Talking with John B. Lai, Editor in Chief of Ultimate Comics Group

John B. Lai, Chief Operating Officer and Editor in Chief of Ultimate Comics Group, LLC., speaks about the history and future of his colorful small press comics line with Richard Caldwell…

John, can you share with our readers the origin story of Ultimate Comics Group? What led to the foundation of the company, and what are your agendas? I am presuming from your web presence that you are a real comic book fanboy…

YES, we’re HUGE Comic Fans. Even though some of our characters date as far back as the 70’s, creating an actual comic book wasn’t seriously considered until John Lai (Writer), Howard Bender (Artist), Lazer Ray (Artist) and Ken Feduniewicz (Letterer), were trading comics in Johns basement. They all wanted to work on a high quality creator owned book and agreed to begin work on Stormblazer, one of Johns most charismatic and visually dynamic characters.
It was also apparent that our artists would not be able to draw one issue per month like the bigger companies require, so UCG partnered with multiple creative teams on EACH title to allow us to work on multiple story arcs at the same time. That strategic decision proved to be critical to our success! Just because a comic artist is unable to draw a page each day, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t live their dream of being a comic artist. We’ve given these gifted up-and-coming artists a venue for showcasing their fantastic art, while also allowing them the flexibility to pursue other projects and interests at the same time. Many of our talented artists can only commit to doing one page per week for us and that works just fine for us!

One of the goals of UCG is to de-emphasize sales gimmicks and focus more on great storytelling and art in a cohesive universe, which helps to make our customers’ collecting experience an enjoyable one. What exactly does that mean? It means we’re going to try to eliminate things that we’ve found to be annoying in the comics industry such as title ‘relaunches’, variant covers, and the killing off of main characters merely to generate publicity during the ‘predictable’ resurrection.
We’re committed to prove to the world that we’re capable of creating awesome, full-color, ongoing, mainstream hero titles. We’ve seen too many small indy publishers advertise how they were going to be the next BIG thing in comics, only to vanish before publishing their first issue. For those few who were able to get a comic printed, we rarely ever saw a second issue see the light of day. We believe the main reason for the untimely demise of so many smaller indy publishers is because most companies concentrate ONLY on the art and forget the business end. UCG focuses on both the artistic side AND the business end, enabling us to survive and hopefully thrive as a company, which will allow us to continue publishing great comic books consistently, like those that are currently for sale: Stormblazer issues #0-12, Metapatriot #1-6, and coming soon, Stormblazer #13, Metapatriot #7, and in 2010…Essence #1-4.

You have an interesting business model at play, from offering print on demand issues to utilizing multiple distributors. You freely accept submissions, and you just recently began to add novels to your publishing repertoire.
UCG clearly seems to be trying to learn from the mistakes of others.
Still, is it difficult accomplishing what you want, in today’s climate?

The economy is affecting us BIG TIME! People are afraid to spend money, and the few dollars they DO have often goes to BIG NAME titles. We completely understand why consumers do that, but we’re asking comic fans to give Ultimate Comics a try.

A HUGE challenge for us is to resist spreading our limited resources too thin. We get so many GREAT ideas from people all the time on what we can spend our time and money on (websites, advertising, giveaways, attending conventions, etc.), but the fact remains, we can’t do it all…at least not all at the same time. So we are OFTEN forced to prioritize! We’ve also been extremely selective of the titles we publish. Every creator has a favorite character they want to draw, but we’ve held very tight controls on adding new titles. Only recently have we decided to add a third title- ESSENCE (she is our HOT female character), to our production lineup. We obviously want to expand, but we refuse to do so if it jeopardizes the quality of any of our existing projects and/or over-extends us financially. As you mentioned, we work VERY hard to learn from other publishers’ mistakes.

The key to our survival and ultimate success is to never forget our core strengths, which is to keep publishing great comics and keeping them priced competitively. One of the largest expenses we have is printing costs. When our budgets allow it, we will do formal print runs (such as the FIRST PRINTINGS of Stormblazer #1 and Metapatriot #1) and distribute them through HAVEN Distributors. For those books that must wait to be printed, we’re fortunate enough to be able to sell online through INDYPLANET.COM and take advantage of their ULTRA high quality digital printing. The fact is, we’re thinking outside the box in order to take advantage of the different distribution options that exist to make sure our fans always have access to our products.

Where do you, personally want to see yourself and UCG in say, five years? Is there a longterm design?

Personally, I’d like to be involved in UCG Movie, Action Figure and Video Game projects. No doubt, comic books are my passion, but the prospect of someday being a part of an entertainment juggernaut is EXTREMELY exciting!
I often chat with some of our creators like Atlanta based artist, Daniel C. White (the artist for Stormblazer #2&3, and Metapatriot #5) AND Utah based artist phenom, Rodney Jacobsen (the artist for Stormblazer #4&5 and Essence #1&2) and we share dreams about how we hope things will develop for us in a few years. We dream about attending UCG corporate meetings in Atlantic City or Las Vegas where we’d sit poolside to review our future action figure line and movie scripts. These guys are such talented artists. It would be SOOOOO cool if we achieved enough success that would allow our artists to draw FULL-TIME!
As far as Ultimate Comics Group goes, our long-term design is constantly evolving. In 2008 our website www.ultimatecomicsgroup.com went live and we continue to publish new issues of Stormblazer and Metapatriot (and soon enough, Essence). Even though in 2009 we’re trying to convince retailers to carry our line of comics, we continue to focus on quality and consistency, and we envision our characters becoming house-hold names. I see our comics- and hopefully in the future our toys, video games and movies- will line up store shelves all over the world where the ‘Ultimate’ name will be synonymous with world-class quality entertainment.

I imagine dreams and ambitions as strong as yours have been with you for awhile.
Who has influenced and inspired you in what you do, from in or outside of the comics and entertainment industries?

That’s a GREAT question. One of my biggest inspirations in my LIFE is the Colonel, from Kentucky Fried Chicken. The guy was rejected by SOOOO many people. His now famous original recipe got thousands of rejections, but he believed in his product and kept proposing it to people. We all know how the KFC story turned out. So, every time I face a setback, I just remember what the Colonel went through, and I passionately continue marching forward. I think it’s too easy to give up. It’s too EASY to say, life is TOO hard and my dreams will NEVER happen, but the fact is, in this day and age, in this global economy, nobody’s going to give your products a shot unless you genuinely believe in them yourself! It’s up to US to fight for own dreams…it’s nobody else’s responsibility. I constantly remind myself to be persistent, to be VOCAL, and be prepared to be in the business for the LONG-TERM.
Another HUGE inspiration for me is Tony Robbins, the motivational LIFE COACH. About 15 years ago, a buddy lent me his set of motivation tapes and it literally changed my life! His lessons taught me to NOT make excuses. I was too quick to blame others for failures, but now, instead of making excuses I put my energies into taking action. As you can see, with 20+ comics and a full length novel (Soul-Savers) completed, I’m still putting these lessons to work for me.
Within the comics world, the guys from IMAGE, specifically Todd McFarlane have been VERY inspirational to me. I loved the story about how the original Image partners quit the BIG TWO companies and risked everything to start their own indy company. It’s SOOO cool. And no doubt, Todd redefined quality in Action Figures, so he’s opened the doors for us to see what the possibilities could be in the comics industry.
I guess all have a common link for me, and that is to constantly push myself to appreciate everything I have, always try to improve, and take rejection and criticism as learning opportunities, not the end of the road.
Damn, that’s deep…but I guess it was a deep question.

Very iconic choices. Those guys are all problem solvers who have impacted countless people in positive ways.
Thank you for speaking with ComicNews.Info, John. Any closing comments, any great expectations to leave our readers with before you go back to making fun comics?

Yes, I’d like to let every single comic fan reading this know, if you think our comics sound cool, ask your favorite retailer to carry Stormblazer #1 and Metapatriot #1. Stores can register with our Distributor at www.havendistro.com or by calling HAVEN at 877-428-3650. If you enjoy those issues, order the rest of our books online at INDYPLANET.COM. We want comics to be fun, entertaining and affordable. These aren’t the comics your parents read, that’s for sure!!!
Thank YOU so much for this opportunity to be heard! ComicNews.Info ROCKS!

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Richard Caldwell

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