Meet Neil Brideau of Radiator Comics in Downtown Miami

Today we’d like to introduce you to Neil Brideau.

Neil, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I’ve been passionate about comics since I can remember when I was a kid I would read pretty much any comic I could get my hands on. In high school and college, I drew comics for the school paper and ended up being the editor for the lampoon section of my college paper. Once I left college, I didn’t have a platform for publishing comics, and I was really lost for several years.

In 2003 I moved to Chicago, and I started shopping at Quimby’s Bookstore, which specializes in small press and self-published books, comics and zines. I started picking up these little comic books that people were self-publishing, and it was really easy for me to imagine making something like that. In 2005 I started drawing a webcomic, called Sock-Monster, and a couple of years later, I started making my own zines full of comics.

I ended up working at Quimby’s for six years starting in 2009 and learned a lot about how the book retail industry works. The thing that makes Quimby’s unique is it offers an open consignment policy for books, comics, and zines. That means anyone anywhere can send or drop off copies of their self-published work and the store will sell it for them and pay them once copies sell. It was really rewarding to see people’s reactions to finding out we’d take their comic or zine without any sort of review process. That automatic acceptance and legitimizing of their work were really encouraging for a lot of people.

In 2010 three friends of mine and I started the Chicago Zine Fest, which was a weekend-long celebration of self-published media. It featured readings, and workshops, and a book-fair style marketplace. I helped organize it for three years, and then I started the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (also known as CAKE) with four other friends in 2012. Chicago has such a robust comics community that CAKE quickly became a destination festival for alternative comics in North America.

It was my education working at Quimby’s and the great satisfaction I drew from my volunteer work organizing the Zine Fest and CAKE that made me want to start a distributor for self-published comics. So in 2014, I launched Radiator Comics. The idea was to expand the number of readers for small press comics. I started off representing 25 cartoonists, of whom I was a fan. Now I’m up to over 60 cartoonists, and I’m working on dramatically expanding my client base later this year.

Radiator Comics has also published a few titles, starting with The Chronicles of Fortune, a graphic novel collecting ten years’ worth of work by New Mexico-based cartoonist Coco Picard, and now we’re publishing a series of minicomics by New Jersey-based cartoonist Whit Taylor called Fizzle. That comic comes out twice a year and should be about eight issues in length.

In 2017 my spouse got a job at FIU, so we packed up and moved our lives from Chicago to Miami! My spouse is very good at finding all sorts of opportunities and sent me a link to Support Local FL’s call for artists and small businesses to run a temporary pop-up shop in Miami. I applied and ended up sharing a space for three months with Teratai Malaysia, run by Munirah Rimer in the Spring of 2019. As that shop was winding down, EXILE Books asked if I wanted to take over their space for the summer and run a shop and offer programming. That was really great because I was able to organize some readings with local cartoonists and run Saturday-morning workshops. This past fall, having seen my pop-up at EXILE Books, Locust Projects invited me to set up shop in their project space to complement the exhibition by Trenton Doyle Hancock, I Built a Mound City in Miami Dade County. There I continued to offer Saturday-morning workshops. Through all three pop-ups, I offered a Quimby’s-style consignment system for Florida-based cartoonists.

In the fall, I also received an Ellies Award from Oolite Arts and a Knight Arts Challenge Award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help support and grow the comics community n South Florida. I’m publishing an art journal series called Spiny Orb Weaver, and I’m working with Jamila Rowser from Black Josei Press to publish a free comic anthology of comics by South Florida Cartoonists this summer! The bulk of the funding will go toward a community cartooning center called Radiator Comics Studio, which will offer workshops, programming, resources and workspace for cartoonists and would-be cartoonists to create their comics and build community among one another!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
When you run a small business you kind of live and die with every good or bad day, a great day of orders can make you feel like you’re floating on a cloud, but if you have a drought, and are paying a lot of bills, it can feel really deflating.

What’s worse is our society equates financial worth with self-worth, and it’s really hard to fight against something so ingrained in our psyche. No one who makes comics or distributes comics is making their living -let alone a comfortable living- off of $5.00 minicomics. So it’s easy to feel defeated. But then I get to mail out awesome comics by some of my favorite people in the world, and things feel better.

Radiator Comics – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Minicomics are at the heart of Radiator Comics. “Minicomic” is the name for any self-published comic book. They’re often photocopied and stapled, and they’re usually written, drawn, printed and bound by one person. Since the production of the comic is so intimate, it’s a really personal artifact of the cartoonist. Eleanor Davis once described handing someone else a minicomic as saying “this is me.”

You can make a minicomic in an afternoon, filling a couple pages with some goofy drawings, or you can spend years writing, editing, penciling, inking and laying out a minicomic. Since you’re in charge of your own comic’s production, you have an entire say of what’s worth publishing. I really love that spirit of independence and intimacy, so Radiator Comics really focuses on self-publishing cartoonists and their work. It’s fun to see the wide variety of titles that come out of homemade comics.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I really care about the artists whose work I distribute, so if I’m selling a lot of their comics, I feel like a success. If I hear from a customer that they are experiencing comics in a new way, that’s really satisfying.

Through Radiator Comics Studio, I want to make cartooning as accessible as possible for people who might feel like they can’t make a comic for whatever reason. You don’t need a lot to draw a comic, just some paper and a pencil, and most people find reading comics easy and fun, so it’s a great way to get ideas across. I’d love to see more people expressing themselves through comics for fun.

In terms of the larger comics community, I have much larger goals that are long term. It’s tough to make a living in comics, and I want to do my part to change that. I say I want to be a part of it because it’s going to be a group effort from a number of distributors, journalists, event organizers, publishers and educators to build a sustainable ecosystem for cartoonists to make new work and be fairly compensated for it. But it would be great to be able to point to specific things Radiator Comics did to help cartoonists make a living.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://radiatorcomics.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @radiator_comics
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RadiatorComics/
• Twitter: @radiatorcomics

Image Credit:
Photo 1: Jamila Rowser reads her comic Wash Day at Radiator Comics’ Pop-Up at EXILE Books, August 2019
Photo 2: Neil with Mike Freiheit and Marnie Galloway at TOKEN Zine Fest at Emporium in Chicago, IL
Photo 3: Fizzle Issues 1 – 3 by Whit Taylor, Published by Radiator Comics
Photo 4: Radiator Comics Table at Miami Flea
Photo 5: Examples of comics Radiator Comics Distributes
Photo 6: Radiator Comics Office
Photo 7:  Neil with Penina Gal, Ashley Robin Franklin, and Ann Xu at the Small Press Expo, Bethesda, MD September 2019

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