The Real Thing – ft. Kenny Keil (Part 1)

Kenny Keil conceived, wrote, and drew his first series while working a day job as a designer. Tales to Suffice parodies a wide range of comic book genres and conventions, making jokes right down to the ads.  This combination of spoof and satire earned him critical acclaim when he released it through an indie publisher, but mainstream exposure remained elusive.  Using Kickstarter for seed money, Keil recently self-published Giant-Sized Tales to Suffice, which collects all his seen and unseen material.

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For some of us, comics are an addiction.  What was your first hit, the one that got you hooked?

Superman #395, May of ’84.  I’m pretty sure I couldn’t even read yet.  And the truth is I only bought it for this really sweet looking ad on the inside cover for an Atari game called Joust.  But I remember flipping through the book until it fell apart, just soaking in all that cool iconic Superman imagery and trying to piece together a narrative from the pictures alone.  By the way, the story?  Totally bonkers.  I still own the comic and to this day it loses me somewhere between the secret island of magical Viking warriors and the mind-controlling communist space satellite. It’s great.

Did it ever occur to you to write or draw comics as a kid, or did the idea hit you later in life?

Oh yeah!  I think the moment I realized people were actually responsible for making these things, I knew I wanted to be one of those people.  But as I got older, my interests kind of drifted over into other areas, so the idea had to hit me again later on in life.

You’re a freelance designer by day—what kind of stuff are you designing?  Anything us citizens might have seen?

You know, I got laid off in December from a full-time gig, and had every intention of doing freelance design work to stay afloat.  But one of the many things freelance life is teaching me is to just go with the flow, and the flow has oddly enough been pulling me away from design.  So mostly I’ve been writing and storyboarding for music videos and commercials.  I wrote a treatment for a music video called “Dreamin’” by Big K.R.I.T.  It was filmed by a collective of directors called Motion Family (definitely want to shout them out since they’re the ones who made it all come together).  That’s not only my favorite treatment, it’s also the only one that’s been filmed so far, so…I guess that works out well, doesn’t it!

And I just landed my first ever piece in MAD Magazine, which was a dream come true.  I love design, but this year has been a nice change of pace.

Has your experience in design proved valuable in any way to producing Tales to Suffice?

I cannot emphasize enough how important my design career and education has been to my comics work.  From the way I approach content, to the way I lay out a page, to the tools I use to get the job done.  And my experience in printing was a huge help when it finally came time to self-publish the big book.

Since you had a day job, how did you pencil in the time to work on Tales?  What was your average schedule like?

I couldn’t even say how long the first issue took, because I had no idea what I was doing and no deadline in which to do it.  So it was just this hobby I had.  Over time I got more serious about it, and that’s when I started feeling the time crunch.  Making comics went from a hobby to a need, and late nights and work marathon weekends became fairly routine.  Warm shout-out to my wife for not leaving me.

You released your first issue of Tales with Slave Labor Graphics (SLG) Publishing.  For those folks interested in this business, can you talk about how you pitched your project and the process to getting it published?

It’s kind of boring: I made a comic, printed it, and sent it out with a cover letter to SLG following the guidelines posted on their website.  That was basically it.  Tales to Suffice #1 is more or less that very demo copy, but since my drawing had improved a bit in the interim between getting a publisher and actually getting published, I redrew several pages and came up with an entirely new cover.

You got a lot of praise for the first issue, but things fell on the distribution side, putting the project on hiatus for a while.  Can you talk about that?

Right around the time that I was wrapping up the second issue, a news story broke about Diamond (the main distributor for comics) basically doubling the minimum sales thresholds that titles would have to meet in order to be carried by them.  It left me, along with a ton of other artists, without a means of getting our books into shops.  So while SLG was seeking out alternatives for that whole situation, I just kept making comics.  I was having too much fun to stop, basically.  Eventually it dawned on me that I had over 100 pages of comic content on my hard drive that virtually no one else had ever seen.  With still no distribution solution in sight, I asked SLG if they were cool with me going the DIY route, and they were.  Meanwhile I had been noticing a handful of cool comic projects popping up over at Kickstarter, so I just decided to go for it.

Even while Tales was put on hold, release-wise, you continued to work on the project on your own time.  Did it ever occur to you to publish it as a web comic, given the difficulties in getting it out the traditional printed way?

I have nothing against web comics in general, but initially I didn’t see that format working for what I was trying to do with Tales.  It’s just such a comic-booky kind of comic, you know?  There was also the matter of me not knowing how to make a website.  That played a role as well.  But I’m wising up!  You can read lots of stuff from the book (and even some web exclusive content not found in the book) over at talestosuffice.com.

You say you “took a nap” after finishing three issues’ worth of Tales.  Is “taking a nap” a euphemism for something else?

Let me put it this way: I have a baby now.

You essentially self-published Giant-Sized Tales to Suffice using Kickstarter to get seed money.  How did you convince people to put their faith in the project?

I don’t know!!  But I think it helped that the project was actually complete, and that I was able to present people with a very specific and realistic goal.  Plus I had a fairly decked out rewards system in place.  Not to mention lots of great friends and family who chipped in and helped spread the word.

How much time did it take to get the necessary funds?

Let’s see…the Kickstarter campaign ran for 90 days, and I hit the 100% Funded mark with about 30 left to go.  You would think that would have put me at ease for the rest of the month, but I was pretty much a nervous wreck up until the very end.  It could have all just been an elaborate prank, with everyone withdrawing their pledges at the last minute!

Out of curiosity, would you rather have a flying carpet—that can travel at a maximum speed of 10 miles per hour—or would you rather have a pen that you can dictate to write itself—but the words come out in languages you don’t understand?

Magic carpet all the way.  I’d save mad gas money and could just glide right over that nasty LA traffic.  Shaking a tassel for all the haters.

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Join us tomorrow for part two of our chat with Kenny Keil, where we talk about robot-loving space heroes, mildly obese vigilantes, and John Oates mustache.  Check out our review of Keil’s Giant-Sized Tales to Suffice, which is available to order on talestosuffice.com.