The Bluesman Cometh

Welcome. Artist Pablo G. Callejo and I are proud to announce the release of the definitive English hardcover edition of our graphic novel, BLUESMAN in Summer of 2008from NBM Publishing. At the risk of alienating our many fine readers that enjoyed Bluesman in its serial form, this is literally the moment that Pablo and I have been eyeing since we began this effort back in 2003.

Over the years, I’ve been asked a number of times why we chose to offer Bluesman in its original serialized form and I thought I might take this opportunity to respond publicly.
There were a number of factors at work in that decision, some creative, some pragmatic. When we started this project, giant graphic novels were all the rage and there was a lot of pressure to finish the project as a whole before delivering it to market. The problem with this is that 180 pages of comics take an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and (yes) money to complete. The format, three volumes at sixty pages each, was crafted to emulate the old-school French album. We both felt like we could use it to deliver a substantive, if not exactly self-contained reading experience in each book. The triptych also tied into the form of the book as a whole, broken into three “stanzas” as it was to reflect the twelve-bar blues structure at its narrative core. The dramatic break at the end of each book forced us to think about the story in three distinct pieces, inspiring a narrative discipline that kept us focused on moving our major characters and themes forward in a unified manner.

Other reasons were more pragmatic. I have been intimately involved in the ordering process of a Direct Market comics outlet for over seven years. In this time, I have received the benefit of over fifty years of combined DM experience from Atomik Pop owner, Steve Richter and longtime employee, Bart Bush as well as the irreplaceable lessons learned from trench retail; how to cultivate a diverse audience for good comics and then successfully speculate on their likes and dislikes to earn profit. It was this kind of experience that led me to view the direct-to-graphic novel trend with some suspicion. From a retail standpoint, they make for difficult product for a number of reasons. They are often more expensive than other comics collection of similar size. As untested material, it was more difficult for me to gauge in advance how many copies of this more expensive book I should speculate on without expending a lot of time and attention to research each one in depth.

Certainly, there were and continue to be exceptions to the rule, but for every Blankets that was able to get some traction on word of mouth and critical acclaim and start selling in comics shops and chain bookstores, there were fifty other graphic novels that were released and gone from the public eye in a month. When I look back on the graphic novels that made the deepest impact in this first decade of the 21st century, those OGNs are still going to be an anomaly in contrast to the works that took years to complete, in the public eye, and then were successfully collected and marketed afterwards as tested material. While it is feasible that the economics of producing the kind of comics that Pablo and I have here may someday change dramatically and open up the possibility of working for three years on a graphic novel without concern for living expenses, we can not feed our families now on the promise of a better future tomorrow and I suspect that many other creators feel the same.

Whatever variables that we were considering as the game began have changed dramatically over the last few years. Bluesman is no longer an untested property, having received fair and warmly favorable reviews from major media outlets like Entertainment Weekly, LA Times, Publishers Weekly, Boston Globe, Booklist, and Vintage Guitar Magazine among dozens of others. It has been published now in three languages (English, Spanish, and French) and has reached 10,000 copies in print worldwide.

While none of these achievements make Bluesman any better or worse than it was when very few people were aware of it, it does give us more tools to use in bringing it to a larger and more diverse audience in its completed form. It gives us a second chance with comics shops that passed it in over the first time and a better first chance with bookstores, both corporate and independent, across the English-speaking world.

Another hard lesson won from retail is that resting on one’s laurels is hard to distinguish from sitting on one’s ass. To this end, I’m in the process of organizing the Bluesman book signing tour this summer that will feature a musical performance celebrating blues and gospel music from singer Shelly Phelps and myself, as well as a multi-media exploration of the book to accompany us. I will also be attending the MoCCA Art Festival in New York City on June 7th and 8th with announcements on other major convention appearances in the works. The goal is to get out there and spread the Bluesman gospel to as many people as time, money, and geography will allow.

Over the next year, I hope you’ll consider coming back to the Bluesman Project website every now and again for updates on the book and the tour. Expect new features developing in the blog as well as we will explore the world, both past and present, of blues music and the curious place that we intersect it with our graphic novel. I hope to see you on the road out there in 2008!

Rob Vollmar