♪ (heroic music) ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer Matt Yocum.

Matt, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thank you.

I appreciate it, Terence.

- Now, Matt, you and I met at Heroes Con a couple of years back, and we were talking before we started recording about the importance of conventions for-- well, obviously for fans, but for comic pros.

As somebody who spends his time working in isolation, when you get out to a convention, what's that experience like?

I mean, you're not selling commissions, but you are getting to meet those fans.

What does that do for you as a writer?

- That's a great point.

It is a fairly insular life as a writer or as an artist.

And in either case, you're spending long hours developing a story or, in the case of the artist, bringing it to life.

But these are hours that you're on your own.

When you're at the conventions, there's an energy, there's an atmosphere.

There's no one prototypical comics fan.

It's all ages, all different backgrounds.

But the common thing that brings us together is our love of comics.

And so to have all of us there feeding on each other for the professionals to be surrounded by people who love the medium as much as you do, and vice versa, for them to get to meet the people that are bringing their characters to life.

I've heard it said that it is one of the few art forms that there's no barrier between fan and creator.

I mean, they get a chance to come right up.

And you don't see that in so many other art forms.

- And what I find really great about the convention experience is, like you say, you can just go and talk to the person who made your favorite comic growing up or the person who's making your favorite comic right now.

And they have a love of comics.

It's not like they are tired of talking about that issue of Cinder and Ash that they did or that new miniseries they're working on.

They're always excited about it.

You have a project that was not out at the last Heroes Con but is out now.

It's called Closet World.

- That's right.

- So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about this book.

- So Closet World was a labor of love.

It took a lot of years for this to come about.

It did not start as a comic.

It actually started as a piece of prose that my brother in the past was a single parent and had two children that he was raising and multiple jobs.

He was very, very busy.

He loved to write, but he did not really have the time.

So I came up with the idea of writing almost like a tennis style, where I wrote an opening scene that ends on a cliffhanger, kind of a little fantasy, a real world meets fantasy story.

And then I punted it over to him, and I said, it's over to you to write as much or as little as you want, and there's no time limit.

So that allowed him to exercise his creativity without any constraints of time, length.

The sky was the limit.

I told him, if you want to write a paragraph or if you want to write 10 pages, that's fine.

If it takes a day or three months, that's fine.

The nice thing is, creatively, you never knew what you were going to get.

So you couldn't plan ahead.

And the only other loose rule we had was, let's not just kill-- just out of brotherly spite, I introduce a character and you just kill them the next scene.

Like, let's build a story, not just destroy each other.

So we took a number of months to build this story.

When it finished, when I began to put this in a graphic novel form, I don't think I'd remembered the time between when it ended.

He passed away only two months after that.

And so I continued life as a prose writer for many years after that, and then made the transition into comic books and graphic novels.

And that's when I started thinking about what are some of the independent stories that I've already written that would lend themselves to comics.

And I thought, this is the ideal story.

It's so visual.

There's so much of it that's infused with his imagination.

And so I kind of made a commitment to myself to take as long as I could, once I found the right artist who could bring that vision to life, that I would take as long as it needed to bring this vision to reality and make this a legacy piece for his children.

- It's a beautiful story, being able to honor your brother's legacy like this.

And you talked about the collaboration and this tennis match, which is how I was thinking of it.

I used to write songs with a friend of mine who also passed away.

And it would be that thing where I would write down a lyric, throw him the pad, and he'd throw it back to me with something else.

And we'd have to kind of play with that.

When you bring in this third person, this artist who's working on the book with you, that's a whole new dynamic.

When you start to see their interpretation, or maybe they have some suggestions, how willing are you to kind of change something that to you was set, but now has a new direction?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

You know, I found a Filipino artist named John Amor.

His tone and style was so perfect for the tone of this story of "Closet World."

I realized I didn't need to change any of the content.

I just needed to truncate down to get it to kind of the episodic nature of each chapter.

You know, I was considering releasing it in single issues, ultimately decided to package it up in single chapters.

So it was less of, how do I need to change it for the artist?

Because he was matched so perfectly.

It was more my own on the writing side.

I needed to figure out what to cut and what to keep.

The other challenge with him was he went on to work on a number of other projects, because I can only afford so much for a page rate.

And he was able to latch on with a fairly decent, bigger name writer who had a long running series that they worked on together for the site Webtoon.

So a lot of people will come to me at conventions.

They'll recognize his work from the Webtoon series called "Urban Animal" that John Amor, the artist, had done.

I knew there are going to be times where we're moving pretty quickly.

And then there's times that the pace of "Urban Animal" is going to force him to slow down his work.

That was one of the biggest commitments was no one could quite match John's style.

And I looked everywhere just to see, especially as we were getting near the end and things were really, really coming in at a trickle, I couldn't find anybody.

And just my own commitment to the purity of the whole work being done by us together, by myself and John, I decided, I don't care if it's a page a year.

We'll take our time.

If it's two pages a year, whatever it is, we'll take our time.

We'll get this thing finished.

Once it's done, that's when I took it to Kickstarter to fund the printing of it.

- It's amazing because I guess for the younger viewers, the idea that you're working with somebody in the Philippines doesn't seem like that big a deal.

I mean, we had remote learning for not that long ago.

That was Zoom meetings and being able to talk to people across the globe is just the way things are.

But for those of us who remember the 20th century, this is fascinating science fiction world with Captain Kirk and Mr.

Spock.

So as you are dealing with somebody who is across the globe, several different time zones away, how do you find the time to collaborate?

I mean, is it just emails or is it the face-to-face meeting?

And is there a language barrier?

I mean, the Philippines is different from North Carolina.

- That's a great question.

It's one of my favorite parts of the comics creation experience is the teams, working with a small team to bring this vision to life collectively.

So "Closet World" as an example, obviously I was the writer, John was in the Philippines.

My first colorist who did most of it is Tamara Bonvillain, the only other person who is based in the United States.

Tamara then went on to work for DC and Marvel and Boom Studios and a number of others.

Was unable to finish working with this because Tamara was so busy on so many other projects.

So I brought in another colorist from Indonesia.

And then finally I had the letter who's from the United Kingdom.

At the very end, no one but myself was in the US.

With a few people, there is a bit of a language barrier.

And so sometimes depending on how strong their English is, I may have to explain things a little bit more fully.

You especially really notice where things are being interpreted when you get the layouts back from the artist and you see what was the vision as the way they laid it out before they go to final pencils.

Then I could see, were they really capturing what I was trying to say, the essence of what I was trying to say.

Whether it was from the script or our communications, which vary from Facebook Messenger to you name it.

Just a host of different ways that we communicate.

- One of the things that you mentioned was this communication and building this team.

Your background is you were in the military as I guess career.

- That's right.

- Before getting out and working in comics.

So how does the military sort of prepare you for working with a variety of different people in a variety of different disciplines in a variety of different locations towards one goal?

- There's a lot of carryover from my time in the military.

The other thing, not just the military, but I had the fortune of working in special operations and then I was also what's called a foreign area officer.

So I have seven years working in US embassies.

The nice thing in both those cases in special operations and in the embassies is you're working with small teams.

So not big units, I was Air Force, but as an example, not big army units of hundreds of people, but small teams.

That translates very well to comics, which is a small team.

So the dynamic and how you foster communication, the way you respect what are they going through.

I'm constantly trying to boost our communication to make sure I know what else are you working on?

Do you need time?

Do we need to slow down?

Where are you at?

What are you struggling with on this page or other things?

And other help.

I mean, I had one artist who's kid in the hospital and so I helped with some of those payments.

I mean, this becomes life.

These partnerships become life.

And you get very close to these people as you're working very closely on these projects.

- It's fascinating because one would not necessarily think of somebody who's in the Air Force as somebody who has this artistic sensibility as a writer who's coming up with stories in the case of an all ages graphic novel.

So in the Air Force, in your time in the service, what sort of prepares you for being a writer?

- The writer side of me predates the military.

And I came in at 17 and then got out at 51.

So it was a 34 year career.

But I always tell people, the writer side of me predates even that.

I was writing short stories to Isaac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine and Amazing Stories pre-internet, sending them in by mail with a self-addressed stamped envelope waiting to get.

And in fact, I started to see that maybe I had some talent when I was getting letters back from the editors.

Here's where some of your weaknesses were.

From Amazing Stories, for instance, I remember the editor writing me back and saying, we're not gonna take this story, but here's a weakness you have.

And here's some authors, some science fiction authors that are strong where you're weak.

Read these authors.

That's when you start to realize, I think I've got a knack for this.

I know I have a passion for it.

Not just consuming, but creating.

I went into the military partly recognizing this is gonna feed me as a writer.

I saw myself as a writer going into the military, feeding myself with experiences that I could draw upon for my stories and the characters that inhabit those stories.

So one of the things that I did throughout the 3+ decades that I was in, is I said yes to so many opportunities in the military that people would say no to.

And it was purposely to feed that part of my soul that was collecting and gathering experiences.

- You mentioned that at 17, you're submitting stories, you're getting feedback from editors.

I see in my role as a professor teaching mass comm courses, sometimes the younger person is more sensitive to criticism.

So what is it about hearing criticism from somebody that makes you wanna welcome it rather than say, no, no, my story's great, you just don't get it.

- Right, when you get rejection after rejection and it's just a form letter, that can be demoralizing and that can start to wear on you.

That's including both submissions for publication or for contest entries.

That's another avenue to try to see, am I gonna be able to break through and make the top 10 or top three or what have you.

And so when you're getting a rejection letter that's just a form, it starts to kind of grind on you.

But then once you got that first letter that actually was handwritten, that was telling you, that's when you realize, okay, they took the time, they sacrificed a part of their time to give me feedback.

So that must mean there's promise A, and then B, I need to listen to that.

I need to recognize, these are people who do this day in and day out.

Obviously this is not my full-time job, I was a young teenager.

So let me take that for action and see, what is it that I'm truly weak on?

Because I'm not gonna see the holes in my swing that somebody from the outside who does this every day.

There is no rejection to this day that there's not a little bit of a sting.

It always stings because you're putting a piece of your soul, yourself, into any story that you create and any character that you breathe life into.

So it can sting a little bit, but there has to be some dispassionate part of yourself that says, I can always get better.

And when I read really good comics or really good writing, I'm always reading for entertainment, and then there's a part of me that looks at it and says, how did they do that?

That was amazing.

And I wanna learn from that, whether it's learning from what I'm reading or whether it's I'm getting feedback from others.

- You are able to work your way into comics.

I mean, you've worked for Marvel, you've worked for DC.

So how do you go from working in a foreign office to getting a phone call from DC saying, maybe we need you to work on this book?

- My very first sold comic was an Avengers story to Marvel.

Now this is pre Marvel Cinematic Universe.

So at the time, the Avengers were not the household name that they are today.

But what I realized is I needed to find a way to make a personal encounter with an editor or some level of editorial at Marvel.

And this was years ago when there were the Wizard World conventions back in the past.

So this was at Wizard World LA.

Then editor in chief at Marvel, Joe Quesada, was having an auction and it was to help a charity, a comics charity, the Hero Initiative, which helps people, older creators with medical problems.

So I was determined to win the auction, which was gonna be to have lunch with the editor in chief.

Now I was writing critiques at a review site online.

So I planned to interview him 'cause that's something else the site did.

But of course I was gonna come armed with a few pitches.

And I said that at the end, look, I'd be remiss if I didn't share with you.

I'm also a writer trying to do some comic works.

Could I share with you?

I had them, all three pitches ready to go, very succinct, and I threw out all three that I could get out in one to two minutes.

And then he said, one of these sounds interesting.

Let me get back to you.

And within two weeks I heard from one of the editors and off to the races.

- Even though "The Avengers" before the Marvel Cinematic Universe might not have been household name, it's still one of the premier books at Marvel at the time.

So as a fan, basically you're stepping into, if not Yankee Stadium, at least Citi Field.

- That's right.

- So how do you kind of make sure that you're doing the best work you can, but also not getting too excited because you're working on "The Avengers"?

- Right, I think one of the things is I recognized early on, independence versus the big two, Marvel and DC.

For Marvel and DC, pick a character, Spider-Man, The Avengers, Wolverine.

There's a core part at the middle that's the theme of that character or that team, right?

With great power must also come great responsibility.

Or less of a theme, but Wolverine, I'm the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn't very nice.

So that's at the center of the wheel.

And all of the writers are dancing around the wheel, trying to talk about that theme in some kind of new way, but you're still dancing around.

Independent, it's kind of a line.

You can go wherever you want.

You can deviate off of that line, kill characters that you introduced with no intent to bring them back.

I mean, it's entirely up to you with an independent.

So I knew with "The Avengers," and at this time, Brian Michael Bendis was the primary writer for "The Avengers."

He had just folded "The Avengers," the "Avengers" disassembled line, and then brought in the new "Avengers."

And then for the first time in history, he was introducing Spider-Man into "The Avengers."

So that core theme where the Avengers come together to fight foes that no single hero could withstand, that's when I realized that's the core theme, and Spider-Man is predominant, not always, but he's predominantly a solo hero, joining something bigger than himself with a long history.

So that will be me going around the wheel is him appreciating the core theme, Spider-Man himself appreciating the core theme that's at the center.

And so that's the story I came up with, Spider-Man learning to truly appreciate Doctor Strange casts a spell where he gets to relive past "Avengers" moments as if he is there.

So when they thaw Captain America, which I think is in "Avengers" number four, if I remember right, it's him being thawed.

And other key, the Kree-Skrull War, he's part of the Kree-Skrull War.

And so it allowed him to experience it.

When he comes out of the spell, he realizes this is way bigger than I ever imagined.

So I had a healthy appreciation for the history and for the current moment of a new character, Spider-Man, being introduced to "The Avengers."

- I guess a lot of us who are just reading the comics might not think about how you are planning these moments out based on this underlying theme.

I do wanna go back to "Closet World" a little bit.

Because again, this is a book that looks like, I think you started in the early 2000s or so, and here it is 2025 as we record.

You've got the book done, you've got the artwork done.

Now you're ready to go and start a crowdfunding campaign.

What is that like for you?

Have you ever done anything like that before?

- No, this was brand new, and I decided this would be the one that I wanted to crowdfund because of my commitment to my brother and the legacy.

So it took so long that his two children married fairly young in life and had kids fairly young in life.

So I got to meet his grandkids that he never met.

So it became a multi-generational legacy piece.

And the reason I say that's important is I wanted this to come out no matter what, and I wanted to completely own this through the studios that I own, my company, Hanger 19 Studios.

So that meant getting the funding to pay for the printing so that I could be selling this myself.

But I had to learn everything in crowdfunding.

I started pretty early, listening to podcasts, reading interviews, studying campaigns, investing in campaigns and seeing how does it work?

How does the fulfillment work?

How long does it take?

So that was one thing was the studying.

The second thing is I wanted it to be done when I started the campaign.

I didn't want to tell people in the crowdfunding campaign, contribute to this and a year from now, we'll finish the book.

I wanted to be able to say, the book is done.

It's just gonna take a while to get the printing done and then package it up and get it on its way to you.

- One of the biggest struggles that crowdfunders have is that they don't have the book done, but they need money to pay the rent.

So I guess having the luxury of your other writing work and your other career gave you that ability to sort of weather the storm as it was getting put together.

One of the toughest things about crowdfunding is connecting to a crowd.

So how are you utilizing maybe a website or social media or maybe those other people that you've supported over the years with their crowdfunding to kind of get the funding completed?

- The first thing obviously is friends and family.

And so I had a friend who's an IT support worker and we joined together and he really helped me with the building of this, scouring decades of emails and helping me build an email list just from my own list and getting the initial volley out.

The other thing is we did do targeted Facebook ads, not a massive expense, but you can see based on how much you'll spend, how many people that's gonna reach.

And that did lead to, surprisingly, it led to, we made more money than what we spent from the sales, which is not actually, it's usually the inverse of that.

A lot of people will say that the money that they put on Facebook ads, it doesn't pay for itself.

But in our case, it did.

Part of it was being very, very selective in the criteria of who we were gonna try to hit.

So that was one thing.

The other thing is I also, I was messaging on every Kickstarter that I was on, I was putting a message, I look forward to this, I'm also have a Kickstarter that's coming out.

There are some people, for instance, the series Bone by Jeff Smith.

Bone just recently did a Kickstarter to do this mega-sized edition, re-release in black and white, hardback, really, really nice edition.

And so I messaged that on there.

Somebody from there saw that, and then they went in and backed mine, and they even said, "I learned of yours "because I read your message on the Bone Kickstarter."

So we started trying to get creative.

Here's another one I did.

Our local theater.

The vast majority, you know, I live in a small town here in North Carolina, we don't have that big of a theater.

Most of it are ads prior to the movies for, you know, the big, I don't know, Buick and Coca-Cola and whatever.

But there's local ads, and I thought, I wonder what, you know, what that costs.

So I found the owner of the theater, I had to track him down, he didn't live in the town.

And I said, you know, what would it cost?

And I explained the story about my brother and everything, and he said, "I wanna give you a 30-second spot for free "for the month," and he said, "You tell me what month."

And I said, "Well, let's span the month that it starts, "because we're gonna begin the Kickstarter "on the anniversary of his death."

And so, which was January 20th.

So I said, "Let's start the ads "at the beginning of January, so people see it, "and it'll have a QR code up there.

"Then once it begins, people can also, "with that same QR code, now the campaign is live."

So I just started thinking of anything I could.

Local newspapers, they did an article for me that championed it, one person signed up through that article.

So any, I was just trying to think of anything unique to get the word out, especially for the first 48 hours, because so many Kickstarters, it's kind of a make or break within the first 48 hours, based on the algorithms.

- And you know, one of the toughest things about a Kickstarter campaign, or any campaign, is that you need to be able to summarize what the comic is about in a way that, if I've got just a couple of seconds that I'm gonna click on your website, I need to know about it right away, so I can get excited about it and decide to read, or I can say, "Eh, it's not for me," and move on.

So what would be your elevator pitch for Closet World that would hook me in?

- Yeah, you know, one of the first things I do is, in this case, I will say this, the story of how it was created was what I put up front and center.

The fact that I created this, that half of what's in there came from my brother's brain, and to honor our relationship as brothers, and the legacy of his children and his grandchildren.

I did front load that.

But then when it comes to the story itself, it's a portal fantasy in the vein of the Chronicles of Narnia, about a little boy who gets a device that can control all of reality, which was inadvertently left in his room from an angel in heaven, and so now the forces of heaven and hell are desperate to get this device.

The other thing that I really highlighted was that it's all ages.

The vast majority of content on Kickstarter is not all ages, and so any all ages content that they see, they're eager themselves.

There is a Kickstarter, and I can't speak for the other platforms, Indiegogo, Zoop, some of these other platforms, but I do know Kickstarter has a dedicated person who works for them.

All his job is his comics, to interface with those who are putting comics on.

Now if people don't reach out to them, he's not necessarily gonna reach out to you, but I reached out to him to begin to ask him some questions.

Once he saw what it was, he said right away, "We're gonna make this a project we love.

"I'm telling you this now."

Now that really helped, because I knew I had his backing and his blessing to get even more eyes on it.

- And you know, in just looking at the cover, as I drop it, looking at the cover, we'll put a graphic up.

The one thing I noticed is that the character's holding something that looks like an iPad or an iPhone or something like that, and it makes me wonder, I mean, it wasn't something that was around 25 years ago, but now it is, and it kind of feeds into the idea that this is something that we all have, is we can research something new on our phones.

So did that have any sort of maybe impact on the audience?

- It didn't so much.

This was a calculator, and so it goes back to my days with my brother.

You know, we were both engineering majors.

We both grew up with a love of mathematics and science and engineering, and so I don't know why there was something about this.

He was an engineer.

My origins in the Air Force, I started as an engineer, and so I kind of wanted to throw a little bit of a thread of something else we shared, which was mathematics, and there's some stuff about that.

The angel who loses this device is responsible for all the mathematical constants in the universe, and if he's off by a digit, you know, of course pi never goes off, but if you're off a digit, then it throws everything out of whack, and so it was just our shared love of engineering and math.

- Well, Matt, they are telling us that we are just about out of time.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you and about Closet World, where can they find you on the web?

- My primary website, which is mattyocum.com, is the best way to find me.

I am on Facebook, and I'm on Instagram, and I'm on LinkedIn.

Those are the three kind of big social media sites that I'm on.

- Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come to Pembroke and talk with me.

- Thank you, Terence, I appreciate it.

- Thanks, everyone at home, for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

(heroic music) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Comic Culture is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, giving broadcasting majors professional experience and on-screen credit before they graduate.

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