ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Kickstarter is a  new website that exists to help artists, musicians, crafters, and folks with cool creative ideas fund their projects. I recently spoke to Chloe Eudaly, DIY champion and proprietess of Portland’s wee and wonderful specialty bookstore Reading Frenzy. Through Kickstarter, she’s hoping to fund a reprint of Sean Tejaratchi’s legendary line art zine Crap Hound #4, Clowns, Devils, and Bait, and was kind enough to give us some details on how it’s going.

Can you share a little history of Crap Hound and your relationship to the magazine?

Sean Tejaratchi and I met in the early 90s and happened to start our projects, Crap Hound and Reading Frenzy, around the same time in 1994. We became good friends and since then Sean has been integral to the success of the shop; he was responsible for almost all of our identity and event materials for the first several years, even manned the counter every now and then, as well as providing sporadic financial support as needed. I became a frequent contributor to Crap Hound and wielded the white out pen when the issues were laid out cut & paste style.

Crap Hound is our best selling title of all time, and people ask us about new and back issues on a regular basis, so when the magazine went dormant for a few years I eventually approached Sean about doing reprints. We put out revised and expanded editions of No. 5: Hands, Hearts & Eyes and No. 6: Death, Telephones & Scissors. Last year we released the first all new issue in several years – No. 7: Church & State. We plan to publish a third edition of No. 5: Hands, Hearts & Eyes as well as another new issue, No. 8: Superstitions later this year. Sean retains all creative/editorial control, I publish, promote and distribute the magazine.

What would you have done without Kickstarter–did you have other options for fundraising?

I’ve financed each issue differently. The first one we published went on a credit card, the next I took out a small business loan, and the third a personal loan from a friend. The magazine does really well, but the proceeds have mostly gone to supporting the shop through some really lean years, so I’m still paying those debts off. I would have had to scrape the money together through pre-orders, events, small loans and it probably would have taken months rather than just six weeks. Not that it’s a done deal – as of January 28^th we still have $3500 to go and just 15 days to raise it in – I don’t want to jinx it!

If our project is successfully funded, it will eventually enable me to take a huge bite out of the old debt, through sales of the magazine, as well as set aside funds to publish the next one. We’ll probably use Kickstarter to raise some cash for future issues, but I don’t think we’ll ever need to raise this amount of money for Crap Hound again, because the Kickstarter platform is helping to launch us into becoming a self-sustaining business.

Kickstarter presents an amazing opportunity to launch creative projects without going into debt. It’s also an invaluable testing ground – even if your project funding is unsuccessful there is so much to learn about how you present your project, craft your rewards, what people are willing to support and how much support they’ll give. It also forces you to promote the heck out of your project, something I see as a shortcoming with a lot of authors, artists and publishers who expect their work to sell itself. Pledging to a worthy project and helping promote it is really satisfying – it feels so good to have a hand in helping someone realize a great idea.

Why do you think people have responded so well to Issue #4? (For me, it’s the worms.)

I don’t know that it’s the particular issue; I think people are just really excited to see any issue released! It’s an invaluable resource for artists and designers – you could probably spend 10x the cover price on clip art books and still not have the same density of quality images. This revised and expanded reprint has 24 new pages and about 50% new images. I know that clowns are a deterrent for some people, so I’m grateful so many have been able to overcome their fears and support this issue.

What are some cool things that people have done with the line art found in Crap Hound?

Crap Hound is a popular resource for graphic designers and tattoo artists, so I’ve seen dozens of posters and tattoos based on images from the magazine. It’s enriched the graphic content of hundreds of zines over the past 15 years. There was a woman making rubber stamp sets out of the copyright free typefaces for a while. I have an open call out to artists and designers to send me images of work they did using Crap Hound.

Crap Hound presents some gray areas; not everything in the magazine is copyright free, so we don’t call it clip art. People want a simple answer about whether they can use all the images or not, but the answer is complicated. First and foremost it’s a visual survey organized around a theme or themes and by its nature it will include images that clearly are not in the public domain, such as corporate logos or mascots. We encourage people to use it, but use it wisely, to understand and embrace Fair Use, to take it and make something new, something better. Sean is frequently able to identify the source of an image so if someone had a major concern we would do our best to help determine whether it was public domain.

In your Kickstarter bio, you state that you “strongly believe that an ability to scale up to mass market demand is not necessary for work to be important or valuable;” can you expand on that? I think that a lot of crafters/artists get confused about what success is, or can feel that their work has little value.

Having devoted the greater part of the last 15 years to promoting independent media, small press literature, and zines, I’ve encountered a lot of bias against non-mainstream authors and publishers. It centers on the myth that these authors aren’t good enough for major publishers or that while their writing may be top quality, what they’re writing about will never have mainstream appeal and therefore is of little value. I think both are bunk. I could reel off a list of 20 authors who began self-publishing and ended up snagging major publishing deals, and even some who rejected them in order to retain control over their work. I could also tell you about some of the most brilliant, hilarious and heartbreaking work I’ve ever read, which by it’s very nature will never scale up to a mass audience. I want to read work by someone who HAD to write their story and write it their way, not someone attempting to cater to the broadest audience possible in order to move more units. I hate to think what our culture would look like if the criteria for what work sees the light of day was dictated by the lowest common denominator. Don’t get me wrong, I love pop culture and mass media too, but my appreciation of the small and obscure is what inspired me to create an outlet for and continue to champion such work.

Excellent, yes? If you have a project that seems a bit out of reach money-wise, or have a few extra bucks to share, check out Kickstarter and see what Chloe and other folks are working on. It’s really inspirational, and you might just come up with that big idea.