Journey of a wannabe editor

Why start a publishing company when you're a well-paid developer?

Behind Happy Misfits Publishing is a guy named Steeve (hey, that’s me!). The road to start my own comic book publishing company was a long and bumpy one. It all started when I was 11. I’m turning 35 in about a month and in between I got to study literature, go to University to learn Japanese, find the time to forget it, work as a journalist, become a Starbucks barista, then start working in IT and become a developer. And now, publishing. Since I started this crazy endeavor, people often ask me “how does it work?”, “what do you do exactly?”. We’ll get to that. But, before we do that, let’s start with the most important question: why?

Why on Earth would someone in their right mind try and print stories on paper and then try to sell it in this day and age? 

(if you happen to receive this newsletter in both English AND French, which is probably the case once you subsribed to the newsletter, you can follow this link where you’ll find out how to unsubsribe from the language you don’t read)

I grew up in a rather violent environment in Paris’ suburbs. The ones famous for the 2005 French riots for those of you old enough to remember it (if not, this wikipedia page sums it up pretty well). There, you learn quite early not to expect a lot from life. People tend to be poor and turn at a young age to violence and criminality to take what they can’t afford.

I understood pretty quickly that I wasn’t cut out for stealing purses and dealing weed. Sadly, I wasn’t the brightest student either. School didn’t interest me. The only thing I liked to do as a kid was hang out with my friends and come up on the fly with crazy stories I would tell them.

Shit about aliens abducting me, secret agents asking me to be their double agent at school or stray cats talking to me… I watched a lot of tv. Of course, my young friends knew it was all made-up, but at least we didn’t notice time passing by. 

I had two talents: talking and inventing stories.

At age 11, my best friend’s older brother, who was a comic geek, showed me his Wolverine comics collection. And, oh boy, did a whole new world open to me. But when I was done reading the comics he had, an issue came up: I wanted to read more and comics are expensive. And my immigrant mother who barely earned enough money to make us live couldn’t afford that kind of hobby.  

So I started stealing comics. Robbing people was off-limits, but stealing at the mall? 👀

(On that note, as I understand not everyone who loves reading can afford a 15 bucks book, some of our books will be available digitally as “pay what you want” files on our website once it’s online, sometime next month.)

I got to discover the mundane life of Peter Parker, the fight against intolerance the X-Men were leading, Bruce Banner’s schizophrenia… A whole universe, 40 years in the making, was at the tips of my fingers. My young mind was on fire. I couldn’t have enough of these stories. We’re talking about a time when superheroes movies weren’t exactly a thing. A time when knowing Thanos’ backstory wasn’t cool (I SWEAR it can be considered cool by some now that an Avengers movie got to be the highest-grossing movie ever for some time). 

I felt like I was in the know. As opposed to the masses of profanes who were content with the shit tv channels fed them and had no idea what they were missing. I was proud to have found the entrance to this amazing world. I admired the people who came up with these incredible tales. And soon enough, I started dreaming about becoming one of them.

I knew how to tell stories. Now, I had to learn how to write stories. Two wildly different things.

So, I started writing stuff about my life, imagining new adventures for my favorite characters and I started paying attention to literature classes in high school. Trouble is, you can write all you want, at an age when the only thing grownups are expecting from you is to choose a career, it’s not that easy to find the way which will lead you to a creative life.

I didn’t want to do anything besides writing and chilling. So I improvised. Peter Parker worked for a newspaper. You’re paid to write as a journalist. I loved mangas too and what little I knew about Japanese culture. So I made up a career plan on the fly. After graduating from high school I would go to University to learn Japanese, after what I would go to journalism school and then become a correspondent in Japan. Easy peasy, right?

So I learned Japanese, got good enough at speaking it to talk with the people over there and traveled to Japan. Then, I don’t exactly know how, but I got to enter a journalism school. Surrounded by money, I discovered a whole alternate universe. One where the words “diplomatic immunity” are a thing. I struggled to fit in and find my first internship as a journalist. But I wanted it enough to make it happen. I worked as a journalist for a brief time. Long enough to stop practicing Japanese and forget 80% of what I had learned about it. 

At one point, I started writing for a website about US comics. It allowed me to meet and interview some of my favorite writers and artists in the industry. Galvanizing experience. But I realized that documenting what these guys did wasn’t what I wanted to do. I remembered that I wanted to do what they did. So I dropped journalism, started working at a Starbucks so I could still pay rent and started a webcomic with an artist I met at a bar (the first of many encounters of that kind).

The webcomic is now offline, but at the time it went on for about 6 months. We published one page a week on a dedicated website and had around 1000 readers a week. It was a great experience. But after 6 months the artist and I went our separate ways and the webcomic stopped abruptly. I was 27, had been working as a barista for more than 2 years and didn’t know what to do with my life. I had ideas of stories I wanted to tell, but always in comic form and I didn't know how to draw, didn’t have any money to throw at artists and was discouraged by the way the comic book industry worked in France. 

27 and never had I earned more than minimum wage. So, once again I put my dreams aside, looked around me, and decided to do what many of my friends did in order to have a comfortable life: learn how to code.

Developers are to modern society what wizards were to the middle age. What you do is obscure enough and people are credulous enough to think you deserve to be paid as if you were saving lives. Hell, you understand how the startup model works, you get to be paid WAY more than people who actually are saving lives. 

I worked as a developer for nearly 7 years. During those years I learned how to code decently, how startups work, where the money comes from, what the internet is made of and a shitload of other things. I also got to earn enough money to hang out in bars more often than in my twenties. And there I met lots of talented people. People who were as skilled as the artists whose work I read on a daily basis. Skills they didn’t do shit with. 

Why?

Because society taught them that art isn’t a career choice. That, at best, you can be published but still need to have a day job to make ends meet. That most of the time it isn’t worth more than any other hobby.

Then, sometime last year, I decided I had put my dreams aside for too long. That I wanted to take a shot at telling my stories. That I wanted to prove to the talented people I had met, and those I would meet along the way, that it is possible to get respected AND earn money as an artist. 

In the span of three months I started Happy Misfits Publishing and printed my first comic book which will be available on our dedicated website in a few weeks. During those three months I once again learned lots of things. But I’ll talk about it in another piece, this one is already long enough.

Why am I telling you about my life in a newsletter about the publishing industry? 

So that you can understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s easy to forget your dreams, but never too late to remember them as long as you’re still breathing. I want to tell my stories, but most importantly, I want to make it easier for young artists and writers to get published (and when I say young, I’m not talking about age). I want them to get a fair share of the money people will invest in their stories so they won’t be discouraged by the time it takes to create new worlds. I want to try and change the way this industry is perceived. I want to help bring a bit of magic to this grim world for a new generation.

And I hope many of you will be along for the ride.