Scout Comics is a small comics publisher that has grown quickly, doubling its revenues every year since it was founded in 2015, according to the publisher, thanks to an unusually diverse business model. The company sells direct to consumers and direct to retailers, as well as through traditional comics and bookstore distribution. Scout also caters to collectors who crave unusual variant covers—issuing differing cover art by multiple artists for a single issue—and casual readers who are happy to buy a box of “battle damaged” comics at a discount. Even their digital strategy incorporates a physical aspect for collectors.
Scout Comics set up shop in 2015 with headquarters in Ft. Myers, Fla. and currently has a staff of 27 employees.
Despite being a relatively new publishing venture, the team directing Scout Comics has over 50 years’ experience in film and publishing. CEO Brendan Deneen’s resume includes stints with the William Morris Agency, Tor Books, and Macmillan, where he created and ran Macmillan Entertainment, the publisher’s in-house book-to-film division. Chief Media Officer Don Handfield is a veteran filmmaker and screenwriter who co-created the Knightfall series for The History Channel. Scout Comics president James Haick III is a financial planner that Handfield credits with establishing the house’s distribution model and giving Scout a solid business foundation.
Indeed, one thing that sets Scout apart is their success with direct distribution—Scout sells directly to retailers in addition to its distribution partners—and with direct sales to consumers. Those two streams, comprised almost entirely of single-issue comics sales, account for about half of Scout’s revenues, Haick said.
Scout offers variant covers and other incentives for retailers to buy directly from them, rather than going through a distributor, and reaps the benefits in higher margins. Direct sales to consumers have grown sharply over the past two years, and Scout has multiple direct-to-consumer strategies, including a monthly subscription box service, boxed sets of the complete run of single-issue series comics, and the “Battle Damage Box,” 25 less-than-perfect comics packaged with a fanciful short story about how the damage occurred. Scout also runs special promotions on their website, including Metal Mondays, where they offer an actual metal version of the cover art on a popular Scout title in a limited edition of 100.
While direct-to-consumer and direct-to-retail sales make up about half of Scout’s revenues, Haick expects that to change now that revenues have begun to flow from the book distribution deal they signed with Simon & Schuster last year to distribute 17 Scout titles to the book trade. The publisher will publish 27 book collections in 2022. Scout has a growing list of book collections, among them, The Mall by Handfield, Haick, and Rafael Loureiro, the story of three 1980s teenagers who discover they’re all related to a mob boss; The Perhapanauts by Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau, action-adventure about a team of paranormal agents investigating paranormal events; and Frank at Home on The Farm by Jordan Thomas and Clark Bint, a psychological horror tale set on a mysterious 1920s-era farm with animals that seem to be watching and even talking about Frank.
Currently, about 25% of total revenues come from the book channel and another 25% from traditional comics retail, where they are distributed by both Diamond and Lunar, the top two comics distributors to direct market comics shops, as well as Universal in Canada.
Deneen describes Scout’s approach as “genre agnostic,” with a strong tendency toward publishing the first works of emerging creators. The first comic they signed was Kristin Gudsnuk’s Henchgirl, the story of a very nice girl who is a reluctant member of a supervillain gang, which she pitched to Deneen at New York Comic Con when the company was just getting started. Scout published it as single issues starting in 2015, and two years later Dark Horse published the collected edition.
Most of Scout’s comics are creator-owned (rather than work-for-hire) although part of the publishing deal is that Scout stays attached to the comic as the production company. “I've been selling books to Hollywood, or involved in the process, for over 20 years. So we stay attached to every comic as a production company,” Deneen said. But Scout does not own the film rights and creators have full control over any deal. “We team up with the creators to help them sell their rights, advise them, and stay on as producers as well,” he said. Scout also develops comics in-house and retains the rights.
Last year they partnered with Mucho Mas Media, a multimedia company that represents BIPoC creators and talent, to set up Chespa, a Latinx comics imprint. The imprint will be run by writers David Bowles and Hector Rodriguez III and Mucho Mas Media founder and co-CEO Javier Chapa. “They control it creatively, and we help them distribute and publish,” Handfield said. Scout’s Black Caravan horror imprint has a similar model.
Scout launched Scoot, a kids’ imprint, last year and used it to start Richard Rivera’s comic series Stabbity Bunny, the story of a young girl and her avenging plush toy, and his magazine Frontiers. The newest Scoot title is Handfield and Joshua Malkin’s Unikorn, a middle-grade fantasy tale about a young girl who realizes her horse is actually a unicorn, which was first published in 2021. While Scout publishes most titles first as a single-issue comics series and then as collected book editions, they handled Unikorn differently, publishing the first issue for release in comic shops to generate buzz and attract collectors, and then went straight to the collected book edition.
While Scout makes its comics available digitally through Kindle, Comixology, and library digital services, they also have their own physical/digital hybrid format for collectors: Comic Tags. These are cards that look like miniature comic books, with art from the comic inside, and a scratch-off code on the back that allows the user to download a digital comic.
This multifaceted strategy has kept revenues flowing, even during the Covid-19 pandemic and its disruptions. By catering to collectors as well as readers, and by selling directly to consumers and to retailers (as well as distributors), Scout has managed to expand steadily.
Haick says the keys to Scout’s model are finding new revenue sources and anticipating market challenges and opportunities. “You always have to think ahead, and that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to be ahead of the curve instead of having to scramble and adapt at the end of the day.”
