C. Spike Trotman started Iron Circus Comics 10 years ago as a self-publishing imprint when she was making the webcomic Templar, Arizona. She’s since expanded, putting out books of her own (Poorcraft), along with editing and publishing anthologies ranging from erotica (Smut Peddler) to horror (Sleep of Reason) to science fiction (New World).

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This past year was the biggest yet for Trotman and the Chicago-based Iron Circus. The company now has a book distributor and is making inroads into bookstores and other venues. Iron Circus has published a number of great books like Letters for Lucardo, Yes, Roya, As the Crow Flies: Volume One and the upcoming Crossplay, and collectively Trotman has raised more than one million dollars on Kickstarter.

The list of people in comics who are both talented creators, insightful editors and savvy businesspeople is very short, but Trotman is on it, and, as made clear in her conversation with CBR, she isn’t slowing down.

CBR: One reason we wanted to talk is that over the past few years you’ve Kickstarted books and you’ve collectively raised more than one million dollars. Which is a big deal. And the big reason of how you got there is that The Complete Girls with Slingshots has been a really big deal. Although, I’m sure you expected it to be a big deal.

C. Spike Trotman: I knew it was going to be big; I didn’t know it was going to be over a quarter million dollars big. I had my fingers crossed for $200,000, and it just blew completely past that.

You’ve put out a lot of books and you spend time on the production, on taking care of creators, but this is a bigger project for a number of reasons.

It’s something I feel like I’m more prepared for than I ever have been before. It’s a definite step up for the company. We’ve put together some pretty fat anthologies. We’ve put out a 360-page anthology before, but this doubles that. It’s not just an anthology, it has a slipcase. We’re talking about will it be fabric covered or faux-leather covered. It’s going to be full color and sumptuous and the final send off for a beloved project. A lot of care is being put into pre-production. This is not for the person who has a half hour to kill before they head home from their trip to the city and wander into a comic shop. It’s for people who know and love Danielle [Corsetto] and know and love her work and they want something that will last forever, essentially.

Outside of how much you raised for the project, this past year felt like you leveling up in a few different ways.

Very much so. Getting distribution for the first time is such a big deal. It has opened my eyes to traditional publishing because I have no training when it comes to running a publisher. Everything I learned I learned in the trenches. [Laughs] I had no clue about basic publisher stuff because I was very internet focused when it came to promotion and pre-sales. Now I’m being on-boarded to a distributor that’s a division of Ingram called Consortium, and they’re turning me onto things like Netgalley and Edelweiss and galley boxes that are sent to sellers. How every sales rep needs a copy of the book, and if you can’t get them a copy you get them a black-and-white galley and if you can’t get them that you get them a blad, and if you can’t get them that you get them a pdf. How it’s really important to build certain relationships and go to conferences.

I was utterly clueless about that a year ago, because that was completely outside my experience. My experience was comic cons, selling directly to consumers, selling online through Amazon and comiXology and my own personal store. I’m going to change a lot of the ways I do things. I’ve had to reprint three books this year alone. What used to be a big run for me is clearly not that big anymore.

Consortium has been great about walking me through this. One of the things they told me was that in the first year there are no dumb questions, so if there’s something you can’t figure out, just let us know. I’m really going into 2018.

Besides that you have books coming out like the collection of another beloved webcomic, As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman.

I love As the Crow Flies. Melanie draws like no one else in comics right now, and they are making a storyline like no one else in comics right now. I fantasize about some kid in a library seeing this on the shelf. A lot of times that’s my end goal for a lot of what I publish. I want the kid in the library -- that I once was -- to see this stuff on the shelves and be like, "Oh." To have that not necessarily be their first experience with comics, although that would be pretty cool, but a foundational experience in comics.

The first time they see something like that. The first time they see someone like them.

Exactly. Which is why I put what I put on the cover of my books. For that exact reason. I love the covers of a lot of my books because they’re of people who aren’t often represented in what we weirdly call the mainstream of comics.

You started out just self-publishing and then you moved into anthologies and some reprints, and now with As the Crow Flies and Girls with Slingshots, and other projects, you’re doing more.

Very much so. I love anthologies because I’m terrified of descending into fogeydom, for lack of a better term. It’s very natural in comics for people to keep to their peer group. The people you came up with who are your friends are the people you go to for every project you dream up. They’re all within 10-15 years of one another. You were nothing together and now you’re something together, so you hold each other’s hands and help each other out. I like doing that, but I never want to be ignorant as to the crowd that graduated school two years ago and are now paying their dues in artists alley and on Tumblr and on Twitter. Anthologies are an amazing way to find creators I have never heard of because they’re outside my social circle, but they’re amazing .

Comics is art and art in a lot of cases is ego. A lot of people have very fossilized ideas of the industry. Not necessarily how it works, but how they think it should work. There are attempts to freeze people out, but fortunately a lot of these attempts are hilariously besides the point. They close ranks around a subgenre of comics that no one’s really that interested in entering anyway. It’s like throwing yourself over your garbage can and going, no, you can’t have it. OK. That’s fine.

As part of that you have open submissions for your anthologies, and Iron Circus Press has open submissions for books.

I’ve found some great books via open submissions. Letters for Lucardo is a book I got through open submissions and it’s amazing. There are a few other books in the works that I’m really excited for that were just stories people brought me.

I also wanted to ask about Yes, Roya, which is the graphic novel you wrote that came out earlier in the year.

It is about a femdom threesome in 1960’s California. And it stars cartoonists. [Laughs] It’s partially inspired by the origin story of Wonder Woman, which a lot of people are more aware of these days thanks to the biopic Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Yes, Roya was partially inspired by that and it is about cartoonists who live in a poly relationship in the '60s. I really love the art, which is by Emilee Denich, who’s a fantastic creator. It’s erotica. It was important to me that the storyline is sexy and the relationship is not the problem. Usually when poly groups are depicted, the main plot point is jealousy or how this is not “natural” or it couldn’t possibly work. To me, if it’s going to star cartoonists, the most obvious plot point is stupid cartoonist drama. [Laughs] So while these three people are developing and navigating their way through this relationship and seeing where all their particular pieces fit -- in every sense of the word -- in the meantime, I’m being blacklisted in my own industry because I’m working with you, and you are being blacklisted by these people because they’re suspicious of your work. There’s a lot of industry politics.

I think it’s impossible to write a story about 1960s America and not touch on racial prejudice. One of the plot points of the book is that Roya, the woman who is in the relationship with two men, is an artist. She’s actually the artist of the comic strip her husband takes credit for. Her husband is this blond-haired, blue-eyed Wisconsin farmboy type and he is able to move in social circles that she is simply going to be excluded from, for functionally the rest of her professional life. They understand that and they’re very practical about it. So he goes out with her work and says, "I drew this, isn’t it great?" While she stays at home and does the work and they both benefit. I only mention it briefly because I don’t want that to be the focus of the book, but it’s something that actually happened. Anyone who’s seen the movie Big Eyes can probably recall that the Keanes had something like that, although a much more dysfunctional setup. I have a friend whose grandmother was a children’s book illustrator and whose grandfather took credit for it because it was just easier.

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You do publish erotica and books with queer content and there is a lot of pushback over those two things, but you seem to have been able to navigate that.

I do face pushback when it comes to erotica, but I’ve had the support of a lot of really cool comic shops and a lot of really cool independent booksellers. What Smut Peddler has proved time and again is once it’s on the shelf and in front of people, it has no problem moving. At the end of the day, money is what matters. If people sell any adult comics whatsoever, they understand that there’s a market out there.

You’ve announced a few books coming out -- can you talk about what Iron Circus has coming out in 2018?

In early 2018, we have four books on the docket and then we have at least one more that’s scheduled for production. Right now we are focusing on Crossplay by Niki Smith. Crossplay is about sexuality in fandom. How a lot of young people, especially who consider cons the main social events of the year, are exploring who they are and what they identify as through the lens of what they love media-wise. That is an erotic title and I’m super into it. That was just Kickstarted and will come out at the beginning of the year.

We have two anthologies lined up. The first one which I’m extremely excited for is called FTL, Y’all: Tales from the Age of the $200 Warp Drive. The setup is that six months from now on the internet appear precise schematics to build a faster-than-light engine for $200 dollars of easily available parts. And so space travel is immediately and chaotically democratized. There’s no hand on the throttle. There’s no Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there’s no NASA, no European Space Agency. Your shiftless cousin could convert a Winnebago and be on the moon by five o’clock. I wanted stories about a world where that’s happening.

We have another erotica anthology that’s in production right now, part of the Smut Peddler line. This one is called Smut Peddler Presents: Sex Machine. It’s about robots, A.I., androids, virtual reality. It’s for the crowd that watched Star Trek: The Next Generation and looked at Data and went, "Oh." It has a great lineup, and I’m super-excited to drop that one on people.

Other than that, I have another instructional comic coming out by the creative team known as Owlin, which is Lin Visel and Joseph Bergin III. They were featured in Island and they’re making How Do You Smoke A Weed? It’s set to debut April 20, because I’m so terribly clever. [Laughs] It’s a guidebook that I want in every dispensary and every medical marijuana doctors office. To my mind, the United States is slowly but surely rolling out nationwide legalization of marijuana. What this means is that there are young people who for the very first time will be able to legally and safely experiment with marijuana as a recreational drug. Then a lot of people who are older, who have never had a toke in their life, now set adrift in this world where pot is accessible to them for the first time. It’s safe. It’s not cut with anything. You don’t have to go to a weird part of town. How Do You Smoke a Weed? is by people who live in a state where pot is legal and they are pot users themselves, and it is an introductory guide telling you everything you need to know about the culture and the language and what to expect.

Hopefully in fall I’ll be publishing Meal by Blue Delliquanti, which is a fascinating melange of influences and interests by one of my favorite creators. It is about a woman who moves to the city and her mission in life is basically to normalize insect eating. Insects are a cheap protein, they’re healthier than a lot of other animal-based proteins. As Earth’s population rises, and the farming of large mammals for consumption is having increasingly dire effects on the environment, the low biological impact of eating things like crickets and mealworms are something that both Blue and myself feel the human race is going to have to look at more closely on a global scale. If you look in countries, around the equator especially, insect-eating has been normal for a very long time. That probably has a lot to do with how big insects get there. [Laughs] But in Europe and the United States and Canada, places where insects do not get very large and have never been focused on as a main source of protein, there’s still a lot of revulsion and reluctance to give this a try. Meal is about a woman who has a serious crush on her neighbor and she wants to turn her onto insect eating. Like most Americans, the neighbor lady has no experience with this. At the same time, she wants to incorporate herself to the cultures of people who have been eating insects for millennia without being too hipster/gentrifier about it, and failing miserably. There’s a lot of stuff going on there. It’s just so out there. I love it. I mean it’s the future, basically.

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I feel like half the audience will go, "I’ve heard of this and I’m game," and the other half will go, "What insane nonsense is this? But I’ll pick it up."

Exactly. But as people who promote eating bugs love to say, a few decades ago people were like, raw fish? Eww. And now everyone eats sashimi and sushi.

Crossplay interior art.

Now that I’ve said it, I feel like a readership composed half of people who are fully on board and excited and half people who think the idea sounds completely insane but they’ll check it out, sums up the readership of many of your books.

[Laughs] That is a good way to put it. The one test that all Iron Circus books need to pass is, does it interest me? If it just hits me right away and I’m super-interested right off the bat, that is the only test when it comes to, will Iron Circus publish it or not. If I look at it and go, "eh," I’m not publishing it.

As the Crow Flies is about to come out, and people like me who are fans of the webcomic are excited about, but it’s started to get a lot more media attention outside of comics as well.

The response to As the Crow Flies is simultaneously really exciting and really terrifying. I only printed 6,000 copies and I thought it would be enough -- but it’s clearly not going to be.

Spike Trotman.

It is a problem, but as far as that goes, it’s a good problem to have.

Oh yes. There’s this saying about people who weren’t there for the come up, picture you as always being this on the ball and that your game has always been this tight. No. I spent a very long time ignored. I spent a very long time surrounded by people who were almost determined that I wouldn’t get anywhere and would have no voice. It was incredibly important to them -- for only reasons they understand -- to make sure that I knew that they knew I wasn’t ever going to make it. I’m at that point now where I’m reprinting books and I’ve got 2,000 square feet of office space, and that’s very swiftly not being enough.

The business is maybe a year out from paying off my mortgage completely. That means my husband will be quitting his job and coming to work for me. It’s terrifying because we’re this snowball running downhill and picking up speed. I’m trying to do it in a controlled way, because Iron Circus grew very organically. I didn’t start getting storage space to store books until I absolutely had no choice. I didn’t get office space until the storage unit was no longer big enough and I had no choice. I don’t want to hire outside people until I have no choice because at the end of the day, this is still publishing and publishing can be unpredictable. But things are going incredibly well. This is our 10th year anniversary, and I never dreamed it would be this good. When I founded Iron Circus, I thought it was going to be a self-publishing imprint. It was for the sake of elegance, separating the house money from the business money. I never thought it would be what it is now.