Last month an awful thing happened: Ottawa’s popular Mirror Comics closed its doors and shut down. Beginning in 2010, artist-writer Dominic Bercier and web guru Allan Isfan founded Mirror Comics to a fair amount of fandom, and hit its stride in 2012 when they released copies of their work at Ottawa Comiccon and noticed people loved what they were doing.
Even with the boost in popularity, the duo noticed quickly that didn’t mean they could distribute to a wider audience outside of their hometown. “Our physical and budgetary realities meant that we were limited geographically to central Canada,” says Bercier.
Mirror Comics didn’t close down from lack of popularity with their releases.
“More than half of our productions were big hits in our books,” says Bercier. “What I find amazing is that each book found its audience, however small, and that the variety that we offered meant that we had something for every type of comic book and graphic novel reader.”
Mirror Comics started off small and from modest beginnings. Like any small business endeavour, they faced struggles early on breaking into a large market already saturated with content.
“Well, at first it looked like a total bust. We were publishing digitally and sales were flat,” says Bercier. “Then we visited the first edition of Ottawa Comiccon, and finally we had a hit! Ghost King just flew off the table! At that moment we told ourselves, ‘okay, this can really work.’”
Afterwards, however, they faced typical financial struggles.
“Traditional publishing is quite difficult if you don’t have deep pockets behind it,” explains Bercier. “That said, we did amazing for the fact that we were on a shoestring budget. We stayed clear of debt throughout.”
Staying debt free after five years of production is no easy feat for a new business, and especially one with production costs like printing and distribution. Mirror Comics may have stopped production of physical comics, but hints it may move on to the web for its next endeavour.
“I’m seriously considering web comics for my next project. I want to build a large audience internationally, using websites, tumblr, twitter, facebook, etc., to reach out to the world,” says Bercier. “I love what we accomplished but it’s not enough.”
Without the cost of publishing, Mirror Comics has the ability to go online and gain a wider audience internationally. If popularity grows and it warrants a demand from an audience, Mirror Comics may attract a larger publisher to pick them up.
Bercier is saddest to disappoint the local fans that kept him and his partner going the past five years.
“We impressed fans and made friends out of them, and they stuck with us to the end, expressing great sadness when I finally shut down publishing operations in early March 2015.” he says, adding that one of their biggest supporters was The Comic Book Shoppe. “We were extremely lucky. We impressed The Comic Book Shoppe, here in Ottawa, early on. They carried all of our books and hosted us for special events countless times.”
There don’t seem to be many regrets in starting or maintaining publication the past five years, and Bercier only expresses fond memories.
“In the end, I discovered is that making books is only half the fun; seeing people’s amazing reactions to our products was the other half.” he says. “It seems like it was easy, looking back, but our focus really was to use our geography to make a name for ourselves, locally, if nothing else.”
With that, Bercier seems settled in Mirror Comics success and looks positively toward the future.
