SLG Publishing Fades Away No Longer Accepting New Submissions

SLG Publishing

As caught by Ben Towle this past weekend, this interview with Dan Vado seems to confirm that SLG Publishing (formerly Slave Labor Graphics) is no longer releasing new work. (Towle published his first two books, Farewell, Georgia and Midnight Sun, with SLG.)

Although the company is still offering restock orders in Previews under the Amaze Ink/Slave Labor Graphics heading, Vado says

Beyond keeping our better sellers in print and continuing some of the things we started a few years ago, I am not doing a lot with publishing. I am no longer looking for new material and don’t envision myself getting back into that in the near future. In a way, the advent of things like Kickstarter made SLG kind of irrelevant. An artist can make way more on a Kickstarted book, assuming it is successful, than they can from being published.

Update: Vado in the comments below says it’s more accurate to say he’s no longer accepting unsolicited submissions but is open to publishing new work from established creators.

SLG Publishing banner

Ben points out several key points where SLG was a leader, back in the day:

This I can confirm. The SLG digital store was called Eyemelt, and they sold downloads (not rental copies you had to read online) at reasonable prices way back in 2006. In 2011, SLG went to digital-first publication for individual serialized issues.

For a walk down memory lane, here’s my list of SLG reviews. I really loved Halo and Sprocket, The War at Ellsmere, and Slow News Day. Many SLG books are still available on ComiXology, if you want to check them out.



6 comments

  • David Oakes

    I want to say “I come to bury Dan Vado, not to praise him.” But nobody reads enough these days to get the joke…

  • There is no need to bury or praise me. I have not gone out of business. I am focusing on running APE while keeping my core good sellers in print and as I asses the changes in the marketplace that keep me from wanting to jump in and publish new projects.

    Would have been nice, since I this is in your news section, to have been contacted about this before you decided to run my obituary.

  • Since the two pieces of my story were based on 1) your own interview quote and 2) praise for SLG’s many accomplishments, this didn’t really strike me as something that needed a fresh contact, particularly since I said that relists are still being offered for order. I’m sorry you feel differently.

  • The interview in question was about APE and not about publishing and as a result my answer was a lot briefer than what it probably should have been. What I said was that I was not looking for new material, not that I had “Faded Away” as your headline states or thatr I had gone out of business which people seem to be inferring from Ben’s post and your article, which by the way reads like a eulogy.

    In my mind there is a difference between no longer accepting unsolicited submissions (which is what I should have said and is more accurate description of what is going on here) than not publishing new work. That may seem like splitting hairs but in my entire 30 year history of publishing people just about EVERYTHING I published came to me as an unsolicited submission. Certainly if one of those people mentioned in the article above had come to me at any point in the last several years and asked about doing something new with me I would have done it.

    And, if you are going to publish something as news I would think, regardless of what it might seem like that the proper thing to do would be to contact the person you were writing about to see, for example, if they were still alive.

  • I’ve changed the headline based on your clarification and added an additional line to the article.

    As for sounding like an eulogy, well, a search of new release lists shows your company put out six items to the comic market in 2016. They were reprints of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac #2-7 all released on April 20. I think concluding that SLG’s operating output is a far cry from what it once was is a fair response.

    Thank you, however, for clarifying here. I’ll be sure to keep your preference for contact in mind when I have reason in the future to write about SLG again.

  • Jim Kosmicki

    I am pretty certain that “Dead Air” from SLG was Mike Allred’s first published book – a full length original graphic novel no less. I don’t know if Allred doesn’t want it reprinted, or people just miss it because he used a different version of his name (M. Dalton Allred), but it’s never discussed that I notice. I enjoyed it a lot – I believe I may have bought it at the Chicago Comicon, and even tried adapting it as a screenplay for one of my college classes.

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