Building a komiks publisher in 2025 (Heat Wave Pt. 2)
Also: join our RAYGUN Publisher Launch on June 29!
This is a long-overdue continuation of a post I made last year on the state of developing new Filipino stories. A year passed faster than expected since that last post, but I think it still gives a solid foundation into the broader context of what we’re trying to do:
One year later, we are finally back to work building a company that focuses on developing Filipino stories: Santelmo House, our IP development company, and its first imprint, RAYGUN, which publishes sci-fi/fantasy/adventure stories in the spirit of something like Shonen Jump.
Before we get started, I wanted to invite you to the RAYGUN launch if you are free! This Sunday, 5-8PM @ Cruxbl, 2nd floor of Comuna Makati, we’ll be releasing Maharlika track 11, Thank You and More Power episode 2, and the first 2 chapters of Night Gate by Lucia Asul. Pre-order link below if you want us to reserve copies for you:
Now, let’s dive in:
Comics are the beginning and the end
Our vision for Santelmo House is to eventually develop original Filipino stories across all mediums: starting with books and then eventually going into animation, gaming, merch, and beyond. But we begin with comics, or komiks with a K in Filipino fashion—not just for love of the medium, but because it has been historically the birthplace of almost all the major stories that have captured the imagination of the world.
Whether you’re looking at Marvel, DC, your favorite anime, or more recently your favorite Korean drama, the comic format (or manga/manhwa/manhua) has often been the starting point.
Comics are at this sweet-spot center of a Venn diagram that brings together both accessibility in production (you can make an epic and engaging story with just one person or a small team) and accessibility in consumption (you can, and I have, binged the entire first part of Chainsaw Man in a single day.) From a business perspective, that translates into relatively low investment and high returns: perfect for someone like me who is working primarily with his life savings and the support of some trusted friends.
The only medium that can beat it in this regard is novels, which have not coincidentally been the birthplace of epics such as Game of Thrones, Three Body Problem, and Harry Potter.
It’s not just about economics. If you believe, like I do, that staying true to a singular artistic vision is a determinant of success, then comics (and novels) are the closest you will get to that Platonic ideal. A single person or a small team putting a story to paper—no need to convince a corporate board that doesn’t get it, no need to organize a team of hundreds of production staff. You can just start.
The Philippines was historically a hotspot for the comic format. In the 80’s, more Filipinos read comics than any other printed medium. The industry collapsed in the 90’s through a very Filipino but very universal story of one company eating the whole industry and then taking it down with it when it failed… but that’s a saga for another time. Today, there are months where a pirated manga site has more web traffic than the desktop version of Facebook. The appetite for great stories in a sequential format hasn’t gone anywhere.
All of that sounds great—but then why are so many comic companies failing? And why is there so little industry support for new komiks in the Philippines?
Why the komiks business is harder than it looks
You can probably count on your fingers how many creators are making a full-time living by making their own original comics in the Philippines. A decent percentage of those creators are under RAYGUN/Santelmo House, where we’re patiently betting on our investments to bear fruit over a long period of time.
But it’s not just a Philippine issue: try searching “how to make money on comics” on Youtube and the videos you’ll find are probably a year old or older. Diamond, the leading western comics distributor, filed for bankruptcy less than a year ago. The industry isn’t exactly thriving outside of Japan, Korea, and China. But why—when in theory this is a format that shouldn’t demand such a heavy investment?
That’s a bigger question than I’m fully qualified to answer. A major element is a problem of portfolio construction: how do you get enough winners to cover the costs of the investments that fail? Especially when you’re operating a multinational company where you need success to equal hundreds of millions of dollars, it will take a lot of investment in a lot of failures to find the one big hit.
Then there’s the supply chain problem. Picture a river where the source, the headwaters, are books and comics, and they empty out to a mouth and a vast ocean that symbolizes the popular formats of film and TV. Sounds linear when you put it like that—but when you zoom out, it’s a giant loop where the health of the oceans flow back into the rivers where they start.
And the ocean has been suffering. Media companies as large as Disney have been struggling with their recent slates, and animation houses have been shutting down left and right. This chaos leads to budget cuts, and in that kind of environment, the appetite for risk-taking diminishes.
I’ve experienced firsthand how in crisis situations, the innovation budget (which in many ways is the function of comics/books) is the first to go. It’s tempting to say “just reallocate money to comics where you don’t need big budgets”—but these larger companies have fixed costs in the billions of dollars, and a comic that returns 20x on its $10k budget will barely pay the salary of one executive. Not to mention that these larger companies have, more often than not, lost their ability to identify and develop a small IP from scratch. The logical response to the crisis, then, is for them to double down on sure shots over anything new.
All of this waterfalls into very little budget for original comics IP several rings up the chain. The going mantra is: show me something hot, then I’ll show you the money.
In the Philippines, all of this is true but with a few additional complications. Piracy is rife and willingness to spend on media is low, which makes the cost-benefit formula even harder to balance. Add to that: the Philippine media landscape is consolidated into three major players, all of which have a (logical, on its face) reason not to invest in new IP.
ABS-CBN has faced financial challenges since it lost its TV license; GMA has focused on dividends over innovation, distributing over 90% of its profits to shareholders over the past decade; and Viva has grown primarily through Viva Max, a platform geared towards adult content. It’s a logically sound stalemate: why spend money on an unproven story when you can spend the same amount on a low-budget erotic film that you can ship directly to an audience that you know wants it?
All of this changes if someone can show a home run: an original IP that becomes a smash hit. But in the meantime, budgets for new komiks are practically non-existent; komikero as a profession is largely an elusive myth where the exceptions prove the rule.
We spoke in the last post about how comics take a lot of time—ideally with the artist fully focused and consumed in the act of creation. But there is hardly any budget to allow for that. Other than RAYGUN, there are very few local publishers that give the creator money upfront so they can dedicate time to their craft. And that’s not a jab at anyone—the reality is that it’s fucking hard, and it’s not even clear that it’s possible to do correctly.
Releasing the spirit of good komiks
But what are we gonna do, wait around and let another generation grow up on everything but Filipino stories?
In the midst of all the chaos and constraints, we believe that there’s one path that could work: building a publisher that focuses on developing new stories, gives creators the funding to dedicate more of their time on developing new worlds and characters, and through patient but intelligent investment is able to cultivate the resulting IP into new mediums that can introduce them to a broader and broader audience. All while being responsible and equitable partners with the creators involved. We’ve already gone on long enough today, so I’ll save the details of the “how” for another time.
It’s a difficult dream, and one that takes a bit of delusion: that we can identify the right creators and stories; that we can make the right calls at the inevitable crisis points ahead; that we can develop a fanbase for original Filipino komiks at a scale that hasn’t existed since the 1980s. We are still extremely small, intermittently broke, and so fragile a strong enough sneeze might bring the building down. But we’re trying something.
If you’re a reader of Maharlika or the other stories we’re developing, you’re a part of that dream at its earliest stages. So thanks for being here :)
See you Sunday?
With love,
Rexy and the RAYGUN/Santelmo House team.
P.S. While we’re here, I want to acknowledge that there are some incredible publishers and associations that are taking a stab at the same problem through other angles. Avenida has cultivated Trese, the biggest success in komiks in a long time (among other great titles), over decades. Nautilus has done the same with the works of Arnold Arre. Komiket, Komikon, and Patron of the Arts have done incredible work building communities that cherish original Filipino works; Komiket in particular has been bridging Filipino works to international audiences and we have been beneficiaries of their groundwork. Adarna and Summit have expanded beyond their core strengths in children’s books and magazines respectively to support new comics. Kwentoon and Kwento Comics are working on their own models of developing long-term IP through comics.
There are many many more amazing local publishers than I can name individually. And though our approach at Santelmo House/RAYGUN is different in terms of how we choose to invest our resources, we are all comrades in arms when it comes to achieving this difficult dream.