Dear Gentle Reader,
Let me be honest with you: making comic books is hard. Not “long hours at a desk” hard. Not “tight deadlines” hard. I mean, the kind of hard that tests your mettle, and that asks you, repeatedly and without mercy, whether you really believe in what you’re doing. Whether you love it enough to keep going even when the numbers are disheartening, even when the market shifts under your feet, and even when the industry around you seems to be waiting for a version of normal that is never coming back.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a Substack post that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. The writer had packed her life into a truck and driven across the country, and somewhere along the long stretch of desert through Arizona, she arrived at an idea: there is no back. Only forward. She was writing about comics, about an entire industry holding its breath, waiting for distribution to stabilize, for things to go back to the way they were. And her message was simple and unsparing: that version of normal is over. It was never permanent. It was a moment. And moments end.
You can check her Substack post here, and I suggest you subscribe to her newsletters:
I read it twice. Then I sat back and smiled. Because she wasn’t describing a warning, she was describing exactly what we’ve been building at Mad Cave Studios for the last several years.
Mad Cave Studios didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a gut feeling that comics had more room in them than what was being made, that there were readers out there who weren’t being talked to, and that if someone was willing to bet on original stories and take the long road, they could actually build something that mattered. That feeling guided every call I made early on, especially the scary ones. Passion got me in the door. But I learned quickly that passion without the right people around you and a clear sense of where you’re going doesn’t get you very far. You need all three, or you’re just spinning your wheels.
We Didn’t Wait. We Built.
We built four imprints not because it’s what publishers do, but because we looked at where readers actually are, not where the industry assumed they’d always be, and built a home for each of them.
Mad Cave is for the readers who want the dark stuff: morally complex, action-forward, mythology-soaked stories that don’t flinch. It’s where the Underworld Universe lives, a fully connected shared universe built entirely from original IP, now entering Phase 2 with Honor and Curse: Eternal, Victoria Jaguar, and Mister Nemo. We’re not licensing someone else’s legacy. We’re creating our own. Plus all the creator-owned stuff like Is Ted Ok, and Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre plus many others, and our licensed books like Speed Racer, Gatchaman, The Phantom, Dick Tracy, and Flash Gordon, among a growing list.
Maverick exists because the YA reader deserves stories that meet them at the exact intersection of who they are and who they’re ecoming. Libraries know it. Schools know it. We built for that audience long before it became the obvious move.
Nakama Press is our love letter to manga culture and the anime generation, the readers who grew up on it, who speak its visual language, and who want comics that feel like home.
Papercutz is legacy and ambition at the same time. The eight-year-old holding a Papercutz book today may be reading Mad Cave in ten years. That’s not an accident. That’s a pipeline we believe in deeply.
So, when distribution fractured, we didn’t wait for it to resolve. We built direct relationships with retailers and showed up at ComicsPRO, in one-on-ones, in the hard conversations that most people avoid. When the market got cautious, we got more specific about who we were and who we were for. When everyone else was mourning the old map, we were drawing a new one.
We secured licensing partnerships with Disney, Lucasfilm, and King Features. We grew to over 45 people. We did all of that in what the industry kept calling an unstable moment. I don’t think it was in spite of the instability; I think it was because of it.
Alignment, Persistence, and the Loooooooong Game
None of this happened alone. One of the most important things I’ve learned and not from a book, but from living it, is that vision only survives if the people around you genuinely share it. Not on paper but in their bones. You need a team that sees the world the way you do, that will fight for the work on the days you don’t have the energy to fight for it yourself.
Misalignment is slow poison. It quietly erodes trust, morale, and momentum until it’s too late. But when you find people who are truly aligned, something almost supernatural happens. The hard days become bearable. The wins become real celebrations. The creative work elevates, since everyone is trying to reach the same place and they trust each other enough to say the honest thing.
And then there’s the other trap I’ve watched consume talented people: chasing the flash in the pan. The one title that explodes overnight. The deal that transforms everything. The one-trick ponies rarely make it. A publisher built on a single breakout with no foundation beneath it is one bad season away from being gone. What lasts is consistency, book by book, relationship by relationship, year by year, without needing every single move to be a home run.
Play the long game. Always. I know, it’s less glamorous, and it requires patience that doesn’t come naturally when you burn the candle at both ends for what you love. But slow and steady isn’t giving up on ambition; it’s actually the smartest, most durable expression of it. Editor Girl post’s author put it better than I could:
“The people who adapt during fragmentation become infrastructure. The people who wait become commentary.”
Mad Cave Studios chose infrastructure. Every imprint, every universe, every licensing deal, every direct-to-reader initiative, it’s all infrastructure. Not for what comics was but for what it’s becoming.
For the Creators and the Dreamers
I want to speak directly to whoever is reading this and still in the thick of it, grinding away on something you love, not yet sure whether the world will notice. I see you because I’ve been you.
There will be dark days, sure. Days when the doubt is louder than the belief, when you’re exhausted and the results aren’t there yet, and when you wonder if you have what it takes to see this through. Those days are very real and they’re part of it. What got me through wasn’t certainty; I didn’t always have that. What got me through was the next step. Just the next one. One foot in front of the other, even when I couldn’t see where the path was going.
There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, or in the immortal words of The Crow by James O’Barr: “It can’t rain all the time.”
The work you make with honesty, with love, with stubborn persistence will find its audience. Maybe not on your timeline. Maybe not through the door you were watching. But the right work, made for the right reasons, resonates. It echoes and it lasts in ways that overnight successes rarely do.
So, keep going. Do things your way: authentically, stubbornly, completely YOUR way. Make the thing that only you can make. Love what you do, even on the days it doesn’t love you back. Because in the long run, the people who make it are almost always the ones who couldn’t stop even when stopping would have been the rational choice.
The best stories we will ever publish haven’t been drawn yet. The characters that will mean everything to someone reading this haven’t been named yet. And whoever you are, a creator, a dreamer, a reader, mark my words, you’re part of what’s coming.
There is no back. Only forward. And we’re glad you’re coming with us.
With gratefulness and a splash of madness,
Mark London
CEO & Chief Creative Officer
Mad Cave Studios
MAD CAVE STUDIOS publishes across four imprints: Mad Cave, Maverick, Nakama Press, and Papercutz. Find us wherever comics are sold.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.