perkins while he was “managing a Trader Joe’s.” But when he teamed up with writer Mark Espinosa, the pair were able to deliver Greetings from the Maglev, this inventive, thoughtful sci-fi tale that is as fun as it is wholly prescient.

Added Perkins, “People didn’t publish that because they said Adam Ca-who?”

Or, Invader’s relationship with writer Steve Orlando, who Perkins said “started during 215 with us.” Despite Orlando being “trusted with some of the biggest names in comics, like Wonder Woman and Batgirl,” Perkins said no one took a chance on his YA graphic novel The Kitchen Witch.

“It’s just a gorgeous, heartfelt, touching, and well-written adventure story,” Perkins said. “And the fact that Steve Orlando, who was established, couldn’t put that out somewhere else, I couldn’t think of a better example of why this industry is broken on certain levels.”

If we can return to Perkins’ beloved Preacher for a second, it’s ultimately that he sees no real distinction between truly great and important stories.

“I always draw a parallel between things. I love Preacher. I love Lord of the Rings. They’re kind of the same,” Perkins said. “They’re both just this group of people on an epic and long adventure with this huge big bad that’s way off in the distance and how are we ever going to get there?”

That’s why Perkins said that he’s “desperately trying to save stories, as many as I can find.” He went as far as comparing himself to the “old woman who takes her inheritance from her husband’s life insurance policy and buys a farm and then just gets all the rescue dogs and rescue animals.”

It also means that Perkins and Invader have spent a lot of time thinking about “what is going to help make indie comics more prolific, more successful.” Part of it is continuing what Invader has done well so far: To change the hearts and minds of comics audiences. Perkins offered an interesting example that speaks to how people need to commit even more to fully and meaningfully exploring new and unknown stories.

“I go to streaming platforms, and I pick [a documentary] that I would never normally be interested in,” Perkins said. “And that seems like a recipe for being bored. But if a group of people find this thing interesting enough, then maybe it’s not.”

Perkins added, “I watched one [doc] about a chicken breeding show; I don’t give a f**k about that. My God, it was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen. People aren’t going to make a documentary, and put that time and effort in, if it’s not an interesting subject. It’s a great way to find something new and interesting and change your life.”

Obviously it goes deeper still, and Invader’s lineup will continually reflect more novel approaches. A big part of that for the future is more ongoing books/series, with the line having launched or are about to launch three such offerings: Jimmie Robinson’s Artillery; David R. Flores and Jarod Hunter’s Do Not Disturb; and T.S. Luther and Sam Gudilin’s The Digger.

“Previously, we stayed away from too many longer series. We would do one or two of those a year,” Perkins said. “Having more of that coming down the pipeline is something we’re very very excited about and a big part of that is how Massive indies program and Lunar has changed our landscape.” (The move to Lunar, Perkins said, is especially significant as they “struggled with [Diamond] for years.”)

In addition to those offerings, Invader is also doing more illustrated novels which were, once again, a surprising money-maker. They’re also banking on “a sort of imprint that we’re calling Invader Presents, which will be creative one shots of things that are 32 to 80 pages.” Perkins said they’re “something that you should just dive in and take a taste of. This isn’t a long graphic novel. This isn’t an ongoing series.”

But they’re also a way to hit back at one industry trend that Invader’s leadership hates to their very core.

“We pride ourselves in our printing as well,” Perkins said. “And it pisses me off, very frankly, to walk into a comic shop and see a $5.99 comic from Marvel that is 24 pages and it’s floppy as shit and you can see through the cover. And 16 pages are maybe actual comic.”

Perkins added, “What we’re thinking is if we put out a 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-page comic that is all comic, we can charge $5.99 or $6.99 for that. You’re giving the reader something, an alternative and a reason to say like, ‘Maybe instead of just Batman and Wolverine, maybe I check out something else because I can read this Batman comic in seven minutes.’”

But it’s not just about great deals and great stories. Perkins said that “if this industry is going to survive, we need to be going where the people are. And that is bookstores.” That means operating in a way that “we’re not taking away from either one [bookstores and comic shops],” and that involves a little added creativity.

“So we always make sure that the books deliver at the same time,” Perkins said. “All of our Kickstarters [also] have a completely different cover, and so comic shops are getting a different product.”

Ultimately, it’s about recognizing the tendencies and behaviors of their audience, and working in those parameters in a way that makes the most sense possible.

“The bottom line is there are people who are never going to walk into a comic shop ever,” Perkins said. “There are people who will never sign up for Kickstarter. We also sell them right on our website, too. You can never leave the house and get a book delivered to you. We want to get these books in as many hands as possible because I actually believe in them.”

And that’s likely what all of this work boils down to: belief. A belief in comics’ potential as a singular storytelling medium and larger communal interest. A belief in creators as much as consumers, and their desire to meaningfully support compelling and important stories. And a belief that a little hard work and the right attention can make all the difference.

With any luck, that belief can get Perkins and Invader into new and strange heights within comics. Nothing is ever certain, of course, but you just need a good story, a dream, a roadmap, and the time to make it all happen.

“I would love to be able to do a story of that length,” Perkins said of Preacher. “The only way that we could do that is if we had some sort of runaway hit. But I love that goal.”

Perkins added, “The thing I like about Preacher is they gave them the time. They gave them the scope to tell a very, very involved and complicated story that when it does end, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s satisfying.’ And it only happened because of time, money, energy, all that stuff. But it has to be something that is planned from the beginning.”

For more on Invader, head here. Meanwhile, the publisher’s latest Kickstarter is running now — Devil in the Herd sees a “faceless man [follow] a cattle drive, seeking justice for a long-forgotten sin. But justice comes in many forms in the West.” The campaign’s reached its initial goal ($1,888) during today’s launch, with everything winding down Thursday, March 5.