If you’ve attended a small press show in the last few years, chances are you’ve seen Avi Ehrlich in their trademark pink jumpsuit, frantically working the large crowds at the Silver Sprocket booth. With its diverse lineup of creators, clear political positions, and commitment to publishing beautiful collections alongside cheaply printed zines, Silver Sprocket in many ways represents the beating heart of the independent comics scene in 2025. Which isn’t to say it’s all wine and roses. That success has brought with it additional challenges, especially for a company that has always aimed to be a community service above all else.
I caught up with Ehrlich late last year over Zoom to talk about those difficulties, their Spring 2025 lineup, and the potential dangers coming from the incoming presidential administration.
- Jason Bergman
JASON BERGMAN: First of all, thank you for doing this. I know you've been ridiculously busy. You just got back from MICE, right?
AVI EHRLICH: We were in Boston for MICE over the weekend. My hands are regaining feeling.
Before that you were at Short Run too. So you were overseas for a while?
We were at Thought Bubble, which was overseas. And before that was Short Run, yeah.
So I guess you’re doing all of the small press shows?
Yeah, quite a few of them. I mean, we really have to do the work to pound the pavement and just make people look at our comics. And we find that getting in front of them in the real world really is the best. To put a comic in someone's hand and make them realize how amazing it is.
What's the vibe been like at these shows the last couple of weeks?
It's been really good. I think we've definitely hit a turning point where a lot more people are aware of our publishing house and the artists we're working with. It feels kind of unfair that we have a pretty good crowd at our table the entire time. I see other exhibitors possibly frustrated, like, “Oh, why is there a crowd over there the whole time?” And it's like every individual book at our table, if that artist was present, would have a crowd at their table. We're just kind of compounding that with the 30 books that we can fit on a table.
But yeah, people have been really excited, really kind, and just really saying very, very kind things about being inspired by what we're doing. We're just trying to flip it back at them and being inspired that they care about comics in the way that we do. It's been really nice.
I'm a regular at SPX, so I remember seeing when you guys were just a couple of zines on a card table. How does it feel to be the big dog at the small press shows now?
Oh my god. I don't know how comfortable I am thinking of ourselves as the big dog. But I hope that we are handling the responsibility of it in an ethical, kind, and fun way. And yeah, it definitely feels good to have people really care about what we're doing and paying attention. It's all because of the quality of the books and the quality of our community, appreciating and responding to what it is that we're doing. So yeah, it's really exciting and wonderful. And I really hope we can be uplifting all of comics and not just shining a spotlight on ourselves.
I want to talk a bit about that because you've described yourself in the past as, “a radical comics publisher.” You have this mission statement on your website that lays out your values, and you are very open and transparent. But at the same time, you are growing, right? Are you as big as you want to get, or do you want to keep getting bigger?
I think at this very moment, we're a little bit bigger than we can handle. So we're putting a lot of energy into trying to improve our systems and our operations to be able to really show up for everyone that we work with and fulfill our obligations and not have things fall through the cracks. We don't have growth targets. We're not trying to be Marvel or Penguin. As far as growth goes, it's really about being able to support our community and the responsibilities we have to the people that we work with. And it's really more about having a sustainable balance than any particular growth target.
Has that been the hardest thing for you, finding that sustainable balance?
We are learning. We're facing new, different challenges every week, and having to learn to adapt to them. So it is difficult when we're not just—we don't just have, okay, here's our process. Here's what we do. We know how to do it. Because we do have plenty of processes that are down that we know how to do. But with the growth comes the need to tinker with how the formulas work. We're not a factory. We're a very small ragtag group of comic book enthusiasts. And having to regularly be on our toes, ready to adapt to changes, definitely brings challenges.
Speaking of challenges, as you're no doubt aware, we just had a presidential election here in the US. And we have an incoming administration that is threatening massive tariffs. Is that a major threat to how you operate?
Yeah, it's a major concern on a whole bunch of different levels. I mean, first, the tariffs, obviously, when if you make a budget for a book based on the production costs being a certain amount, and if those books are being printed with prices already on the backs of them, if they come back and then there's a new line item that says, “Trump tariffs” and it's an extra 20%, it really throws a wrench in our budgeting and just what we can do there. It can really cause havoc on a book's ability to break even or all the economics of it just get thrown sideways. So not knowing what's happening is really frustrating. We've had the Trump tariffs before. Last time he was in office, there was a line item of Trump tariffs that was just an extra cost we had to pay because Trump doesn't understand how tariffs work. And so that's definitely stressful.
But there's a lot of other really major stresses with the incoming administration as well. For example, we print and distribute some more activist publications like a self-defense study guide for trans women. And we have a new abortion pill zine that's just a really brass tacks informational, but compassionate guide to how abortion pills work, and the science and health, and just everything you need to know about that to manage one's own abortion. And the Trump administration is talking about weaponizing the Comstock Act to make it a crime to mail such materials using the USPS.
We're committed to keeping these resources easily and readily available to anyone who needs them. We sell quite a bit of them, but we also make them available at deep discounts or for free to any organization who needs them. And it's really cool that the sales have been enough to support all the free copies that we distribute. But we refuse to not make them available. It's really scary that we might be putting ourselves in a position of legal jeopardy depending on how the next four years play out.
Did you ever think that these would be the conversations you would be having? You started all this as a community store, right?
I mean, trying to trace the beginnings is pretty wild because I was running a record label since I was a teenager. And then I kind of got burnt out on that. Then I restarted a different thing that was actually a community-run bicycle repair shop and then also a bicycle club. And then that accidentally turned back into a record label before turning into the comic publisher we are today. We always cared more about what was morally and ethically right than what was legally right. So that's always been part of what we did.
You're not supposed to dumpster dive for groceries. But if there's perfectly clean, usable, safe groceries available that you can make meals for your community with, we would do it. And through organizations like Food Not Bombs — that's more of a model than an organization. But so we've always done crime. I feel like the stakes are suddenly a lot higher than someone getting mad that you're going through their dumpster. You clean it up really nicely and leave flowers, and they don't get mad at you because you're a real person right there who they can talk to and you can diffuse the situation. Whereas with it coming down from the federal government like this, there's no longer a human face on it. And the consequences are just much more real and present. We're having to talk about literally protecting the physical safety of our cartoonists, being accused of being groomers, or all sorts of really, really fucked up scapegoating that has real dangerous consequences in the real world. And these are not the challenges that we were expecting to be dealing with ever. But it's our responsibility to rise to these challenges and be a part of trying to weather the storm with everybody as best we can.
When you look at the map of the United States now, and where the shows are, are you having to reconsider which ones you attend? Where your artists live? Where they travel? Where they can stop along the way?
These are things that we have worried about in the past. For example, we've had trans creators who went to exhibit at, I think, HeroesCon in North Carolina. And I remember when the trans bathroom bill had been passed, I got into it online with the organizers of the convention just asking, “Hey, do you guys even have a gender neutral bathroom? Or do our artists have to pee in buckets? What's your plan for this?” And their response was, “Oh, yeah, there's this obscure convention office on the third floor behind this weird pathway. And we'll let anybody use our private bathroom if they need it. And it's cool.” So an artist can take 45 minutes to walk around this convention center and navigate to your one private bathroom and make a big to-do about using your private bathroom. Great. I've heard from a lot of people that it was a really worthwhile show to exhibit at and get your comics in front of a lot of people, but we've never exhibited at it because it just doesn't feel like the organizers of it take our literal safety and ability to exist into consideration.
Speaking of other concerns, you recently did a fundraising campaign. Was that out of necessity? Or was that for peace of mind?
So, I really don't want to freak anyone out, because we are stable. We are sustainable. We're not going anywhere. We have a very diverse set of operations where we've got the publishing house and then we also have a physical storefront in San Francisco that really serves as our indie comics Hard Rock Cafe. That's also kind of like a community space of comic-making resources and presentations and book release parties and like zine-making nights and stuff like that.
On the storefront side, we had a really dramatic set of changes to San Francisco's economy in our neighborhood that caused us to accumulate a pretty substantial amount of debt. And it's scary to be in debt. Like, I didn't go to business school. I don't have deep-pocketed financial backers. And I'm continuing to hold a little over a month's worth of revenue in the form of debt. There was a dramatic downturn in how the retail shop was doing that we thought was due to construction and some very short-term factors. So we didn't adjust to them right away, because we thought that they were just going to improve. Then we later discovered that there were actually trends happening on the local economy level and not just for our shop or not just because of the construction that was happening outside. Our profit margins are enough that we're not losing money every month, but we haven't been able to really pay this debt down. And for me as an individual, to hold this debt is incredibly stressful. Like, I've got to make payments on my house. I've got to make sure that our staff get paid, that our artists always get their royalties on time. Our crew is fucking amazing and so hardworking and really deserves to have gotten raises quite a while ago. And we really just need to shore up the finances to be able to sustain in a not stressful way and focus on making and selling the books and not be focused on moving money around. So I mean, it was a necessity, but we're going to be okay regardless in the longer term. But I would really like to find a way to get out of debt right now to just not have those stresses hanging over me.
Is the retail store fundamental to Sprocket as a business? Or is it more of a personal connection for you?
Everything is very interconnected. Like, the retail store really allowed us to level up our publishing by being our sandbox, a master class on what it's like to sell comics from a retail store. Like what kind of cover people respond to, what marketing materials, just learning about consumer behavior. And also learning about the retailer's experience interacting with different distributors and different publishers and what are some best practices that we can learn from. So any one part of the operation could hypothetically be cleaved off and be its own thing. But the way it stands now, we do all of our mail order and our direct wholesale fulfillment from within the retail store building. Around half of what we sell combined between mail order and the store itself is Sprocket stuff, even though we order from almost 400 different suppliers that are like tiny independent publishers, or artists who self-publish their own work or different distributors. It is its own very complicated operation. But I do think that if we were to split it off or close something down, there would still be a ton of work replicating certain elements of that operation to be able to keep the publishing side being what we need it to be. Or to run it the way that we want to be running it.
I imagine just running a store – you're on Valencia Street in San Francisco, right? That can't be cheap or easy at this point.
It's a lot of fun. But we did sign our lease during the COVID lockdowns when all the buildings were boarded up. So it's not cheap, but it is not as expensive as it could have been. Our lease is now up for renewal. Valencia has the second worst COVID recovery in the whole city after downtown due to some changing demographics. And we're hoping that we can have a longer term lease that reflects the current economic realities that would be sustainable for us.
Would that be a lack of foot traffic from people working in the area?
For us, it has more to do with the service industry that was working in San Francisco. People between the ages of 20 to 35 moved out of San Francisco in droves. And that part of the population did not bounce back after the COVID things closed. And because of how public transit works, like the trains to the East Bay, to Oakland or Berkeley, stop running at midnight. So all of the businesses that serve a service industry, like late night diners and bars, are not open as late. I'm very involved in very local, hyper-local, politics. I'm on the board of directors for the Valencia Street Merchants Association and the citywide council of small business owners. And we've learned from the head economist of the city of San Francisco that this 20 to 35-year-old demographic just doesn't live here anymore. And that was the demographic that shopped Valencia Street the most.
I'm assuming because they can't afford to live there anymore.
Yeah, rents are dropping in the Mission, which I've never seen happen in my lifetime. And landlords don't just drop rent. They take a year or two to finally accept that they have to drop rent because they're greedy fucks. But we've also seen a dramatic drop in tourism, not because all the tourists are right-wing, MAGA, whatever. But in the last presidential election, the entire right-wing media machine was trying to paint San Francisco as a failed city because they were trying to paint a narrative of Kamala Harris being the personification of San Francisco politics. Like San Francisco is this lawless hellhole that you'll get stabbed in and someone will take a shit on your car. And it's like, that is not true, but that has gotten into the popular narrative. So tourism has taken a major hit. And also, the global economic condition of a pretty strong dollar against rather weak other currencies means that it's a lot more expensive for people from other countries to travel to the United States in general. So tourism overall for the whole country is down, especially San Francisco with these narratives. And those are things that have a major impact on our retail store.
Well, I do want to talk about the books. The fun stuff!
Yeah, the books are so fun. I don't want to be here talking about macroeconomics. I hate that I have to be familiar with these things because I much prefer the escapism element of comics or the thoughtful connection to your world or the storytelling, all that stuff.
So tell me a bit about the spring 2025 books.
Every single season is a whole new leveling up. We've always published so many comics by people who are not yet known quantities, who maybe have self-published some things or done comics online. So it's extremely exciting to really be the vanguard of every season, just presenting a whole new crop of incredible, young, masters of their craft, who nobody's heard of before, in addition of course to our more popular returning indie-comic rockstars that we either helped established or were lucky enough to form relationships with over the years.
How do you find people now? Do they come to you? Because again, you are the big table at the indie shows. Or do you still find people on your own?
When we started out, we primarily were just reissuing comics that an artist had already self-published for bigger distribution and marketing and production value. But now we are primarily brand-new original projects that will come to us at the pitch stage rather than the finished book stage. Our managing editor Ari Yarwood, is I think one of the very best comic editors in the business at scouting talent and also helping shape a book into being the best version of what it's trying to be. We do get pitches from agents, we did open submissions last year. So a lot of the new books coming out this season are from open submissions. It's also a big part of why we go to so many festivals. We'll ship out a whole pallet of books to sell, and then we'll ship back a pallet. And the organizers will sometimes be like, “Oh, no, did you guys totally eat shit on the show? Why are you shipping back so much?” And the answer is we're not shipping back our own books, we went around the whole convention hall and did the purchases from other cartoonists of their self-published books for us to sell in our store. So we're seeing firsthand every day what kind of comics our audience is excited about from the whole world of independent comic books, self-publishing, and micro presses. Our own store is one of the most powerful places to see what's exciting and fun to read and what we're having fun championing in the store that we feel like we could do a good job championing on a larger stage.
That's cool. So, the spring season!
Yeah, the spring season is friggin' amazing. I mean, like Connor B., whose Bring Me the Head of Susan Lomond, has been overachieving online. And it's really exciting to get this book going.
Would you classify that as a YA graphic novel?
It works as YA. I mean, I'm 42 years old, but we don't talk down to anybody. It's like, this is a comic that I love, but that a parent would feel comfortable sharing with their kid. If the kid can handle Powerpuff Girls and Dexter's Laboratory, that level of cartoon violence and chaos, it fits right in there with that kind of world. But very Sprocket-coded of casual queerness and subtle political values that are not really represented in publishing elsewhere. But then we've also got returning artists. We've got Alex Krokus doing a new Loud & Smart book in full color. We're re-issuing Pinky & Pepper Forever by Eddie Atoms with around 50 pages of brand new content. And that was one of our really, really popular comics that went out of print to make way for this new expanded edition. The final book in The Changeling series by Tina Lugo, which is a Taíno-inspired take on exciting epic manga. We've got a new Caroline Cash, PeePee PooPoo #100,000, which is a milestone that I don't think anyone has hit so far. It's great to totally just blast past Batman and Spawn with the most issues. The Everything Sucks collection by Michael Sweater. We're doing our first ever game, Sweatgasm, which is a really horny version of truth or dare by Archie Bongiovanni.
I want to ask about that last one - what brought that about? Did you specifically want to get into doing tabletop games?
So Archie had previously self-published it and couldn't keep up with the work of printing and cutting up and packaging them all. A lot of what we do is kind of out of necessity of, okay, this amazing thing exists, and the world needs it, and we need it. We don't sit there in a boardroom trying to make acquisitions that are strategic. It's more we have resources that can benefit the world that we want to exist in. And if we feel that we're well-suited to provide those resources and that collaboration, and we're the best people to do it, then we'll explore that and see if it makes sense for everybody. But we don't really get in bidding wars. If a project exists that has a bidding war, then we know that they're going to be okay somewhere else. So we're not like messiahs doing the Lord's work, taking on these charity cases. We make money publishing comics. We have fun doing it. But it's like a lot of what we publish, we just don't think it could really have a home somewhere else where it would get treated properly and get the attention that we feel it deserves and be handled in the right way. So Archie's someone that we've already published. We're already good friends with. We are in community with. And it obviously has a gigantic audience, but that the other publishers were too cowardly to take on themselves.
Is that generally what drives Sprocket as a publisher at this point? Things other people aren't willing to take on, things that, I don't know, speak to you personally, all of you at the Sprocket store.
It has to be truly fun or moving or impactful in some way. So maybe not always fun. Sometimes it's really sad. But it definitely leaves an impression and has significant cultural and literary value. But that isn't to be like an old man with a pipe and a rocking in a nice chair in a castle. It's comics that we want to see in the world that we don't really see, from voices and perspectives or about content that we don't really see being represented. That really is part of our world but is not part of the literary landscape. That we just really think has a lot of value that we can very truthfully champion. We only publish things that we already know that we have 20 friends in mind that I would absolutely buy this for as a Christmas gift because I know that they're going to love this and it's going to improve their lives. But it's not like a political book that's yelling at you about how you have to recycle more or something. It's like these are actually compelling, joyous experiences that one wants to have, whether it's an A24 style, real think piece or a just totally hilarious buck wild, what the hell is happening, Fungirl, or PeePee PooPoo.
Well, I do have one last question for you…given all the challenges you've mentioned, where do you see Sprocket in the next couple of years? Are there things you really want to do but you can't at the moment? Or is it just sticking to the original plan?
We do have a lot of things that we really want to do, but they're not necessarily like we have to do these things, but it's more like we want these things to exist in the world. So even though we exist on a global stage, publishing comics that are distributed and licensed internationally, we are a literal local community here in San Francisco, where we have our store, and all the places that we go, conventions and things. We found that we really want to demystify and democratize the process of making one's own comic book, without gatekeepers or having to get approval from a publisher or other powers that be. And one challenge that a lot of people are having right now is how to literally make copies of their comics. The business world went digital and then COVID happened and a whole ton of the printing and copy places shut down. And the ones that are still around are a lot more expensive and a lot less accessible. You can't just go to a Kinko's and scan copies anymore, and your place of work might not even have a copy machine or printer that you can easily show up and use after hours. So we would really like for there to exist a community printing resource in San Francisco where people can literally print their comics.
People already use our shop to scan and staple and fold and use all of our equipment for that, but we're not set up to literally make the copies. So if we can get financing for it, we would love to open up a print shop ourselves on a community model or to just be incredibly supportive of somebody else doing it and following in the tradition of the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. There's a really amazing one up in Rhode Island whose name I'm forgetting that has a really cool name that I know Cathy G. Johnson's involved with or like Tiny Splendor in Berkeley is really amazing, but you can't really get there from here if you don't have a car.
But then on the Sprocket side, our finances for this past year were really fucked by the challenges I was talking about earlier. We plan out our release schedule like a year in advance and we really take seriously the commitments we've made to all the artists that we're gonna publish. You're taking two or three years to make this incredible graphic novel and this is the release date we agreed on and this is the marketing we agreed on. It would be really shitty to pull the rug out from under someone and say, “Oh, hey, our cash flow is fucked. We gotta take a month off from everything just to let revenue catch up to bills and not be in debt anymore.” Which is logically what we should do. So instead, we're cutting a bunch of costs for this next year, spending less money on printing new books each month for the new season now that we're aware that we're in this situation. So I really hope that this next year is getting back on our financial footing, getting out of debt, and staying sustainable. We love working with the artists we work with. We don't have to be a publisher that does like 12 books a month like Fantagraphics. They've got a model that works for them and that's great, but we really want to stay lean and stay focused on what we're doing and we don't want to be the factory that does the same thing for every project. We really want to give every single book the very personalized love and attention to have it be created and marketed and distributed and promoted and everything in the way that makes the most sense for that book specifically.
The post “It’s our responsibility to rise to these challenges”: Talking independent comics with Silver Sprocket’s Avi Ehrlich appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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