Archaia Studios Press (ASP) Restructuring

No blog of a struggling new comic book artist can avoid having at least one entry devoted to the publishing aspect of comics. I have been very fortunate that Robotika was picked-up by Archaia from the first go around. Mark Smylie and Aki Lao, who selected Robotika to be part of ASP's initial line-up, are two of the most up standing guys I ever done business with, and after dealing with them for a few months, I started trusting them completely.

When the first mini series was published, ASP published 3 books: Artesia, Mouse Guard and Robotika. Now, three years later, ASP has more than 25 titles in their catalogue...that is not counting all the special collections and reprints. It was pretty awesome to see how Mark and Aki have built the company up.

From what I understand, Aki has decided to move on from ASP to pursue other endeavors. Change is part of life, and I am sure the fact that Aki works full time and has a wonderful family that he wants to spend as much time as possible, all contributed to his decision.

While Aki and Mark are trying to figure out how to fairly restructure the company, the publication of Robotika is suspended. This of course is a bummer, because I am very eager to share the last 100 or so pages of new material, but I am very hopeful that everything will work out just fine. ASP is continuing to do pre-press on issues 2 and 3, and I am almost done with issue #4 (the cover of which has already been colored by Joel Chua). In fact, the silver lining of this news is that I will be totally done with all the art and writing on the whole series before it will be published and I will be able to focus on trying to promote it.

Someone asked me if it is possible that Robotika will never be published...I guess so. Lots of weird unexpected things happen all the time and I am sure there are lots of comics that have been completed that never saw the light of day. I do trust ASP to come through this "restructuring" healthy and able to put out the rest of the books under their banner. I guess I'll just have to wait and see :)