NBM's So Graphic!

Terry Nantier

by Jennifer M. Contino

NBM is the oldest publisher of original graphic novels in the United States. The company founded 25 years ago by Terry Nantier, Chris Beall, and Marc Minoustchine and offers some of the best in US and European graphic novels, as well as original comics series like Boneyard. NBM has lots of treats planned for this year, and we wanted to catch up with founder Terry Nantier and find out some of the new works coming soon.

Sequential Tart: What factors influenced the decision to become a publisher?

Terry Nantier: Back when I was a teenager, I had the opportunity to live in Paris. This was in the seventies when France was experiencing a tremendous boom in comics with an explosion of creativity as witnessed in Pilote magazine and the forming of Metal Hurlant (the origin of Heavy Metal), L'Echo des Savanes and others. Older audiences started to flock to the medium (no, this has not always been the case in Europe, it was just for kids before there too) and the media started to take this medium seriously.

A lot of that success was based on the format used: the graphic novel as we've come to call it (really, I prefer to call it comics albums) which allowed better printing, therefore better art and more pages to expand on your story. At the time, this did not exist in the US at all. I thought this format could be an opportunity for comic art to flourish again here. When I came back to the US to college, I started NBM with that very goal.

ST: What was the process like to incorporate and open the publishing house?

TN: Technically, we were at first a partnership with three partners (myself, Chris Beall, and Marc Minoustchine) and as this was incredibly new for here, success was fairly limited. Especially since I was not interested in publishing superheroes, but reaching as wide a potential audience as possible. In those days (1976), there were no independent comics ... the only thing close: undergrounds. We incorporated when I moved to New York a few years later.

ST: How were you initially received by retailers?

TN: At this point in time large corporations like Diamond didn't even exist! We were dealing with the original, the legendary Phil Seuling who started the whole direct market. Also with Bud Plant, Last Gasp, hey, even Denis Kitchen's Krupp Comics Works! But we also strived for general bookstore sales from day one. Against all odds, we did land a book distributor as early as 1980.

ST: How many initial titles were published?

TN: We did only about one book or so a year, back then, still getting our footing when the term 'graphic novel' didn't even exist and we had to face pie-eyed comics fans who thought we came from Mars. We published a noir detective spoof by a French artist, Loro, called Racket Rumba, then Bilal's first book: The Call of the Stars, which I believe the Humanoids are in the processing of releasing again under another name.

ST: What were some early problems NBM experienced?

TN: As mentioned, lack of acceptance of this new format. We did manage to sell not too badly into the fledgling comics market and into headshops but getting into the general trade was murderous. Which is why we went slow.

ST: How did the you overcome hardships and struggles in the market?

TN: By just sticking with it. I'm a goddamn bulldog and a glutton for pain, I guess. It was not easy but the comics market did come around at first in the early eighties and we began to ramp up our publishing program in earnest as that happened.

ST: What are some of the best lessons you've learned since becoming a publisher?

TN: That, with perseverance and sticking with the initial vision, not deviating to please a certain group of fans, we eventually got our point across, if not yet to all, at least to many, about who we are and what we're about. We're doing our bit to bring comics back to a wide audience and to wide acceptance.

ST: What are some changes and trends that have affected business?

TN: There certainly has been a lot of change since 1976. The best for us is of course how graphic novels have grown so much during that time. They first became a truly accepted format by the mid-eighties and slowly but surely grew and grew. Of late, they've grown very quickly in fact, both in comics stores and outside where you can see fairly substantial GN sections at bookstores (although maybe not always stocked very well for breadth of selection) and where libraries in particular are literally going bananas right now over GNs! Ultimately, though, we need to see a huge blockbuster series like Asterix or author in Europe, selling in the millions.

ST: What do you think has the potential to be a major blockbuster event?

TN: I honestly don't see anything out there right now that is likely to mushroom to such enormous proportions but you never can tell. I've been looking for years. Whether it's from us or someone else doesn't matter to me, just that GNs become a major category of bookselling. Bone, with its animated movie, might reach very high numbers if that really tickles the audience? Maybe our own Boneyard might do that in time, who knows?

ST: How has the Internet affected NBM?

TN: It's a good medium to promote and also to make our books available to a wide audience as well.

ST: What other advances have you taken advantage of to get the word out about comics?

TN: This is not a technological advance but the fact that the press has never been more receptive to our kinds of books and that we can get regularly reviewed, as we do, in the Washington Post for instance or in such highly regarded professional publications as Publishers Weekly and Booklist will definitely help in turning public opinion around!

ST: What conventions is NBM going to set up at this year?

TN: We'll be at MOCCA in mid-June here in NYC, a new small press show to benefit a new comics museum here, with Ted Rall and many alternative political cartoonists to push our new Attitude, the New Subversive Political Cartoonists, a collection of cartoons with interviews, also Peter Kuper, maybe John Malloy of Amnesia.

Of course, San Diego with a big booth as every year with Richard Moore, Rick Geary and others ... SPX in September.

ST: What are some graphic novels that NBM is releasing this year?

TN: We do have a book that is looking to break out like say Chris Ware did: Ted Rall's To Afghanistan and Back, the first instant GN, a travelogue of his experience at the front in Afghanistan, reporting for the Village Voice. It's a compendium of his articles, cartoons and a 50 page GN portion relating his experience. We anticipate tremendous press response to this because he went believing nothing of the media hype here and came back with some disturbing answers ... It has an intro by Bill Maher. That'll be out in stores beginning May.

Boneyard has done very well and is growing in popularity. The first collection of issues one through four came out in April.

Oh, boy, have I got something cool for you! Our new Oddballz comic book. Lewis Trondheim has been seen here already championed by Fantagraphics (Harum Scarum: The Spiffy Adventures of McConey ). He and a growing gang of increasingly successful artists following on his footsteps are reinventing humor comics in Europe. It's real, it's wry, it's slightly goofy, and it's very international, anybody can get into it. This will be a bi-monthly starting in April as well, feature McConey and his merry band of pals, as well as the beguiling Astronauts of the Future, a couple of genius kids convinced that every one else is aliens or robots, the story has a great twist to it. Trondheim, is an incredible well-spring of ideas. He's a f***ing genius, I tell ya, his plans for world domination are well under way, so just submit now.

Also in this busy April, we had the long awaited reissue of Dave McKean's Cages, a work of genius, one of the top ten GNs of all time.

Hey, that's just a swatch, come visit our site regularly to see what else we got coming!

NBM

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