In today's comic book marketplace, it's hard to make shockwaves with readers. But over the past three years, one new player in the comics publishing game has tried to live up to its name by mixing veteran storytellers with often ignored ideas: AfterShock.

The series and original graphic novels published by AfterShock don't follow a market formula or sell themselves on a shared universe mentality. Instead, made a splash by promoting both well-known creative talent and high concept story hooks. AfterShock Comics has become a home for fan favorite writers like Garth Ennis, Cullen Bunn and Paul Jenkins as well as established art talent like Goran Sudzuka, Wilfredo Torres and Juan Doe -- and that's just barely scratching the surface of the publisher's impressively deep roster.

That approach comes in large part thanks to the AfterShock executive team, all longtime comic book veterans. Publisher and CCO Joe Pruett's credits go back over 20 years including his classic Negative Burn anthology. Editor-in-Chief Mike Marts has had multiple runs leading lines at both DC and Marvel. And recent arrival SVP of Sales and Marketing Steve Rotterdam has run his own creative agency as well as served on senior staff at DC.

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That trio spoke with CBR about what makes AfterShock a mix of old school comics creativity and formally experimental market player, and below the team digs into their outlook on exploring genres outside superheroes, why they're betting on the large graphic novel hardcover and how a combination of creators and concepts is an approach that can survive a soft market.

CBR: AfterShock is a very different player in comics. It's a newer publisher, but you utilize a lot of veteran talent since you guys are veterans yourself. You're not tied to a major media company, yet you've been able to put out a lot of titles early on. Most importantly, you don't seem to be the kind of player that's gunning for marketshare or talking aggressively about taking on Marvel, DC or other premier publishers in a head-to-head way. What would you say were your goals for AfterShock as a publisher overall?

Mike Marts: Right from the start, like you said, our goal was not to be Marvel or DC. It was not to overtake marketshare. We just wanted to tell the best stories possible from the best people possible. And whether that meant established pros like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis or newer voices like Marguerite Bennett, our goal was just to put the best quality product out there. If we happen to reach #3 in marketshare along the way, that'd be a great side effect. But that wasn't the goal in total.

Joe Pruett: Like he said, we're more concerned with telling great stories by great creators. We just want to grow naturally.

Steve Rotterdam: Yeah, when it comes to marketshare if you're telling good stories with good creators, you'll tend to grow naturally. That's how we're doing business right now.

You've done a variety of books in many genres – some superhero stuff, some horror, even war books. Was there a creative identity you were looking to establish?

Pruett: We weren't going into it saying, "We want a horror story or a superhero story." We just wanted good stories. So we went out and found an initial group of creators that we know and said the deal is, they do what they want. It doesn't have to be a horror story or a war story. If it's good, we'll publish it. We don't want to have any boundaries that way.

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Marts: It's exactly what Joe said. I think that we've been fortunate that all the different creators we've worked with have brought us different genres to play with. And we've been lucky that there's not much repetition. We haven't tried to set out and do too much in the way of superhero comics because we feel there's enough of them in the market already. It's the stories that come first, and we've been well represented all over the place.

Rotterdam: I came in late to the game and wasn't there for the AfterShock launch, but looking back on it and assessing the company and what it's assets were, one of the things I really appreciated, having worked at DC and a lot of other publishers, was that the folks at AfterShock were very secure at identifying their lanes and staying in those lanes. There was no attempt to try and go toe-to-toe with other publishers at our level who were dealing with creating shared universes and larger, ambitious initiatives which are very, very challenging and somewhat quixotic in trying to go up against DC and Marvel.

There's a sense of surety and comfort in the knowledge that the people at AfterShock and the people we're working with can say, "We're a place where you can come and tell the stories you've wanted to tell that you may have not been able to do in the way you wanted until now." The publisher is not a hands-off publisher, but it's not a micro-manager either. There's guidance and assurance and ways that the company works to get those stories out in the best way possible, but it's not overbearing.

I think creators have responded to that not just by coming on board but by repeatedly coming on board. There's a lot of places you can park a property, but there are certain kinds of stories where you can now say "That's an AfterShock story." Three years in, and we can say that now. The evolution of the company has just been phenomenal.

NEXT PAGE: AfterShock's Approach to the Comic Book Industry, Explained

CBR: I want to stick with the early days of the publisher before we get into what you have coming out right now. The early books AfterShock put out really seemed to fit the creators own personal brands. A book like Captain Kid was obviously a Mark Waid/Tom Peyer concept, and Jimmy's Bastards is title that could only be a Garth Ennis book. What was the response in the market to those early efforts? Was there an example from that first wave that taught you how AfterShock was going to work overall?

Marts: With the first wave of books, there were really two goals. There was getting the attention of the retailers and readers to show what the company was about and what our goals were, and then there was the secondary goal of actually getting these books and ideas out to the marketplace. That was actually pretty tough at the beginning. It took us a while to gain some traction and to get noticed. I don't want to say our first wave of books were sacrificial in any way, but I think that the first wave – after we take a step back and take a look at the broader view of the company's history – was an example where we didn't quite have the notice and popularity and readership that we do now. That being said, I think those are some of the strongest books that we've published.

But as time has gone on, and we've gained more readers and the trust of the retailers, it's been easier to launch books and to get attention in order for people to appreciate the types of product we're putting out.

Pruett: I agree with Mike. With our first books, we knew we didn't have Batman or Superman or Spider-Man, so we had to get attention by leaping into our address book and calling up some star creators. And that definitely did get us attention, but it didn't get us trust from retailers. There is a graveyard of publishers who came out the door and promised to be the best and biggest thing ever, only two years later they're all gone. The retailers have been burned too many times, and they don't necessarily trust new publishers and their slogans. So we've just been working on coming out with great titles from great creators, and over time, we've earned that trust. Our new titles now are getting more attention than we did at the start, and the support is there from the beginning. I'm pretty sure if we released those same launch titles today, they'd sell significantly better than they did at the start of the company.

I've noticed that after the first year of titles, you guys have been emboldened to do more long-running series rather than strictly miniseries set to be collected as standalone graphic novels. Was that something that grew out of the response to those first books?

Pruett: Honestly, that came from talking to the retailers more than anything. They just trust us more to keep going.

So what are your goals for AfterShock moving forward? You've got an established base of creators who are coming back for more like Garth Ennis and Cullen Bunn, and you're working with a variety of creators from Sam Keith to Jai Nitz. Is there a goal for what kind of material or what kind of creators you want to do more with in 2019?

Marts: I think it's all about the creative relationships. We established some great partnerships at AfterShock in the first few years. Like you mentioned, people like Garth Ennis have done multiple projects with us, as have Marguerite Bennett and Adam Glass. We'll continue to do work with people like Frank Tieri who's been a partner of the company for a while. At the same time, it's a balancing act. We attempt to bring in more new voices, and I think with each established project we launch with folks like Garth Ennis, there's also someone that we have faith in who we think will be a voice of tomorrow – a next generation superstar. That was someone like Donny Cates a year and a half ago. We approved his first project Baby Teeth before he became super successful on things like God Country and Redneck. That was a creative gamble for us that really paid off and proved to be a successful partnership. We're looking to do more of that – taking a chance on new people and their ideas.

Pruett: Not only do we take chances with creators, we take chances with format. This year we put out a 106-page oversized anthology hardcover in SHOCK to a very good response financially. We'll be doing more of that with the just-announced original graphic novel line. Again, that will be closer to the European oversized format of hardcovers with our core creators and new voices coming into the fold. But we're all about taking a chance on books as far as creative partners and formats.

NEXT PAGE: AfterShock Comics' Plans for Original Graphic Novels and the Importance of Taking Risks

CBR: Let's talk about those original graphic novels. I'm surprised that so much of the comics marketplace – particularly in the direct market – is focused on serializing stories first and then collecting them later. Have you gotten word from retailers or readers that people are becoming more interested in just going straight to a larger story with a bit more of a spine?

Pruett: Yeah. I think we're now in the Netflix generation where audiences keep saying "We binge watch our TV shows, and we binge read our comics." There's a lot more of a trade audience now. This is a format, like I said, that I think is a great balance in between [single issues and longer graphic novels.] It's the format in France. I was just over there and went to several bookstores, and these were everywhere. I'm a big book person myself. I like hardcovers. So it was Nirvana for me. We've been talking amongst ourselves for years that we should do this format, but we just never knew if it would be financially feasible to do so. It's a lot more expensive to print and if you strike up that money on the creatives and to get it printed, that's a chance you're taking. But it's once I think is worth taking and one we as a company think is worth taking. So let's see if we can make this a more prevalent format to try.

Rotterdam: The Euro-graphic novel is also enabling storytellers to tell their stories without having to squeeze their narrative into a traditional five or six-episode beats. They're not limited to that, and it provides them an opportunity to tell stories in a different way. That's what we're trying to accommodate.

Pruett: What we've said is, it's all about quality, because this format allows the creators to take their time doing the work and not be held down by that monthly deadline. Therefore, when we put a book out it's going to be done, ready to go and of high quality. It won't be rushed.

Let's talk about your most recent output. The Last Space Race from Peter Calloway and Alex Shibao is a title from creators known to some folks but still on the cusp of breaking wide. And it also feels like a genre we don't often see in mainstream comics – the outer space outpost – that is frequently on TV or other media. What made that combo the right fit for you guys?

Marts: Peter Calloway was one of the outside voices where we knew his storytelling voice from TV shows like Under The Dome and Cloak & Dagger and the first season of Legion. I had worked with Peter on Gotham City Sirens at DC Comics, and we knew he was a great storyteller and that his was a voice that needed to reach a wider audience. He came to us with several different ideas, and The Last Space Race was one we thought had a lot of potential. Stories that involve deep space exploration and traveling to Mars or beyond and stories about things like first contact – those are all ideas that are very popular right now.

Dead Kings is also a series that I think will draw a lot of attention both because Steve Orlando is doing so much high profile work at DC right now, but also because Matthew Dow Smith is very much a fan-favorite artist. So often we see writers being the selling point for comics, but as a merging of writing and art, this series seems to be showing off collaboration first. How did that team come together?

Marts: The beauty of the creative process and how we bring a project together is that sometimes it's writer-driven and brought to us as a pitch from the writer, but sometimes it's brought to us by two collaborators. That was the case with Dead Kings. Steve Orlando and Matthew Dow Smith came in together and had this idea for a futuristic, apocalyptic tale. Both of their voices were contributing equally to what the project would become.

We've had a few other projects like that in the past. Sam Keith and John Layman came to us together with Eleanore & The Egret, and we have a project coming up from Phil Hester and Ryan Kelly called Stronghold. We pride ourselves on being a creator-driven and creator-friendly company, and part of that is soliciting ideas that come from more than one person.

Another book with a unique creative pedigree is Lollipop Kids. I've met Adam Glass' son Aidan tagging along with his father at conventions over the years, and when I saw they were doing a book together, my first reaction was that it may fit into the young reader mold that's so popular in bookstores and libraries these days. Was that a factor you discussed as this project came together?

Marts: I think it's a combination of several different things you just mentioned. Certainly we were attempting to tell stories for different types of audiences. Lollipop Kids is something that will be appreciated by younger audiences and older audiences alike. It was also unique in that Adam and Aiden brought us the story together. Adam's been a friend of the family for a long time, and we've gotten to know Aiden over several years. So we knew he was much more than your average 12-year-old. He's a storyteller in his own right.

Pruett: We'll all be working for Aiden one day. [Laughter]

Marts: Exactly. So this story was brought to us by the pair of them. I think other publishers might have seen some risk in a story co-written by a 12-year-old, but we saw it as a gamble worth taking.

The most recent "season" of AfterShock books cover the gamut of creators and genres. What do you want to do to follow that up or build the next phase of books? I don't want to sounds like an eavesdropper, but I know I saw Mike having dinner with Tim Seeley at a con recently, so maybe he's got something else on tap. What's the overall game plan at this point in the company's life?

Marts: I think that it's us continuing to do what we do. We'll continue to put story first and accept the best ideas. At the same time, the industry being what it is makes it tough. It's a challenging industry right now, and it requires us to experiment. We're still only in the third or fourth year of the company's existence, so every step that we take is one of experimentation and trying out new things. There are times we tried something that didn't quite work. So we just try to learn from that and apply those lessons towards the next book and improve upon things. You've just got to be ready to adapt with the ever-changing industry and try new things as you go.

Rotterdam: To add a button that, risk has always been a part of AfterShock's DNA. The name speaks to that in part, but it's also not a company that has made its mark in playing things safe. We're not trying to steal share or grab people from other companies and have them come over to us. We're looking to expand the market by reaching out to reading audiences that are maybe underrepresented or underserved. That's part of things going forward. So risk is part of what makes AfterShock AfterShock. It's exciting, and we'll never have a formula that we replicate month after month.

I feel compelled to ask about longterm plans in terms of media adaptation or a Hollywood component. Are you actively trying to develop those things with the creators, or is the full focus on publishing for now?

Pruett: We're a publishing company first and foremost, and our focus is strictly on the publishing. If other avenues open up, that's icing on the cake. But that's not what we're about. We're about publishing great comics. And if you do that, other people will come around eventually.

Marts: We're fortunate in that so many of our comics that have worked well in the publishing arena have potential in other media afterwards. It's been nice that a few of those projects have been acquired for development already.

Rotterdam: Though it's not a distraction. Mike and Joe are fully focused on the publishing side of things. They're devoted to that, and I think it's evident in the material. These books are not auditions for TV series.