BOOM! Studios CEO Ross Richie: There Has Never Been More Good Comics Than Now

Ross Richie, founder and CEO of BOOM! Studios, is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of comics you’re likely to meet; when ComicBook.com sat down with Richie at San Diego Comic Con for a short, “big-picture” interview about the future of the company and the state of comics, the publisher was wired and enthusiastic, chatting up friends and colleagues and enthusiastically greeting passersby……all at nine in the morning at Comic Con. Anyone who’s been there knows that’s pretty impressive stuff.Read on to see what he had to say about creator-owned comics, the Archaia acquisition and plans to push through more all-ages original properties, now that the licensed books in the Kaboom imprint have helped strengthen the market for kids’ comics.ComicBook.com: In addition to taking on Archaia, which is a big kind of battery of Intellectual Property, it seems to me as though the days when you did mostly licensed work are waning and that you’re mostly all original IP now, right?Ross Richie: I would argue, from my perspective, we never were [overly concerned with licenses]. When we won the Best New Publisher in 2005 from Wizard Magazine, we launched with original content. Zombie Tales, Cthulu Tales, a lot of the anthologies. Then we were doing Hero Squared–which is a book that’s very close to my heart–all that sort of stuff. All of that sort of stuff and then of course 2 Guns, which was a very early book that we did.As we started to build, looking at licenses is a great way to expand your business and so when we launched Kaboom, it was with a lot of Disney licenses and a big part of doing that is based on–if a spot like all-ages and kids’ publishing is under-served, retailers are scared to buy those books because there might not be an audience. The conventional wisdom is that kids don’t come into comic book stores. So launching originals in that space could be deadly.And it’s a disservice to the creators if you can’t serve them and provide an opportunity for them where they can flourish. We’re very protective of people because they’re literally giving us their dreams on paper, right? And I know if I gave somebody my dreams, I’d want them to try to do the best they could with it. So at one point we had twelve licensed titles through the Kaboom imprint that were all Disney-focused and that, on a market share basis if we just sliced Kaboom off as an imprint it was bigger than the next publisher behind us in market share alone.That might contribute to the feeling that we do a lot of licensed material, but really what it is, is that it was giving commercial product to the retailers and now, a few years later, retailers have an identified section in the front of their store that has Adventure Time and My Little Pony and several publishers in the space and the ground really broke for everybody. Now, that’s a valid way to publish comic books and so now I feel like we’re in a place where we can do something like Herobear, which is an original, and it can be supported by retailers.I’m a very strategic thinker and so I don’t really just sort of make it up. We’ll have a very specific philosophy and a specific approach and you’ll see us do more original content through the Kaboom imprint as we grow that and do it in a real systemic way.