I have the privilege to know Tom and Tina Sjögren and call them friends, they are real life adventurers and explorers and among the few people in the world who have completed the Three Poles Challenge (reaching the North Pole, South Pole and Everest). They are a wonderful couple, good humored and great conversationalists.

During an expedition to the Amazon River a few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend many evenings with them by a bonfire, talking about everything under the sun. They told me many anecdotes from their adventures and mentioned their 10 Golden Rules, a list that condenses what they feel that enabled them to tackle and conquer the Poles, overcoming several life or death situations. Since then, whenever I’m about to start any new project or when I feel stuck, I read the list again and always find insight and inspiration. Comic Book Journey is no exception, from day one Tom and Tina’s Golden Rules have been the backbone of our quest. I now share this valuable tool with you:

10 Golden Rules

1. Go for both poles
We didn’t manage to even reach the South Pole the first time. But we never lowered our goal. Our final success was so much greater in the face of it.

2. Seek out the winners
We wouldn’t have made it without the aid of polar veterans, and they in turn learned from veterans before them. Every true success is a mankind joint venture.

3. Don’t cut food and fuel
In the short run, dropping food and fuel increased our speed. In the long run, it killed our expedition. Don’t undercut your survival.

4. Face the storm
Hiding out in a tent waiting for the sunny days steals crucial time. A storm always looks the worst from inside the tent. Face the storm.

5. Get out each morning
Get out there, every single day. There are so many reasons not to: Repairs badly needed, fog and whiteout. The winner moves when the others rest.

6. Keep moving
In temperatures of -50C, we wore only thin layers of clothing. In this situation, to stop was to die. When times are rough and you are the underdog, keep running.

7. Don’t think
Skiing thin ice commands swift and determined steps. Too much doubt in times of pressure kills the power of action. Don’t think, just go.

8. Be brutal
If you want to reach the impossible then you must continue where others stop. Tear down walls with your bare hands, crawl on your knees. But never stop.

9. Say only positive things to each other
We asked Polar veterans for their single, most important advice. Out of their advice, one turned the most important to us: “Say only positive things to each other.

10. You don’t have to believe to win
Faced with the facts, we could not believe in our success. Yet it arrived. You don’t have to believe in success. Just do the right things. And go.

Tom and Tina Sjögren

 

There you have it, a very valuable tool to use when tackling a difficult project. Tom and Tina have several websites, including Pythom.com, which I highly recommend if you’re interested in exploration and adventure.

LHR

The first step we took was to embark in a massive amount of research aimed at answering some very specific questions:

1 What are today’s best practices to write and make a comic book?
2 What’s the state of the market for print and digital comic books?
3 What are the options to publish and distribute a comic book?
4 How to market and advertise a comic book or graphic novel in the age of social media and digital marketing?

To answer the questions, we used three basic avenues of research: the Internet, books and face to face talks with people in the industry, mainly at small Comic-Cons where it was easy to make contacts and talk. It must be said that the amount of information available can seem overwhelming at times, but little by little you are able to separate the wheat from the chaff and isolate a number of facts that step by step start giving you the basis to draw your road map.

Maybe the the first truth that becomes apparent is that the proposition of making and publishing a commercially viable comic book series is extremely difficult. The major obstacles quickly become self-evident. The market is crowded and dominated by the two big publishers, Marvel and DC with their extremely powerful superheroe universes, backed by monumental advertisement campaigns and major media exposure. Their overpowering presence makes it very difficult for a new arrival to make itself heard or seen. Another factor that makes things even harder is the tight integration of the major superhero properties with the film and TV industries, which add their mighty marketing muscle to the equation.

In future posts we will talk about how we have answered not only this questions but the many other that cropped along the way and the decisions taken to navigate around the major rocks and shoals.

LHR

Sometime around February of 2016, I gave a well known film producer, with whom we have worked before, a copy of a new TV pilot script titled “The Cuban Train Wreck” to read, a few days later I got an email from him, praising the story and saying: “…I loved the pace, it read like a good comic book…” His comment must have lodged in my brain because a few weeks later, while taking a shower (a usual place for me to have ideas), I suddenly thought, why not?

Next day I discussed it with my brother, who is also my business partner, and he became enthused by the idea. Mind you, although we have never made a comic book, our background gives us a good grounding to tackle this project. In the past we have published a book and several catalogs, besides a large number of printed advertisement pieces. Also during a certain period between 2002 and 2006 our main source of income was the production from script to finished product of animated shorts for advertisement and educational purposes. Added to the latter, we have 20 years experience producing movies and documentaries. Having said that, there are so many aspects of the comic book world that are new to us that at times it seems overwhelming, but we just keep on searching for answers.

Like many things in life, the beginning of our journey was pretty modest, but has signified a considerable effort both in time and money. When you hold the latest floppy of your favorite series on any given Wednesday, believe me when I say that you’ve got no idea about the massive undertaking behind it, literally hundreds of hours of work by several talented people. After having begun my exploration of this world, I only have respect for the people who dedicate their lives to comic book making and publishing.

LHR

 

My love affair with sequential art started early and was the forerunner of my subsequent addiction to reading and film. From the beginning, my parents caught on my passion for comic books which led them to use it as both the carrot and the stick, when I behaved and did well in school, my reward would be comic books, tons of them, but when I diverged from the straight and narrow (which unfortunately was often) the comic book supply would run dry and if my transgressions were grievous enough, they would put my collection under lock and key until further notice. When I was 14 or 15 years old, my focus shifted to literature and for the next few years I would read comic books rarely. Every thing changed again when out of the blue, someone gave me a bunch of comics they were discarding, among which I found two issues of Sandman, once again I was hooked.

Over the years I have spent a considerable amount of money buying comic books, which I don’t regret on the least, although the current price of a floppy is quite off-putting, I wish they could be cheaper. I have no trouble crossing over from paper to digital and back, but I most say that when I love a series, I rather have it on paper (TPB). Anyway, in a nutshell, I love comic books.

LHR

Here we go, our first blog post. If you’re wondering about the reasons behind this blog, please checkout the ‘About’ section. Although the blog was created today, the journey started more than a year ago, I could even say that my personal journey began forty-odd years ago, when as a child I received my first comic book as a present, I was so small that I’m unable to tell you exactly which title it was, but I can assure you that I was captivated by the pictures and the word balloons that, at the time, I couldn’t understand. On a later post I will talk about the comic books that influenced me as a child.

When I say we, I refer mainly to my brother and me, we have been business partners through the years on many ventures, mostly having to do with filmmaking, transmedia projects, advertising and the Web. In 2016, once again we joined forces to embark on this journey which has already brought satisfactions as well as many mishaps. Many others, have been and will be part of our project and also fall under the “we” banner, because believe me when I say that just as filmmaking, the comic book production and publishing gig is all about team work.

We hope that you, the reader, will enjoy this telling of our tale and might profit from reading about our experiences and the knowledge that we have gathered and continue to accumulate on a daily basis.

LHR