Following the success of Nocterra, co-created by Scott Snyder and Tony S. Daniel, Snyder's publishing imprint Best Jackett Press has entered a new distribution deal with Comixology Originals and Dark Horse Comics. Snyder will be joined by several all-star co-creators for an upcoming wave of eight Best Jackett titles that will be released digitally through Comixology before being published in print by Dark Horse. With this new partnership, Snyder plans for a more inclusive publishing line that benefits creators, readers, and retailers alike.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, Snyder explains how the partnership with Comixology and Dark Horse was reached, shared his hopes and goals with his publishing imprint, and teased what fans can expect in the weeks and months to come from the imprint's creations.

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Fresh off of the launch of Nocterra, with Tony S. Daniel, you've just announced an entire wave of Best Jackett titles that will be published digitally through Comixology Originals before being published in print by Dark Horse. How did this deal come about?

Scott Snyder: I've been working on a bunch of books for Best Jackett for a while. The books' [releases] are staggered: Some are already finished, some won't start until the end of the summer. I had most of them in the works in different ways before we started to talk to Comixology but what happened was, when the pandemic hit in March of last year, a lot of people I know went back to DC and Marvel so, for me, it was about how do I make sure this line can come out in a way where our priorities are still intact. We're still about trying new things and pushing the industry forward in cool ways and how do we retain the ancillary rights and make sure that the artists have a really strong wage, a rate that is competitive with DC and Marvel so they don't have to keep running back to that corporate home base to be able to supplement what they're doing for their own stuff.

In those moments, [more than a year ago], it was really hard to figure out a way to make all that happen. We figured out a few avenues to think about and one of them was Comixology. My partner at Best Jackett Will Dennis, who greenlit American Vampire and was a longtime Vertigo editor on Y: The Last Man and a bunch of amazing series, was like, "You're friends with Chip [Mosher] over at Comixology. They've done great things in comics and they're a good-faith partner in the way they've sponsored all these conventions we go to, like ThoughtBubble, to publishing people who might not have an opportunity at good rates, emergent creators."

I took a deep look at Comixology and talked to them and Chip was great. He wanted to show Comixology wasn't about digital competing with print but showing that we're all in it together, the same trades, graphic novels, manga, and anime are all part of one ecosystem and one can supplement the other and that's exactly where I am. It became about how do we set up a system by which each book can be considered on its own, both for digital and print.

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Some books, like Barnstormers, the historical fiction book I'm doing with Tula Lotay about a pilot in the Roaring Twenties who crashes into a wedding and winds up taking the bride from the wedding -- she wants to leave with him and the next morning he wakes up with her pointing a shotgun at him telling him to take her with him -- on this crazy adventure, we talked about doing it digitally as something more serialized where it would come out every week or however many days as an old-school comic strip doing it digitally and, in print, do it as a graphic novel.

A book like We Have Demons has a very heavy direct market appeal because it's Greg Capullo and me, [we could] do that in a single-issue format, variant covers and all that for print, but digitally doing it in a way where, if you subscribe to Comixology Originals, you get all three books as they come out for one price.

All of it was about how do we do something that allows digital to be digital and print to be print and show how these two things aren't competitive but actually supportive. You read the digital and want the print. The Book of Evil, which is part prose, you read it or listen to it on Audible but read it in prose in installments that isn't just monthly like comics in the direct market would go. How do you do that in digital in a way that gets people excited and how do you release it in print in a way that fits print for people that want to collect it, hold it and experience it communally with other friends?

All of that was part of the consideration in going into business with Comixology and Chip and everybody there and at Dark Horse -- Mike Richardson and Dan Chabon -- have been fantastic about trying to find out the sensibility of each book, saying how do you find something that'll be fun for digital and fun for print.

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I believe this is your first work with Dark Horse after working with Image Comics and Vertigo. Was the move part of a preexisting deal between Comixology and Dark Horse or did you want to consciously move forward with Dark Horse and Mike Richardson?

It was part of the preexisting deal but the preexisting deal was sort of still nascent when we signed up with Comixology to tie up all this stuff. It was a matter of talking to Dark Horse and making sure they were doing due diligence with a lot of things but also make sure that Dark Horse was a partner that was excited to experiment and try different things with different books for the direct market, that it wasn't just an assembly line of graphic novels. [One] book might be better to do in single issues while another might be better as one hardcover edition, adapting that for each project. The whole goal was to honestly create a deal that was elastic and comprehensive, with both Comixology and Dark Horse, that would allow us as partners to figure out, in good faith, what might make the most sense for each market.

You and I have hinted about some of these titles before, you've been working on these books for a long time. What made right now the best time to announce this wave instead of one at a time?

We have more titles that we're going to be announcing in the next six months in the direct market in different ways. One aspect of Best Jackett that I want to emphasize that's really important to us is financing and helping realize works by emerging creators in the industry in ways that will allow them to fully retain everything and decide what publisher they want to work with. All of that is a very big leg of the stool at Best Jackett and the deal with Comixology allows a kind of stability that makes that possible in that way.

A lot of it is it just feels like a moment when creators are empowered more than ever before. I love DC and plan on doing more stuff at DC and I love Marvel -- I'd love to go over there and have had those conversations and would love to write Wolverine and there are tons of characters I'd love to do over there -- but there's also more interest in intellectual property, big, robust mythologies and in series by creators than ever before from all kinds of different platforms.

You also have an audience that is primed for geek culture: My kids, from the tentpole of Marvel movies, understand all the superhero stuff and they also want to find things that are their own like Death Note or The Wicked + The Divine. My fourteen-year-old loves Locke & Key and my ten-year-old loves Steven Universe. They want properties they can feel ownership in that way and -- as for why now -- you make all these things that feel accessible, inclusive, robust and invite people in ways that allow them to feel some kind of investment in them.

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I feel like that was there from the beginning with the crowdfunding campaign for Nocterra, letting people in to see how it was made and give them a sense of investment in it.

Yeah, Best Jackett is a portmanteau of my two sons' names, Jack and Emmett -- we made it before Quinn was born -- but the idea was to be better players and allow a degree of transparency. My goal with Best Jackett is to give you a peek behind the scenes so you can see how comics are made and be a part of it from the ground up. Whether it's Nocterra and the Kickstarter where you get to see the process that we were sold with that book in Issue #1 or with Comixology where you get to experience the books in a way that the creators believe are the truest to form.

A lot of the things we're going to offer through Best Jackett, like teaching, are all about that. It's about demystifying it and letting you in and asking if you want to be a part of it. With the pandemic hitting right when we were starting, affordability is a really big question for us. If I were to do all the books in the direct market, it would mean, you wanted to read everything I did, you would have to spend $40-50 a month to read everything. With Comixology, you can pay $5.99 a month for a subscription and read everything and things like Joe Glass's book The Pride or American Vampire or Adora by Ariela Kristantina and Marc Bernardin -- Ariela is doing a book with me at Image called Chain.

There's a lot of possibility with the Comixology deal that lets us do our books here, secures a rate for the artists, allows us to retain the ancillary rights so we own the things ourselves. And Comixology has been a good partner with the direct market and comics in general, you can read our books for a reasonable price and decide if you want to pick them up in print. And my belief is they are all good enough in print that you would want to do that and support your local retailer. It's all one big system that is complementary and synergistic.

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I wanted to touch on you getting into teaching again because you had taught comic book storytelling before for various organizations. How is it getting back into that?

It's great! In August, there's going to be a big announcement about how I'm going to teach and how I'm going to set that up so it's affordable. My goal was to say to people that you could pay the price of a comic, maybe a little more, to get in the classroom. I'm trying very hard with Best Jackett to be someone who is operating in good faith in the community but also finding new ways of taking risks and doing things that might fail but are ultimately experiments where your heart's in the right place with it. With teaching, I might wind up teaching a lot of people for way less money than I could make but the goal is to say thank you back.

Best Jackett is about that. It's about letting me do the best books I can and offer them at an affordable price without gauging you, let you in behind the curtain to see how they're made, and get exclusive merchandise that pertains to these books that is affordable. It's a thank you. If there's a Best Jackett mantra, it's that. How do we say to the fans that have given us our dream job, thank you? This was a way to get it all to you in a way that's affordable and Comixology just seemed like a great partner for this phase of it.

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