A few days ago we received an e-mail from Ben from Belgium. Ben is studying comic strips at the Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art and Design (the only Flemish college of art and design in Brussels) and had been instructed to give a lecture about a publishing company. He chose Reprodukt and came up with a lot of questions. And especially since many of those questions have been asked on a more frequent basis lately, we decided to share them with you.

So here are his questions and some answers… Have fun getting to know Reprodukt a little bit better.

Ben: So I´d like to know how you decide which comics will be released and how you find these (because there are a lot in production over the whole world)?

First we try to follow as closely as possible the current output of the authors that we have already published in the past. Which means once we have published a comic by a specific author, we almost certainly will publish his next book as well. The goal is to try and cover the artistic range of him or her, as long as we believe it fits into our line of publishing. So even though nothing seems to be decided in the beginning there already is a constant flow of new comics that we would like to publish. Those comics are already filling many of the publication slots we have (we usually manage to publish between thirty and forty comics every year). Then of course we have to keep in mind that the books that we are going to publish need to have a certain potential to find an audience.

Still, we allow ourselves to publish a few books each year that we know are unlikely to achieve big sales figures. We do them anyway because we believe in their specific qualities. In general one may say that the comics that we are going to publish, are comics that we wouldn´t want to miss to read in German ourselves.

We happen to find new authors and books on comics festivals (we travel quite a lot, for example to France, Spain, Italy, the US, Finland, Holland, Sweden etc) and through meetings with other publishers (mostly at conventions and book fairs). With regard to our German authors which we usually have already known a long time before, we actually publish their first work at Reprodukt. Many of  them have been publishing their own zines before or showcased their work in comic anthologies. We are trying to follow the work of many young authors and constantly discuss their potential until eventually talking about doing a book project at Reprodukt. It´s extremely rare that we publish a German artist that we hadn´t already known for a couple of years (which shouldn´t keep you from sending us your applications, of course – although it´s usually better and you get a quicker response when visiting us at festivals).

The facts about which books are published in what order and at what time exactly, is discussed and decided in group meetings where pretty much everyone of Reprodukt is invited to take part in – during this meeting  arguments from all the company’s departments are being taken in consideration, no matter if the participants are regularly concerned with editorial, promotion, production or distribution charges. The discussion ends up in a democratic decision most of the time, while Dirk Rehm, the founder of Reprodukt, has the final say.

Ben: Does every comic book have a chance, or are you looking for similar themes or graphic styles? (’cause I like a lot of the books Reprodukt publish and I don’t have that with other publishing companys, so in a way there must be an uniformity)?

A good comic for us is when the drawing style and the storytelling qualities culminate into a convincing story. In a comic, words and pictures are of course interdependent. The drawing style should be unmistakenly individual. Sure we appreciate beautiful drawings – but only as long as they´re not only about showing off the artistic skills for it´s own sake. A good story must allow the reader to take part in the development of the characters so that he can somehow relate to. Those are qualities we are looking for and you can find them in such seemingly different artists as Tom Gauld or Brecht Evens.

Ben: I am also wondering who decides this, is there a sort of jury?

As mentioned before the final decisions are more or less achieved in a democratic process. While the editors have to look at many manuscripts and finish comics throughout the year, in the end only very few of them are actually taken into consideration for publication.

Ben: Are there perhaps new plans for the future?

Currently we are preparing the spring 2013 books and at the same time we are already making plans for releases for the fall of 2013 and early 2014. In March 2013 we will launch six titles of our new line of comics for children. Now that comics for grown-ups have finally found a bigger readership in Germany we hope to get more kids to read comics again as well.

Thanks again to Ben for his questions, we really enjoyed answering them.

Please check also out Ben’s homepage and blog:
www.bengijsemans.com,  www.bengijsemans.tumblr.com

Der Beitrag wurde von Christian Maiwald am 13. November 2012 um 08:45 Uhr veröffentlicht.
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