Nearly six years ago, Big Head Press was founded with a very specific purpose: to publish graphic novels conveying what the founders consider pro-individualist themes. With a Web-friendly business model that offers free serialized comics online and a growing catalogue of print compilations, Big Head stands as an intriguing contemporary example of values-based publishing.
"The themes might be fairly hardcore libertarian," explained Scott Bieser, director of Big Head Press and the artist on several Big Head projects. "Or they may reflect individualist aspects of conservatism, progressivism or stubbornly uncategorizable points of view.” On the Big Head Web site, the company is clear about what it doesn't want: "We're not interested in ‘futility of life’ or military-type stories."
Big Head’s first book (with art by Bieser), A Drug War Carol by Susan W. Wells, originally created as a Web comic and published in late 2003, was an irreverent examination of America's costly war on drugs. It was followed up by an adaptation of L. Neil Smith's 1979 prose science-fiction novel, The Probability Broach, the following year.
Pleased with the results of its first two forays into comics publishing, Big Head pressed on. "In 2005, we undertook to expand our catalogue by taking on more projects, and increase our visibility by establishing a revamped Web page in which our books would be serialized for free online," Bieser said. The online world is very important to Big Head. Asked where the press was located, Bieser said, “principally, cyber-space.” It turns out that Bieser’s brother, the principal owner of the company, lives in Texas while Bieser works out of a studio-office in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
As part of the company expansion, the Web site was relaunched with three more new titles, including two, The Architect and The Hook, penned by comics veteran Mike Baron. "Mike's work is central to the history of independent comics, and we've been huge fans of his for years," Bieser said. The current practice at Big Head is to serialize the comic online in daily installments before issuing a print copy of the entire series.
Despite professing to not remember exactly how he became involved with Big Head, Baron is pleased with the existing business relationship and his work for the publisher. Baron said he was “extremely proud” of his latest project for Big Head, The Architect, a horror story inspired by the life of Frank Lloyd Wright with art by Andie Tong, that had been rejected by conventional comics publishers. “They didn’t understand,” Baron said. “What’s to understand? I’m trying to scare the shit out of people, a difficult task in a comic book.”
Currently Big Head has two featured titles in serialization: writer Adi Tantimedh and artist Hugo Petrus’s La Muse, an alien sci-fi story, which updates on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and L. Neil Smith and Sherard Jackson’s Time Peeper, a time-travel yarn, which updates Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The last graphic novel put into print was Baron's The Architect, released in 2007, through both the direct market via Diamond Comics Distribution and the book trade market through Baker and Taylor.
There are several new titles in the pipeline as well as print compilation work slated for future release. When asked about the future, Bieser was both idealistic (Big Head will “support the primacy of individual free will”) and practical: “our next goal is profitability, and beyond that we plan to establish ourselves as a ‘new mainstream’ publisher of graphic stories that are both thoughtful and accessible to intelligent readers.”
