At New York Comic 2023, we found ourselves on board for the Rocketship Entertainment panel! Founded in 2019, Rocketship is an indie publisher that works with independent artists who self-publish or produced their works through online platforms to help bring their work to print and connect them with other marketing and multimedia opportunities. They’ve worked with creators to put out over 50 consecutive Kickstarter campaigns, primarily adapting webcomics and print comics, and have recently launched a new kids-focused line called Bottle Rocket. Joining Rocketship CEO and publisher Tom Akel on the panel to discuss the company and their titles were Rocketship’s CTO Robert Feldman, Archia, ½ of the artist duo Very Very Bad Girls, creators of Born Sexy Tomorrow, Fred van Lente, co-creator of Action Philosophers, Fernando Pinto, creator of Gun Punch, and Leeanne M. Krecic, the creator of their most popular title, Let’s Play. This was Fernando’s first-ever panel, which got encouraging cheers from the crowd.
The panel began with an overview of Let’s Play, which is about the contentious relationship and budding romance between a game developer and a popular critic who left her a scathing review. Then, turning the mike over to Archia (who will henceforth be referred to by their nickname Ash), they mentioned how Born Sexy Tomorrow is the first series she made with Tapas, which helped them make volume one. The softcover is in retail now, while the hardcover will be available in the spring. They’d sold out of all the hardcover copies they’d brought to Artist Alley earlier that day!
Tom then asked Fernando to talk about his newest title, Gunpunch, whose logline asks the question “what if Green Lantern was a broke millennial?” The main protagonist has symbiotic armor that grafted onto him right after he got fired from his job, so he’s stuck looking like he’s at his job even as a hero, and because he sucks at his job he gets hurt. A lot. The series is a meditation on being an adult, having to do things you don’t like, and not making any money even though you’re getting beat-up everyday, but with aliens, guns, and a lot of dirty “not-great” language that he got the thumbs up for. Tom laughed out loud at the first issue, and felt it sits alongside their other titles Outrage and Darby in its maturity and absurdity. Rocketship will be Kickstarting Gun Punch this Spring, for both softcover and hardcover editions.
Next up to talk was Fred, who talked about both his series Action Philosopher and Eat Fighter, the latter of which would be formally announced as part of Rocketship’s slate in a few weeks. Tom couldn’t get a picture of for on his slides due to the poor internet connection in the Javits Center, but Fred joked he’d just show an image of it from his phone. Fred and his “brother from another mother,” Ryan Dunvaley, have been making Action Philosophers since 2003, and are excited to now partner with Tom and Rocketship. Action Philosophers reimagines different historical philosophers as fighters, the first volume “Hooked on Classics” focusing on the likes of ancient favorites like Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, St. Thomas, and Socrates; basically everyone from every Monthy Python song you’ve ever heard. They’d recently completed the Kickstarter for volume 2, “Omnipotence for Dummies,” which takes the story up into the early 19th century and includes Decartes, Machiavelli, Emanuel Kant and other Renaissance-era philosophers. Mary Shelley is also featured alongside her Frankenstein’s Monster; though she herself wasn’t a philosopher, she was the daughter of two. The idea is do a new story with each volume, and the third volume will be called “Modernity Bites,” which will bring things all the way up to the 21st century. The series was originally in black-and-white, but thanks to the Kickstarter, they were able to recruit Adam Wochowztski, who worked with them on The Comic Book Guide to History, to color the entire series. The Kickstarter for the third volume will be announced sometime next year.
Fred’s other series, Eat Fighter, is a murder-mystery series about competitive eating in a future where fast food has been banned. The federal government stopped trying to regulate guns and is now regulating food instead, turning the ATF into the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, and food. It’s a satire of sports movies, our obsession with weight and food, and everything involved in that. The series also features tapeworms, zombies, dinosaurs, kale pops, chilli barbeque, cannibalism, and monster truck rallies who devolve into Mad Max Fury Road-style races. Fernando, the artist of the series, got to draw a lot of weird stuff. The series is co-written by Fred’s wife, Crystal Skillman, who was also filming the panel. The series was originally serialized on Webtoon, and Rocketship is planning to do one big print edition for the entire run, though Tom notes that they may readjust after calculating the page count since they’ve made previously made mistakes with underestimating the size of a book before.
Just in time, Sanford Greene walked in late to the panel to talk about his work, and Tom instructed everyone to applaud for his arrival. Sanford, a multiple Eisner winner, talked about his Ringo Award-winning book 1000 – an amalgamation of all the fantastical folk tales and ghost stories and imagining if they existed in real life. The protagonist, Dragin Sun, is outcast from Dragon Realm, needs to commit 1000 acts of repentance – though not one act of vengeance per volume as Tom jokes about. The entire run will be collected in a 9 x 9 inch square bound format, and will be a meaty book with rounded pages and slipcase edition, which was Sanford’s request. Tom jokes that it will be absolutely gorgeous when it comes out… in seven years. The book will begin its crowdfunding campaign on Zoop as soon as Sanford finishes the cover for it. Sanford self-depreciatingly jokes that “if there’s a cover in the front, it will be even better.”
Tom then spotlights his own work, which he’s often forgotten to before in previous panels. Tom co-created his webtoon Back Channel with Stan Lee, and it follows the story of Tom Tennor, a hacker taking down systemic problems in prison system, and naturally since it’s a Stan Lee join he gets super power along the way, and hijinks ensue from there. It’s really a YA drama about Tom’s relationship with father, and has been re-edited and reformatted for print, with several section rewritten to make better sense in the printed format. Tom acknowledges that they’re behind on fulfillment for the Kickstarter campaign for the book, which was several years ago, but the book will be available on Amazon and in-stores in just a couple months.
As Tom was discussing his work, Sanford left the panel as quickly as he came in, “like a ghost” as Tom noted. Fred joked “was he actually here,” while I chimed in that “maybe it was all a collective delusion.” Leanne concurred that maybe he was a group hallucination.
The conversation then turned to ask the panelists of the challenges of creating, formatting, structuring, and pacing webcomics and then going back and forth between them and the printed format. Ash personally loves the formatting creativity of webtoons, in terms of scrolling and long vertical panels and how that affects the timing and pacing. The challenge is turn how to turn the long, beautiful panels of webtoons into a print book. If you’re thinking about making a printed edition on the backend, Ash recommends thinking about formatting choices for both Webtoon and print from the start. She originally had zero plans for a print version, so it was hard for her to do it on her own, it was so frustrating it made her want to jump off a building. She initially gave up after episode 4 until Rocketship offered to help her adapt it for print. Nowadays, she storyboards with print in mind, and then slices up the panels for Webtoon format. She feels that storyboarding for page makes for a better print product if you plan it that way from the start.
Fred, meanwhile, has been making “dead tree” comics for 15 years, and that trains you to think about your page and panel layouts in terms of page turns, with big reveals, splashes, and spreads. But those elements don’t apply to webtoons, where there’s no pages, so you have to approach and think about it differently. He complemented how Fernando did a great job reformatting the panels of Eat Fighter for print, taking the long scrolling format of reading on your phone and converting them horizontally. The challenge is to reformat without shrinking panels, and Fred laments how he once accidentally deleted all his files trying to do it himself, which is why he was happy to work with Tom and have Rocketship take care of it.
Leeanne grew up reading manga, to the point she actively has to remind herself to not read right to left with US comics. Because she is a tremendous nerd, she has worked in and been playing with how to run an action script that will automatically convert a comic drawn in Clip Studio into a vertical scrolling webtoon format on your phone. She wants to be able to build that, because while she appreciates Rocketship’s help and they have her blessing, she wants to be more personally involved because her work is a part of her. She gravitated to the webtoon format because she was previously a web designer and programmer, so working with apps, developing them, and identifying what they’re capable of.
On the advantages of the webtoon format, Leanne has seen more people intimated by getting into comics get settled in with webtoon because it is like reading a storyboard. Trying to read American comics or manga can often be an overwhelming experience because a reader might not know how to read it, whereas webtoon’s format holds your hand in a way. But there are also a lot of readers with sensory issues or disabilities who don’t like reading on digital devices. That’s why it is important to her to increase accessibility to her comics as much as possible, and she opted to publish her books in print knowing that would expand her readership. She has also thought about ways to tell her story to the visually impaired, and feels she doesn’t have a good reason not to try and make her comic as accessible to as many people in the formats they’re most comfortable with.
Fernando joked how his comments wouldn’t be as salient as Leeanne’s, but wanted to talk about things from the art perspective. Like Fred said, the way the storytelling functions is different between the page and the scroll, and you have to think about how to elicit the best dramatic effect in both format. You have to really think about composition, because the placement and positioning of panels is very different, and that was a difficult adjustment for Tom as first. Tom notes that a lot of his students nowadays get their start in reading comics from webtoons, so it’s valuable to have them follow the comic from screen to page, and the process of doing that has been a great experience for him.
Tom notes that all the artists on the panel got their start in the nascent days of the webtoon boom, but feels not a lot has changed in terms of platforms and the format since webtoons first gained popularity in the past decade. Tom asks the panel what changes they’ve seen in the market that he hasn’t, and how they would like to see the business evolve as the industry reaches critical mass.
Leeanne believes there are so many more untapped possibilities with digital comics she’d like to see. With Let’s Play, she has dabbled with multimedia techniques with her comics by including sound and animation. She joked how including a modem activation sound at the end of one of her comics freaked half a generation out because they’d never heard it before and thought it was like a disaster alarm going off, while other people who’ve never heard the sound of a modem going off on their phone thought it was hilarious. She believes there’s potential to include AR and VR immersion, like how in the Naver version of the platform you can use those tools to look around a room in a panel like it a 3D environment, and immerse the reader in actually being a part of the narrative experience. She wants to see more of that and wants the platforms to see that too, and that there are enough creators who’ll take advantage of those tools to justify the manhours and expenses of developing them. She also thinks it’d be cool to incorporate Webtoon format with ARGs and have fans hunt around the internet to find the next part of the story.
Ash thinks one of the most amazing things about comics is that it’s one of the few mediums that one person can do by themselves. She wants to challenge and evolve what webcomic storytelling can be to use the format to push the story format in a way only comics can do, not just to make it like other mediums like video games and concept albums, because comics is itself still a medium with so many variations and possibilities to experiment with.
Fred jokes that since he writes a comic about food, he wants smells as a sensory addition to reading comics. Fernando is unsure if comics and smells is a cocktail that mixes well, while Leanne chimes in that they should send the idea up to Doordash, to which Tom smelled a sponsorship callout.
Rob also appreciates using the interactivity of the webtoon format, and recounts how his Cycko KO was an almost fully animated Hanna Barbera-style scrolling Webtoon that took advantage of that really well. Tom uses sound and animation as storytelling devices in meaningful ways that you can’t do in print, and had to reverse engineer those moments to figure out how to convey important story points as effectively in print form. While Rob loves interactivity, he feels it is still lacking in most webcomics, and it’s kind of shocking that more of those tools don’t exist in the format yet.
Tom has attempted several times to do choose your own adventure comic in print, but the page count is usually too unwieldy, but thinks using that format for a webtoon would be fun to play. Ash recommends maybe doing it as a visual novel, since the images accompanying the text still feels kinda like a comic. Tom is currently doing a choose your own adventure book about the history of choose your own adventures. He wrote every panel as a branching point, and when he sent the script to Ryan, he told him he wanted to murder him, because it was the craziest thing he’d ever seen. Oni Press owns the official license for choose your own adventure books, and offered a webinar that Tom took, which made him realize he was doing the format wrong and led him to revise the script to be much more doable and less rage-inducing for Ryan. The book will be titled Game Master: History of RPG, timed just in time for D&D’s 50th anniversary The Kickstarter will arrive in the spring, though neither the book or its publisher not been officially announced yet.
Tom then turns the conversation to the most hot-button topic in the comics field in 2023; AI. Rocketship has a strictly no AI policy when it comes to comic creation, but Tom asks the panel whether they see a future for AI in the industry that’s not toxic.
Fernando thinks that format-wise it could work, in terms of automatic scrolling or jumping or converting vertical pages to horizontal automatically. It’d be a lot of work, but expand the audience for titles. Fernando feels it’s not AI that’s the problem, it’s the way it’s being used. You can do cool stuff with it, but the way people are using it now is just stealing, and the stealing is the problem. Fred wonders if AI has at least figured out the finger problem, and Fernando acknowledges that it’s starting too. Everything still looks like it’s made of bronze, but at least they have the right amount of fingers. If AI can be used to make the comics reading experience better, that’d be great, but stealing other people’s art is just bad.
Leanne has very strong feelings like AI. She has degree in computer science, and has never seen tech bros take the high ground. Ever. AI will be a thing, so she believes artists will need to understand the tech better than the tech bros do. She is in support of AI as a tool to make her life easier but not ti take something away from someone else, to hurt anyone else, and not make her weaker for relying on it. She notes that whenever she needs a reference, she hits up Pinterest and pins like sixty things, and then formulates a picture based on all of these references and brainstorms ideas. AI could be used to help sort through reference images on the internet rather than an amalgamation. Rather than take an existing image and say “I made this,” it would be like taking it and saying “I like this” and creating a pile of things used for inspiration to make something new, encouraging your creativity rather than replacing it. Ash remarks that AI is aggregating all these images, but it doesn’t show you the images it’s borrowing from, just the conglomeration it produces. But there’s a way to use it to collect images for inspiration rather than to regurgitate a shoddy derivate of them. Leanne has played with D&D name generators to come up with name ideas for many years, but has never seen them come up with a name that made her go “Yes, this is what I want!” Rather, she uses it as a tool to figure out what she likes and come up with her own idea, as opposed to some creative output as a product. AI art is going to be a thing, even though the people pushing it don’t really care about artists. She doesn’t believe we can put that genie back in the bottle. But, she thinks it can be used as a tool for individuals to use in their development as artists, though she acknowledges that’s kind of a rose-colored glasses view. At least for now, AI art is not copyrightable, though there’s no guarantee how long that’ll last. Fernando laments that’ll end when the lobbyists decide they want it too.
Tom is not impressed with AI from a writing point of view, because to get the results you want, the prompt you input has to be so specific you’ve already basically written the thing you wanted the AI to write in the first place. Doesn’t think it’s a useful tool that makes his life easier for him right now. Rather, it’s a lot of “Emperor’s New Clothes” for him, the third in a line of new things pushed by tech bros in the last couple years following crypto and NFTs. They’re all bad-faith uses of tech by tech bros, so it’s hard to have any faith in them. Leanne acknowledges how far AI has come in just a year, and Tom concedes he is open to revising his opinion if the tech is improved. But for the moment, it’s just a giant “meh” for him.
Robert asks the panel if they’ve seen the Chinese startup who is developing a Webtoon app that’s driven by AI-generated content. Tom teaches for a company based in Spain called Domestica, and someone from that company approached him to make AI Webtoon comics for their platform. While he’d be compensated, they wanted him to promote that he made comics using AI. Tom decided he needed to check out what their art was like if he was going to sell-out and risk becoming ostrachized a total pariah in his community, and it was lame, It was bad version of Chibi manga art, and the company wanted him to make his comics with this cutesy sticker-like art. But what makes comics awesome is artists, and different kinds of artists, so Tom declined to work with them.
Fernando believes corporations will use AI as much as they can, and sees a company like Disney start using AI to make their comics. However, he believes that will put more value in indie human-created stuff, and will cause people to appreciate those comics more. While human-made art may become more a niche market, there’ll be more value to it, like a 5-star restaurant vs McDonalds. Leeanne is also hopeful that people as a whole will support human related content every time over AI art. There’s always swinging pendulums for things like this, and while AI might be a novelty at first, people will still come back and want human-created stuff. Ash concurs there will always be an interest and demand to meets with artists IRL, to collect books, and have their books signed by a creator’s hand. That’s not going away.
Even so, Leeanne believes artists have a responsibility to protect themselves and their work and be educated on what’s going on. In that vein, Ash admits she has tried to train AI on her own in a program called Allora. She thinks it could be interesting as tireless assistant, and could be used by emerging creators who can’t afford high-quality assistant. Leanne concurs that AI-powered writer’s assistants like Grammerly are useful for proofreading and correcting grammatical errors. If there’s an AI-powered system that doesn’t steal art, or if there’s a way to get percentage of the royalties from AI-generated art, that would be better than how it’s working now. Though, there is already a way to do that, because the AI companies know what information they trained it on, but they just don’t want to pay out anyone except themselves. Despite these AI companies charging people for stolen images that they do not own.
The good news, Fred chimes, is AI companies are hemorrhaging money. Microsoft alone is losing millions and millions. Fernando also believes that people who want to write and draw comics will continue to do so no matter what. The issue is whether readers will still buy them. Tom fears dumb readers, especially in the webtoon industry, particularly readers under the age of 15 who’re just consumers. Ash disagrees, arguing that they’re often the audience that pushes back on AI most and tell off all the adults. Fred notes that there is a lot of torch-wielding going on of suspected AI artists.
An audience member asks Ash about the AI-program she’s training, Allora. They ask whether it would be acceptable to them as artists if someone were to use an AI to create a comic in their art style so long as a percentage of the royalties go back to them. Ash’s first instinct is to respond no, while Fernando shrugs “sure, free money is free money.” Leeanne acknowledges this is an hypothetical, but says that it would have to be for a big sum, and even then, she doesn’t think she would agree to it. Tom argues that as an artist, the existence of a tool that could replicate your art style risks lowering your page rate. Leeanne pushes back at this, saying that covers of songs don’t devalue the original, though Tom retorts that’s an interpretation rather than a regurgitation of the same thing. Fernando says he might consider it when he retires and can’t draw himself anymore if he needed to feed his family, but right now, if you want a comic drawn in his style, you should just call him and see if they can work something out. It makes sense, but it makes him feel weird, but talk to him in five years and see how he feels then. Ash says it’s off-putting to see AI generate art so fast that she knows humans would take much longer to create. This new technology is so enmeshed with human output it’s hard to separate the human element from the tech, which is unsettling. Leeanne acknowledges that they are all established creators, so they may not need to go this route, but some starving artists might be on board with paying for that.
Tom recounts story of a novelist friend of his who emailed him a month ago to show him the cover art he’d commissioned. When Tom asked him where he got it from, he replied that he didn’t know, he just hired a guy off Fiverr and paid him a few hundred bucks. Tom immediately clocked that his friend got scammed by someone passing AI art off as his own original work and had to break the bad news to him, pointing out all the obvious art errors when you zoomed in on the image, including a hand being drawn backwards. The image was also only in 72 DPI, and he was not sent a high-res. His friend emailed the guy he hired back and they admitted to using AI. Unfortunately, the anonymity of Fiverr provides a fertile breeding ground for these scam artists to sucker people. Tom hooked his friend up with another artist he knew instead.
Leanne recounted how Disney got in hot water for the credits of Secret Invasion using AI in stock photos, though more specifically it was the company they hired to make the title sequence who used it without their knowledge or permission. Regardless of who was at fault, everyone agreed it looked awful. Ash notes AI is being used for animation inbetweens to create images between keyframes, which Fernando finds acceptable if you were the one who created the original characters and images in the first place, and Tom retorts there are already 3D animation tools that can do that. Fernando lambasts Corridor for saying they changed animation with their AI-inspired anime when all they did was rotoscope and steal from existing anime.
Circling back to their final thoughts on the topic, Ash agrees with Leeanne that artists need to educate themselves to protect themselves and their stuff from what’s going on, know what to do, and keep their eyes on it. They lament how Deviantart, Twitter/X, Artstation, and other platforms don’t let you opt out of AI data mining. Tom wants Webtoon and other art platforms need to take a stand against AI to make sure art theft can’t happen. Ash is frustrated why they don’t just give artists to opt in or not, and why they didn’t make it a consensual exchange from the beginning. Fernando points out the problem of whether reposts from other accounts would be considered when opting out, which Leeanne emphatically calls straight theft. Ash believes they should only be able to use it if they directly contact the artist. If they’re going to get huge amount of free labor out of this opt in, the right thing to do is to directly email the artist to ID them and get a system in place for royalties, and they should have done that from the start.
Leeanne jokes how they all have strong feelings about this topic, evidently. Tom apologizes if the AI conversation wasn’t interesting for the audience since it wasn’t on the agenda, but the crowd reassures him that it was very informative and a good conversation, and Fernando appreciated how it brought up a lot of things about the issue that evokes strong feelings.
Tom closes out the panel by asking the panelists what have been the most exciting things they’ve seen at the con or just in general going forward this year in comics. Fred is doing collabs with YouTubers that circumvents the direct-market and book market and goes direct to consumers with a crowdfunding component involved. He’s curious to see how going direct to YouTube fans and other sources of fandom will turn out in generating excitement for comics outside of fan realms. He’s been worried that people have been getting too balkanized and falling into little bubbles of fandom, making it harder for new comics and creators to break out. He feels they all want to break out into the larger world, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to do that.
Meanwhile, Ash has been working with her friends to recreate webrings, linking sites and webcomics together through tags. Tom notes how this could be a good strategy for resolving the discovery problem new comics have, as marketing is difficult for webcomics creators. Fernando has been walking the floor and seen a lot of cool stuff outside of the mainstream, including a lot of cool stuff going on that he thinks will end up on Netflix five years from now. Fernando recommends people get on the ground floor of new creators and new writers at comic cons. He has discovered a lot of new writers and stuff he didn’t know about that he’s excited to check out and get to know. Besides Rocketship’s slate, which is awesome, Tom is excited for Distillery’s model and Ghost Machine. Rocketship is completely creator-owned publisher where creators own 100% of the rights to their work. Tom likes that as a model, thinks that’s the way it should be, and wants to see more new publishers and the industry turn in that direction.
Tom’s closing comment elicited a final question from a comic creator in the audience named Bob, who brought up the concept of exclusivity, where an artist or writer is tied to a specific publisher or outlet. Bob asked how they feel about how that model works for creators and impacts readers. Tom feels that if creator is compensated appropriately, it’s fine, but otherwise it’s not good. While he acknowledges why rights to specific comics need to remain exclusive, he believes creators should be free to make own choices about who they work with.
Fred was Marvel exclusive creator for two years, and while he didn’t regret it because it gave him a nice raise, part of the reason people sign you up with an exclusive contract is so no one else can have you, whereas it’s nice to have multiple publishers and safety nets and to have your portfolio be as diverse as possible. To be a working creator, you kinda need to have that. So he doesn’t think he would sign an exclusivity agreement with anybody ever again, because “I love my freedom!” Tom jokes that he’s working with Rocketship so much he’s kind of exclusive with them by default going forward.
Fernando acknowledges that it depends on the creator, but personally, he wants to make as many comics as he can with as many people as he can and as weird as he can in different styles and formats. It depends on who you ask, since he knows some people who would love to work on Spider-Man forever. But that freedom works for him and is more fun and creatively liberating, and he doesn’t want to limit himself. Tom feels not every publisher needs to have exclusivity with their artists, since they occupy specific lanes or niches, so it’s not always going to be effective. It makes sense for Marvel and DC, since they’re trying to keep their talent away from each other, and those contracts are important.
Bob clarified his concern that it’s not just Marvel and DC doing these things anymore, but independent creators who proclaim they will only publish their comics with specific publishers, or an artist will only make art for a specific creator. Fred notes that such proclamations are a marketing ploy, a gimmick to help move their stuff and increase individual sales, which he’s sympathetic towards since it’s tough being an individual creator or a start-up publisher. Tom feels doing it is ok, so long as it’s not forever. It can often boil down to an artist pitching three books to a publisher, the publisher agreeing to distribute all three, and since that’s all the artist reasonably has time to work on for the next two years they just say they’re exclusive to that publisher. Fernando adds on that having a contract makes it easier for the bank to see you as a real person and lend you money to get a house, and other benefits that come from a contract like health insurance is nothing to fault. There could be a lot of different reasons or factors for why an artist might want to sign an exclusivity contract with a publisher.
The panel concluded at 7pm exactly, with Tom thanking the panelists for their time and promoting the Let’s Play spotlight panel the following morning. TAt this panel, they celebrated the ending of the webcomic’s “third season,” the final one that will be published on Webtoon due to creative and financial disagreements, the print release of the fourth volume, which compiled the final chapters of the “first season,” and announced an anime adaptation of the series to be produced by OLM, best known for their work on Pokemon, and is the studio behind the breakout anime hit of the Fall 2023 season, The Apothecary Diaries. With the soaring success of Let’s Play and an existing slate of comics and creator adding fuel to their fire and crowdfunding campaigns to launch, the sky’s the limit for Rocketship’s future, and I’m looking forward to seeing them rock it ship-shape and shoot for the moon!
