Tundra Publishing was a Northampton, Massachusetts-based comic book publisher founded by Kevin Eastman in 1990.[1] The company was founded to provide a venue for adventurous, creator-owned work by talented cartoonists and illustrators. Its publications were noted in the trade for their high production values, including glossy paper stock, full-color printing, and square binding. Tundra was one of the earlier creator-owned companies, before the formation of Image Comics and Dark Horse Comics' Legends imprint.[2]
Despite its ambitious start, Tundra never became a profitable enterprise. It closed its doors in 1993 after burning through $14 million in three years.[3]Kitchen Sink Press acquired its holdings;[4] it reprinted popular Tundra publications such as Understanding Comics and continued to publish some Tundra series such as Taboo.
History
While co-managing Mirage Studios, Eastman and his partner Peter Laird often spoke of the difficulties in maintaining creative control of their work. Eastman decided to address this problem by using his own personal knowledge and connections to help other creators. With Laird's blessing, Eastman started Tundra Publishing in 1990,[5] to realize personal and other projects.
One of the plans was for Tundra to act as an exoskeleton for an existing self-publisher; offering marketing muscle, higher production values, printing costs paid and a page rate up front for half the action no strings attached.[6]
Moreover, as Eastman said in a 2007 interview with Benjamin Ong Pang Kean, Tundra provided a forum for Marvel and DC creators to work on projects that they could not otherwise realize:
Basically, I'd meet them at conventions and they'd said they're stuck doing Spider-Man, they had a wife and a kid at home, and they had to make ends meet. But if they really had a chance, they said they'd really do this [at Tundra] and I'd hear this repeatedly. So, I went back to those artists because I had the money and said I'd give them the chance. I asked them what they'd like to do. They could pick their dream projects that they'd wanna do and I would provide the funding so that they could survive and they didn't have to do Spider-Man for a year and I'll fund the projects and I just wanted to make my money back from the profits to keep my company going.[2]
As part of Eastman's designs for Tundra were to produce personal projects of an adult nature,[7][citation needed] this saw Tundra fitting in the dubious middle-ground, as their intended product sat somewhat awkwardly between the comic shop and the book shop. Eastman says that he originally "thought that the audience was a lot larger than it actually was," citing his personal assumption that readers would "grow up through X-Men and discover The Sandman and then Dark Knight and Watchmen and beyond." The relatively new inroads of comics and graphic novels into bookshops worked against Tundra at the time.[5] Tundra dealt in new properties, which required "building from the ground up," and was "a lot more work" than Eastman had anticipated, growing far too quickly for comfort, and requiring considerable injections of time and money, rather than being profitable.[5] Tundra received multiple award nominations during its first and second years, including Harvey Awards and Eisner Awards, but despite critical acclaim the company was not making money on its titles.[2]
Speaking in 1992/93, Eastman was optimistic that the company had "finally reached the point where [it had] slowed up enough . . . to be giving individual projects the time and attention they require[d]."[5] Shortly thereafter, in the spring of 1993, Tundra was bought out by Kitchen Sink Press,[8] closing its (solo) doors after just three years, losing Eastman between $9 and $14 million.[2]
Tundra had been prepared to take over publication of Alan Moore's troubled Big Numbers series (originally self-published by Moore) before it was aborted.[9]
Tundra UK
In 1991 a British arm of the company, Tundra UK, opened in London.[10] Led by Dave Elliott, an editor at Deadline and a founder of Atomeka Press, the UK branch worked with creators already on board with Tundra in the US as well as developing new projects. Tundra UK published comics from 1992–1993; titles they published included:
^ abcdWiater, Stanley & Bissette, Stephen R. (ed.s) Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics (Donald I. Fine, Inc. 1993) ISBN1-55611-355-2
