Apr 12 2009
Goodbye to Praxis Comics? Not yet, thankfully.
Earlier this month, Praxis Comics’ site had gone down for a few days and I assumed that the publisher had folded. After all, it’s a cutthroat business and their website had previously mentioned some trouble with investors. However, I am pleased to report that the website has returned with a new design. (I’m generally fond of Praxis’ art, but I think the design probably uses sex-appeal a bit too blatantly. Ah well. That’s pretty standard for this industry).
I also came across Radical Comics. They don’t accept unsolicited submissions, so I won’t add them to our index of comic book publishers. But I think they’re worth looking into because they have book trailers for all of their series.
So, if you’re interested in doing a trailer for your comic book (or perhaps even a novel), I think you can learn something from their approach. Their trailers are striking because they have no narration and hardly any words; they only use wordless images and an instrumental sound-track. That’s a surprisingly interesting way to present a simpler story like Calibre, an Arthurian legend retold in the Wild West. It did not work for series with a more complicated setup. For example, the premise of City of Dust is that fictional stories have been outlawed 100 years in the future. I don’t feel like the images gave me a good idea of what was going on or why I should care.
A day after posting this obituary for Praxis Comics, I see that no one has cared enough about Praxis to post a comment. Hmm. I suppose that its death shouldn’t surprise me, then.
Don’t be so sure about that!