An Interview with Crucial Comix

We interviewed Shay Mirk a couple of years ago, and had a great conversation about zines, comics, and community-building. At the time, Shay was editing for the Nib, had recently been making a zine a day, and had recently published Guantanamo Voices, a collection of oral history comics about Guantanamo Bay prison. You can read that first interview here:

When we heard that Shay was starting a new venture into comics publishing, we had to learn more. Alongside Audra McNamee, Shay has now founded Crucial Comix,  a small press that hopes to become the home of nonfiction comics online. Today, Shay is telling a little more about the press—and the classes they will offer!

Shay Mirk (L) and Audra McNamee (R) showing a minicomic about starting a comix press.

Can you tell us about why you wanted to start Crucial Comix?

I felt like Crucial Comix is a thing that should exist, and no one else has made it. So I decided to try to make it happen. Over the past couple years, I’ve been reflecting on what feels difficult and frustrating about making comics. Since The Nib stopped publishing in August 2023, there’s been a real lack of places to publish nonfiction comics. So many artists, myself included, publish our comics on Instagram or elsewhere for free. And there are some great presses that publish comics in print—like Silver Sprocket and Fieldmouse Press—but don’t publish online. I thought there should be a space that’s owned and run by cartoonists—not profit-driven tech companies—where we can publish our work online.

One of the hardest aspects of being an artist is that each of us has to run our own small business, figuring out a lot of things on our own. I want to be involved in a supportive community of artists where we share skills, knowledge, and resources. I’ve been teaching comics classes for the past five years, but I’ve felt frustrated by the constraints, costs, and bureaucracy of colleges and institutions.

Finally, in the classes I teach, people ask me all the time how to break into publishing comics. The only real answer I have for them is to start making and publishing their own work. It feels hard to me that there’s nowhere to send aspiring cartoonists, somewhere I can point to and say: here’s a place to meet artists and publish your work, where cost isn’t a barrier to entry. So, what I was envisioning is a publishing platform run by cartoonists that encourages community and collaboration, that’s open to pitches from all kinds of artists, that offers classes to experiment with new ideas and build your skills, and that’s not part of an institution where you have to pay expensive tuition. 

I’ve found pieces of this dream in a lot of places—I’ve been inspired by the resource-sharing vision of the Cartoonist Cooperative, the accessibility of SAW’s amazing free Friday Night workshops, the supportive and long-lasting community made by Center for Cartoon Studies students, the low-cost printing of original comics Robyn Chapman is doing at Paper Rocket Press, and the digital publishing smarts of the Nib. I’m stitching together inspiration from all those places to make Crucial. 

Is there a certain kind of comic or zine that you think Crucial Comix is the best home for?

The main thing we want to publish are nonfiction comics that say something new and essential. I love reading comics that bring a personal, vulnerable, and real perspective to a topic. So there’s no real limit on what topics we can cover, more that the comic needs to feel like it’s relevant and offering something new. One of our goals is to always be open for pitches, so people can submit comics any time. 

How do you envision Crucial Comix creating community among comics, creators and readers, far and wide?

I loved working as an editor at the Nib because I got to talk to artists all over the world and help them get their stories published. But one thing I always wanted were more ways for those artists to interact with each other, not just us editors. One thing we’re doing with Crucial is we’ve made a Discord, where anyone who publishes work on the site and anyone who takes a class or workshop can join. We’re hoping that it can be a space for comics creators to talk to each other, share work, and find friends.

I also think it’s important to say that our newsletter and Instagram share all kinds of nonfiction comics, not just the work we publish. So in our Instagram stories and in our newsletter each week, we post nonfiction comics that we like, no matter where they’re published.

This is about supporting and growing the world of comics creators, not just highlighting our own work. And I see classes as a really powerful way to create community. Every class I’ve taught has become an interconnected little unit of people sharing their ideas and feelings. I want Crucial to be a place where cartoonists can teach workshops on whatever they’re interested in—it can be a spot to test out new ideas or try weird stuff. We’re totally open to running workshops on fun ideas that artists want to pursue. Every workshop and class has sliding scale costs and they all have three spots set aside for free. Hopefully that makes the barrier to entry very low for anyone looking to join.   

You are experimenting with a different kind of funding model. What is the new funding model and how will it work?

Most small presses go bankrupt for a very simple reason: printing is expensive! I’ve worked for three independent print publications—the Portland Mercury, Bitch, and the Nib—and they’ve all had to stop publishing in print or cease publishing entirely. Even when times are good, books and magazines cost a lot of money to print and often have very, very slim profit margins. And then there’s a ton of variable costs that are out of your control, like the cost of paper and shipping. So I think the funding model of a traditional small press—publish books or magazines and use the profit from those works to publish the next batch—is pure chaos. We’re trying to keep costs very low by publishing digital comics and zines, rather than books or full-length magazines, and by not having any brick-and-mortar space. We’re not actually aiming to make much money at all by selling print products. Our business model is that we’re funding the press through classes. 

I had a lightbulb moment in 2020 when I started teaching comics-making classes online. Previously, I was teaching through a university where the students were paying thousands of dollars for each class, but I was getting paid very little. I started running classes on my own instead, just publicizing them through my social media. I could offer a class for way cheaper—like $150 for an eight-week class—and make more money than I was being paid by the university. My classes have always filled up and the participants asked for more classes and on different topics.

I think there’s a huge number of people who want guidance in creating comics or in exploring their creativity, but don’t want to pay for an MFA. Our model is to offer really affordable classes, and split the income from each class between the teacher and Crucial. We put that money back into paying artists for publishing their work on the site. To me, it feels like everyone wins: people can take really great comics classes, cartoonists get paid to teach whatever they want, and we have money coming in to pay for more original comics. 

What are some of the classes coming up that you are most excited about?

I’m running a five-session class with Whit Taylor on editing comics that will be really interesting. This is super exciting to me because there’s no clear path for how to get experience editing comics, other than to edit your friends’ work. I’ve never seen someone offer a comics editing class before—I’m sure a class must exist, but I’ve never seen it! I’m hoping we can help build up a crew of really great comics editors, who can turn around and use their skills to edit comics for Crucial or anywhere else.

I’m also especially excited for Mariah-Rose Marie’s one-off workshop Cooking Up Comics, where we’ll be making recipe zines. This is a perfect example of what I want Crucial to be: a place where a really wonderful artist can teach a workshop that sounds fun and interesting to them. And we get to come along for the ride. 

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Learn more about Crucial here:

Instagram: @crucialcomix

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