One of the most impressive debuts at this year's MoCCA Festival was Secret Acres, a new comics imprint launched by Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino. Their first two books, Samuel C. Gaskin's Fatal Faux-Pas and Eamon Espey's Wormdye, are handsomely produced paperbacks collecting work by up-and-coming experimental cartoonists—very much along the lines of the now-defunct Highwater Books imprint.
As it turns out, that's intentional. "Secret Acres started, pretty much, when Highwater Books folded," Avelino said. "To my mind, Tom [Devlin] is one of the more influential people in comics of this generation. I don't think he made any mistakes as far as his taste or his attention to detail. He did get ahead of himself in terms of what he was ready to publish at the time. When Tom and Peggy [Burns] moved to Canada, a lot of us who were working with them were left with all this inspiration and nowhere to go with it." Avelino and Matthews started talking in 2005 about launching a new publishing company and spent a year making a list of self-publishing cartoonists they might want to work with.
Gaskin's twisted art-brut gag cartoons and Espey's terrifying, design-heavy nightmare narratives are very different from each other, but Matthews and Avelino are infectiously enthusiastic about both of them. They discovered Gaskin's work through minicomics he'd published as a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies: "It was pretty much unanimous after we'd read the first couple of Faux-Pas comics that Sam was someone we wanted to work with," Matthews said. "And Wormdye has been one of our favorite comics as a mini for years now."
They're already planning their list through 2010: the imprint's next books will be JB's Curio Cabinet and a 330-page Theo Ellsworth volume, followed by work from Minty Lewis, Joseph Lambert, Ken Dahl and Edie Fake. "The challenge for us is to keep up with the work these guys are doing," Avelino said. "Sam [Gaskin] has two different titles in the works—one being Pizza Wizard, the Xeric-winning series, the other being Sugarcube."
Secret Acres is still working out the details on how it’s going to distribute its books beyond the convention circuit and Web site—the publishers are still in the early stages of talking to Diamond and "trying to have a very concerted marketing effort," according to Matthews. "We advertise, we send out press kits.... We're also trying to figure out which shows make the most sense to attend. Obviously, we can't go to all of them, but we're trying to get a sense of which ones are the best fit for our books."
Secret Acres also has an Avelino-designed Web site, secretacres.com, which sells it’s books and artists' minicomics, and also includes critical theory about comics as well as serialized strips. "I liked what Tom was doing with the Highwater Web site, where he had small installments of the books he was selling," Avelino said. "It's such a cheap and good opportunity to get people looking forward to seeing things. And comics criticism is a big deal to me. It's important to me for those conversations to happen."
What to look forward to in the future? Anything goes, according to Avelino: "Our tastes in comics are pretty broad, and I like that kind of diversity in storytelling and in style. Most important to both of us is a good, strong narrative—even Sam's book doesn't become strictly abstract. I think you can expect something completely different from one Secret Acres book to the next. It'll be tough to find anything [the artists] have in common, apart from the fact that they're all very good storytellers and all very dedicated to what they do. The company exists to support these artists, period. We're not exactly doing this for the money."
