Who am I and What do I do?
- A History of Nifty Comics

The first thing to keep in mind is that Nifty Comics has been around in various forms since 1995. We’ve run through Diamond and Capitol City (when they were around) in the past and had some pretty decent sales. During the comics boom in the mid-90s we had a mini series that sold right at 30,000 copies. Of course, this was when comics were selling hundreds of thousands and millions, so our numbers were considered crap for anyone trying to be serious publishers. A good thing that came out of it was that BKN International optioned a pilot of the Cadre. It didn’t go anywhere, but it’s pretty cool to have a 20 minute animated version of a comic I created.

We run a couple of issues post-crash, but the numbers were abysmal — under 1000 (under 500, actually) through Diamond, direct to stores and FM International. Although the books we ran were all “Small Press Spotlights” and received great reviews.

At that point, in 2001, Nifty Comics disappeared for a while. It’s not widely known, but I was involved in a pretty bitter divorce and my ex-wife decided that she wanted Nifty Comics and all assets as part of it. Now, keep in mind that Nifty was worth absolutely nothing at this point, so the whole thing was pretty painful. Four years later I was able to buy back the rights to everything, although the ex had put out some pretty awful trade paperback compilations in the interim.

Nifty Comics began publishing again in 2005 with a new Cadre series and the release of our low, low, low budget film, Bite Me, Fanboy. The new Cadre #1 came out in May, although we did a small run through ComixPress in April for a Cartoon Network meeting. I made the decision this time to just do the comics for fun since they’d been a source of pain in the past. As part of this “just fun” plan, I opted out of using Diamond as a distributor. From my experience they don’t treat most indy companies very well and just aren’t very “fun” to deal with. Plus, most indies only sell a few hundred copies through Diamond and I figured 300 extra sales an issue just wasn’t worth the headache.

So, with the launch of the new series I did what all new comic publishers do and hit the streets trying to get local comic shops interested in the books. What I very quickly found was that comic store owners really aren’t interested in black and white, mainstream style, super hero comics. One retailer told me he wouldn’t carry the book because his clerks would have to actually SELL it as opposed to Marvel/DC books that will sell without having to talk to customers.

This attitude irked me a little so I marched down to the local Borders (a place I haunt a couple of times a week) and spoke to the manager there, showing him the comics. He got me in touch with the store buyer who promptly ordered 100 copies of the book. We hit it off pretty well and he called a couple of other stores to recommend the comic to them (most of these companies are great at supporting local “talent”) and also got me in touch with a regional level buyer for Borders.

The whole process took a few weeks but I was able to backdoor my way in to a pretty large book chain. They said they would try me out for the first issue to see how it went and the regional suggested stores put the Cadre comics in with Graphic Novels/Manga instead of the magazine section. When all was said and done, I was in somewhere between 80 and 100 Borders stores in the US.

After the success at the first Borders store, I got a little cocky and decided to go for the Virgin Megastore and Tower Records/video/Books right down the street. I talked to the managers at those stores and had even better success (my dad was a pretty well known guitar player in the 50s-70s and dropping that tidbit helped quite a bit). Tower stores in particular were fantastic about supporting indie publications – and I was sad to eventually see them disappear.

Sales started out at around 700 and were up to 2000 by issue 4, almost exclusively through non-comic industry outlets. We do sell to a few comic stores (somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 shops), but that only amounts to about 230 sales an issue or thereabouts.

5 Fun Facts About Nifty Comics and Mat Nastos

1. Pre-Order sales for the last issue of the Cadre we released (Cadre #9 through books stores, released as Origins of the Cadre #4 on the internet) reached just over 8500 copies. This number of sales was reached by using the marketing and distribution techniques I outline in this book. We reached those pre-order numbers WITHOUT the use of Diamond Comic Distributors as a sales channel. In fact, we go out to less than 30 comic book shops.

2. Our Scottish superhero comic, Fionn, sold over 20,000 copies in its first 3 months, all through non-comic industry channels. As I discuss in the Fionn Case Study, Fionn targeted a very specific niche and did so incredibly well. The book is still selling at Celtic and Scottish Festivals across the country.

3. Over the course of 2 years and 10 issues published to date, Nifty Comics has printed and sold over 150,000 comic books. Again, all without making use of the dead end that is the current comic industry distribution channel.

4. I finished my first self-produced film, “Bite Me, Fanboy,” is 2005 and made available for release that same year. Using the marketing techniques found in this book and exploiting the power of affiliate marketing, “Bite Me, Fanboy” has sold almost 5,000 copies to date.

5. My affiliate marketing experience, something I use in conjunction with my comic book publishing endeavors, has come from a series of very successful websites I created and still run to this day. I manage approximately 15 affiliate sites and was responsible for more than $2,000,000 in sales referrals in 2007 alone.

Who Is Mat Nastos?

Mat Nastos was born in the early 1970s in Wilmington, Delaware, while his father, Nick Masters, was on his way to tour the UK and Europe with Bill Haley & the Comets.  After spending his first few years in Ireland, Mat Nastos’ family returned to the US, living in Philadelphia for most of the time, with summers spent at pre-casino Atlantic City.

It was during this time when Mat Nastos received his first comic book, a copy of Power of Warlock #14 given to him during a particularly nasty case of the measles in 1976.  This began Nastos’ life long love affair with the world of comic books. 

In 1978, at the age of 5 and with the retirement of his father from the life of a touring rock musician, Mat Nastos and his family relocated to beautiful state of Hawaii.   It was in Hawaii where Nastos’ love of comics would continue to grow.  He would go on to put together and manage the first comic book conventions in Hawaii with the “Mat Nastos Comic Book Conventions.”  The conventions ran from 1986 and would last into the early 90s after being sold to Creation Conventions.  During this time, and with the help of a comic book collection which had grown to number nearly 40,000 copies, Mat Nastos found his love of comics turning in to a near obsessive goal to create comics of his own. 

After graduating high school, and with the guidance of comic industry pros like Mike Zeck, Walt Simonson, Dave Thorne and Corky Trinidad, Mat Nastos would leave Hawaii for the wilds of New Jersey and the Joe Kubert Comic Book School.  While attending the school, Nastos quickly found work both in the world of independent comics and in the film industry as a young storyboard artist for a number of Roger Corman films. 

As he moved on from the Kubert School to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan to get his bachelor’s degree, Mat Nastos continued to work regularly as an artist for comic books and film, while building a name for himself as a storyboard artist on such television shows as Highlander, MANTIS, Team Nightrider, Space: Above and Beyond and many others. 

Upon graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Mat Nastos quickly found work as an artist on one of his childhood favorite comic books, Elfquest.  Over the next few years Nastos would work as an artist for Marvel and DC, as well as being an art assistant to the legendary Joe Orlando of DC Comics/Mad Magazine fame.  Mat still recognizes Orlando as one of the most significant influences on his life and his artwork.

It was in the mid 1990s where Mat Nastos formed Nifty Comics and began to publish his own style of solid comic book storytelling and fun with issues of the Cadre.  Nastos has continued to publish the Cadre comics off and on since 1995.

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