Approximately half a year ago, I finished publishing the Bubble DX webcomic. Six months before, approximately a year ago, I had finished drawing it. Approximately a month ago I finally accepted that the French physical edition that was planned for the comic was not going to happen. And approximately four hours ago I came to terms with the fact that the USA edition wasn’t going to either. To celebrate my surrender to the inevitability of this reality, and as a final note to the project, I decided to write this post-mortem.
Bubble DX consists on two timelines, one colored in red set in the present time of the story and another one in blue, set in the past. The red pages were thought of and drawn first, and were published in Spanish as part of the Neodimio sci-fi anthology zine I created. On February 2022, the first issue was published. On March 2023, the sixth and last number of Neodimio, and with it the last chapter of the red timeline, came out. The zine and my own comic are thus inextricably intertwined. As I wrote and drew Bubble DX, I also edited, self-published, promoted, shipped and did all the other things needed to be done for Neodimio to exist. I remember the experience very fondly: I managed to publish and promote the work of a lot of artists I admire, I was invited to talks and zine fests, and Neodimio even received the 2023 Comic Barcelona Awards in the Best Zine category. I used the money of that award to pay for the printing of the last number of Neodimio.
That anecdote reveals an important fact about the zine: it was never profitable. But that didn’t matter. Neodimio had many objectives, and the first of all was being able to create art that I and all the participants on the zine could be proud of. It was a project born out of our passion for science fiction, comics, illustration, zine culture, risography and many more things. It was an attempt to, hopefully, advance my and other people’s careers. It was a project with political ambitions, as ambitious as a leftist zine with around 125 copies per edition can be, which honestly is not much. But the compromise was there. The only money I got from Neodimio was earned the same way all the other collaborators earned theirs: I divided the miserable profits from each issue by the number of pages it contained, and each of us received that amount multiplied by the number of pages we had contributed to it. I also decided to publish a pay-what-you-want PDF version along the risography printed one, to ensure anyone could read the zine independently of their ability to pay for it.
As Neodimio and the red timeline of Bubble DX were coming out, I started approaching some Spanish comic publishers to make the complete version of the comic I was planning happen. It would contain the already created red timeline along the new blue timeline I had in mind. At first the situation seemed promising, and some “indie” publishers expressed interest on it. Then came the ghosting, the complains about the complexity of the comic and the meager publishing offers. One of the most prominent publishers of this kind in Spain told me that, even if they were to publish my comic, they would only pay me around 900€ as an advance for the 128-page graphic novel. This miserable quantity is in no way exceptional but the standard one around here, and the equally miserable royalties they offered were the standard ones to. Another “indie” publisher in Spain boasts about having higher than average royalties, which rise to the whopping quantity of… 15%. The ones this first publisher offered me were even lower.
The offer wasn’t very difficult to refuse because it was not much of an offer anyway. They thought the comic was too complex to be profitable, and that the fact that it wasn’t a black and white work would rise the printing costs too much and hurt them in that regard too. I won’t deny any of those claims. I’m proud, extremely proud of my comic, but I also know it’s not perfect. As I get better (or so I want to believe) at drawing, I see more and more things I would want to fix or change on it. What I know is that workers, and I’m a worker before I am an artist, deserve to be properly compensated. What I know is that any business that can’t afford to do so, any publisher whose editors can make a living from publishing comics but can’t or wont provide the same conditions to the artist making them, should close its doors.
Around that time, I decided to publish the whole thing as a webcomic in English. I also had managed to get two publishing offers outside Spain, one in the USA and another in France. The conditions were worse, but these were even smaller publishers and those deals seemed more acceptable considering the way they operated in. Above all, I wanted to get Bubble DX published by any means necessary. It was the start of 2024 and it seemed the complete comic was going to finally come out on paper, on Spring/Summer in English and at the end of the year in French. What followed in the next months was a continued ghosting by the editors. Summer came and went and the USA edition hadn’t even begun its preparations. October flew by and the same thing happened with the French one. After having inquired several times and getting vague answers or no response at all, I wrote to both publishers: I didn’t want to publish Bubble DX no longer, nor with them nor with anyone else. I gave up, I needed to move on.
Neodimio and Bubble DX started coming out while I was still studying and living with my parents. Since then I have stopped doing the first of those two things. Only since the end of this summer has my career reached a point where I’m starting to believe that, if things keep going in the same monetary direction they have been going this year, I might be able to make a living out of drawing and leave the nest someday. I couldn’t have done this without their material support. And I say drawing, and not doing comics, because even tho I’m pretty sure I’ll keep making them and putting them out on my own, I no longer believe I can make a living out of comics. I’m still in a quite precarious condition, but working on illustrations for TTRPGs, music, books and such at least pays just enough so I can dare to imagine making a living out of drawing. Let’s hope that is the case.
This is not a happy text, but I needed to write it. As a working class and class conscious artist, I wanted to focus on the material reality Bubble DX was created in, and that reality is a bleak one. Having said that, I have so much love for the comic I’ve made. That doesn’t mean I can look at it easily, every time I do it I see an infinity of mistakes, of things I would do differently now, of decisions and shortcomings that make me doubt if I have any artistic skills at all. But even then, I love Bubble DX. These characters are my children, and I’m proud of the world and story that I’ve created. I’m also incredibly thankful of all the people who have supported me and my comic and keep doing so. I want to keep creating art and, in one way or another, I will. Thanks for reading this post-mortem, and thanks for reading Bubble DX.