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guess it all started when Joe Lansdale approached me in September of ’93 about doing Weird
Business. We started talking about doing this massive book, but it turned
out to be a lot more massive than we expected.”
That’s Mojo Press managing editor Richard Klaw speaking about their
ground-breaking second project, the 400-plus page Weird Business.
Released just over a year ago, Weird Business went on to win an Eisner
Award and has thus far sold very well with virtually no advance publicity.
On top of that, Klaw and Mojo Press publisher Ben Ostrander have since
released a steady tide of astonishingly well-produced volumes, ranging from the
slim comic anthology of the Wild West Show to their recent
bells-and-whistles 30th anniversary reissue of Michael Moorcock’s seminal short
novel Behold the Man.
Small press publishing is nothing new, and certainly not in Austin, but Mojo
Press has gone the game one better by consistently issuing releases that not
only look great but also manage to be the kind of books you come back to over
and over again. For the record, I’ve already devoured the stunning Weird
Business several times over, eagerly shoving into the faces of startled
friends with a hurried “Man, you’ve got to check this out” and loaning it out
like I was some bizarrely overzealous branch of the Austin Public Library. “Due
date? We don’t need no stinkin’ due date!”
“As Weird Business progressed,” says Klaw, “we knew we needed somebody
to publish the book, and finally I told Joe that I knew someone who might be
interested and who had the money to do it. That was Ben. I pitched it to him
and he agreed that it sounded like a really great idea. And so Mojo was formed
in October of 1994. That’s how it came to be: We were stupid enough to spend
the money on this big book.”
Before you begin scratching your head and wondering how these two — the
gangly, hyper-talkative Klaw (grandson of the late Irving Klaw, famed
photographer of pin-up beauty Bettie Page) and Ostrander, who looks more or
less like your good neighbor Sam and speaks with measured surety on everything
from maddeningly arcane comic book trivia to the recent novels of Elmer Kelton
— came to create one of the most successful small press houses in the
business, let’s go back a bit.
Both men come from publishing backgrounds, albeit none so interesting as the
one in which they’re currently involved. Klaw toiled for years in the salt
mines of corporate monolith Barnes & Noble satellite BookStop, where he was
almost single-handedly responsible for picking up small press volumes that
would otherwise go unnoticed by the chain. After that he moved on to local
imprint Blackbird Comics, as well as a stint at Adventures in Crime and Space
bookstore.
And Ostrander? “I had worked at Metagaming, which was where Steve Jackson
[special friend to the United States Secret Service and founder of Steve
Jackson Games] also started out. I had published games there and done a lot of
work of that nature, more or less.”
Unlike most publishing firms, Mojo has no central offices, at least not yet.
The entire business is run out of Klaw and Ostrander’s houses, with spare
bedrooms set up as more or less permanent offices. “We’re unusual in that
there’s only two of us,” offers Ostrander. “People meet us and they go
`You’re Mojo Press?!,’ you know? We do these books that are so vicious.
Every book we do is a big deal — that is, we do bigger books than most small
presses, the quality’s better, etcetera, so people tend to look at us and
wonder where our staff is. And we don’t have one.”
It may not be Knopf or Simon & Schuster, but it is a full-time job: The
two work every day on Mojo, slinging calls back and forth between the two
houses and actively working on several different projects at any given time.
“There’s a lot of overlap with what we do,” remarks Klaw, “but there’s definite
roles that are divided. Ben deals with all the printers, which I never do.
Anything that deals with money — that’s Ben’s problem, and I deal with the
actual creators, for the most part. I’m the one that calls them on the phone,
I’m the one that gets the work in, and I’m the one who of course edits all the
stories.”
“In some ways, we’re busier than the editors at the big companies,” says
Ostrander, “because we don’t have a staff to deal with all the little details
for us. Putting out a book, we’re the ones who have to worry where the
copyrights are, and all that sort of stuff. We often hire art directors,
though. Locally. They design the logo, get the page numbers right, and so on,
but the two of us take care of pretty much everything else.”
Thus far, Mojo has released seven titles, ranging from their first project
(which was actually carried over from Klaw’s days at Blackbird), the
horror-comic anthology Creature Features, to the recent Big Bigfoot
Book and their expansive Saga of Blueberry: Confederate Gold, a
compilation of the famous Western comics by legends Charlier and Moebius.
It’s still Weird Business that’s the bloody little feather in their
cap. At its inception, no one had ever attempted to combine the greatest horror
authors and comic artists into one creepy package. Nay-sayers were abundant,
thinking in part that people wouldn’t go in for what is essentially a mammoth
hardcover horror comic. Ignoring the negative comments, Klaw and
co-author/Nacogdoches resident/living legend Joe R. Lansdale (who, by the way,
came up with the name Mojo Press, his own self) issued invitations to artists
and writers in the genre, and were almost overwhelmed by the immediate response
they received. With original stories from Poppy Z. Brite, Charles de Lint,
Nancy Collins, Howard Waldrop, F. Paul Wilson, and the late, great Robert
Bloch, the book is a veritable chronicle of who’s who in the horror genre. And
with top-flight artists ranging from Miran Kim, Omaha Perez, John Bergin, and
John Lucas… well, let’s just say the fanboys had a field day on this one.
But I’m cheerleading aren’t I? Sorry. Hard not to. Back to our small press
debate already in progress:
“The problem with small press is that it’s both good and bad.” says Klaw.
“People look at us and say, `What kind of stuff do you publish?’ and the answer
is `Pretty much what we want.’ And they just look at you and say `Huh? What’s
that mean?’ They don’t always get it.”
Ostrander agrees. “I think a lot of small press companies screw up because
once they have a book or two, they immediately get a big staff and then go
under. They lose sight of the fact that you have to put out good books, stuff
that people read and enjoy. They get a couple of books under their belt and all
of a sudden they think they’re Warner, and you can’t do that.”
Which, of course, is the antithesis of Mojo. Already scheduled for publication
this season are three new volumes including a second Blueberry volume,
Broken Nose, and the long-awaited Lansdale book, Atomic Chili: The
Illustrated Joe R. Lansdale, which will include all of the author’s comic
adaptations and other related art, plus a pair of as-yet-unseen gems, Pilots
and The Job. Top that off with Dead Heat, the debut novel
from horror author Del Stone (“it’s a zombie-biker kinda thing” Ostrander
says), and it’s obvious that this fledgling Austin operation is growing faster
than the Amazing Colossal Man. Which is good for us. Trust me.
As Ostrander says, “We’re doing books that if we walked into a bookstore and
saw them, we’d buy one, we’d need to have it. Couldn’t live without it. No way.”
This article appears in December 27 • 1996 and December 27 • 1996 (Cover).