A Mobile-based comic book creative team spent early June 2010 asking readers across the country to click, vote, and download on their behalf, as writer Kevin LaPorte and artist Amanda Rachels pushed their horror comic Clown Town through the later rounds of Small Press Idol, an online competition built to spotlight independent comic creators who lack the marketing muscle of the major publishers.
Clown Town follows a small Kentucky town under siege by a band of murderous vigilantes disguised in circus makeup, a premise that blends slasher-movie dread with the uneasy, uncanny-valley menace long associated with clowns in American horror fiction. By the time the competition reached its later stages, the LaPorte-Rachels collaboration had already placed first in both the second and third rounds, a run of momentum that put real pressure on the team to keep their fan base engaged through the final push. On June 6, 2010, LaPorte took to the comic’s promotional channels with a direct appeal: download the issue, spread the word, and vote before the deadline closed.
What Small Press Idol Represented for Independent Creators
Competitions like Small Press Idol emerged during a period when the comics industry was in the middle of a significant transition. Through the 2000s, digital distribution tools, webcomic hosting platforms, and social media were beginning to give self-published writers and artists a way to reach readers directly, without going through a traditional publisher, distributor, or comic shop. Popularity contests and voting-based showcases became one of the more visible ways that small, independent titles could get discovered inside a crowded marketplace already dominated by major superhero publishers and long-running syndicated franchises.
For creators without a marketing budget, these competitions functioned less like a simple contest and more like a grassroots campaign. Success depended heavily on a creator’s ability to mobilize an audience: emailing supporters, posting reminders on forums and blogs, and asking readers to take the extra step of downloading and formally casting a vote rather than just reading for free. That dynamic explains why LaPorte’s June 6 appeal to readers was as much a part of the competitive strategy as the artwork and writing itself. In a field where dozens of small-press titles might be vying for a handful of advancement slots, a creator’s online community frequently determined whether a strong comic advanced or stalled out in an early round.
A Genre With Deep Roots
The killer-clown premise at the center of Clown Town draws on a well-established tradition in American horror. Circus and carnival imagery has unsettled audiences for generations, in part because clowns are designed to be recognizable and expressive under exaggerated makeup, which strips away the ordinary facial cues people rely on to judge intent and mood. That tension, a friendly performer’s face concealing something threatening, has powered horror stories in print, film, and television for decades, and it gives independent horror comics a recognizable hook that can travel well among genre fans even when the creators themselves are not yet widely known.
Setting that horror in a small, specific place, in this case a Kentucky town, also follows a familiar and effective storytelling convention: horror often lands hardest when it invades a setting that feels ordinary and grounded rather than exotic. Readers can be told a great deal about the danger a story wants to convey simply by choosing to place it in a modest, familiar-feeling community rather than a sprawling city or a fantastical location.
A Broader Creative Partnership
Clown Town was not a standalone effort for LaPorte and Rachels. The pair also worked together on The Blind Eye, an ongoing web comic they described as a tale of superheroic horror, a genre mash-up that blends the visual language and power fantasies of superhero comics with the dread and atmosphere of horror storytelling. Pairing those two genres was itself a notable creative choice; superhero comics tend to emphasize triumph and clear moral stakes, while horror thrives on uncertainty and vulnerability, and combining them requires a writer and artist who can shift tone convincingly within a single ongoing story.
Working across multiple titles simultaneously, as LaPorte and Rachels did with Clown Town and The Blind Eye, was and remains common practice among small-press and web comic creators. Because independent titles often update slowly and depend on a small, devoted circle of returning readers, many creators keep more than one project active at a time, both to keep a body of work growing and to give different corners of their audience something that matches their particular tastes, whether that is horror, superhero action, or a blend of the two.
Mobile’s Place in a National Creative Landscape
Local, independently produced comics rarely make national headlines, but they represent an active and often overlooked corner of the broader creative economy in cities like Mobile. Small press and web comics allow writers and artists working outside major publishing hubs such as New York or Los Angeles to build an audience without relocating, relying instead on digital distribution and online communities of genre fans. Horror and speculative fiction in particular have long had committed, geographically scattered fan bases that are often more receptive to discovering new independent work through recommendations, conventions, and online voting drives than through mainstream retail shelves.
Competitions such as Small Press Idol gave that kind of grassroots creative work a rare moment of visibility, forcing entrants to actively court an audience in real time rather than simply hoping to be noticed. For a two-person creative team based far from the traditional centers of the comics industry, advancing through multiple rounds of national voting was a meaningful sign that their work was resonating well beyond their immediate circle of friends and family, and that the story they were building, page by page, had found genuine traction with strangers willing to click, download, and vote on its behalf.
The comic industry’s independent and self-publishing scene has continued to evolve significantly since 2010, as crowdfunding platforms, digital comic storefronts, and print-on-demand services have given small-press creators additional tools to fund, produce, and distribute their work directly to readers, further lowering the barriers that once made mainstream publishing the only realistic path to a wide audience.
How the Voting Actually Worked
For readers who wanted to support a specific title in Small Press Idol, the process required more than just visiting a web page. Participants typically had to download the comic from a participating digital storefront, leave a review or rating if the platform allowed it, and then submit a separate vote through the competition’s website. That extra friction was deliberate; it was meant to filter out casual traffic and reward creators whose audiences were engaged enough to follow through on each step.
For a creator like LaPorte, that meant the team had to spend as much time on outreach and instruction as they did on art. LaPorte’s June 6 appeal to readers was essentially a tutorial in how the competition worked, paired with a reminder of the deadline and a direct ask for downloads and votes. The format favored creators with active mailing lists, forum presences and social-media followings, which is why independent comic creators who had spent years building those audiences tended to do well in competitions like Small Press Idol.
What Comes Next for Independent Horror Comics
The infrastructure that emerged around Small Press Idol and similar competitions during the late 2000s and early 2010s laid the groundwork for the broader independent horror comics scene that exists today. Digital storefronts, Kickstarter campaigns, webcomic hosting platforms and online conventions have given creators like LaPorte and Rachels a clearer path to readers than they would have had a decade earlier, and the genre’s distinctive visual style — heavily inked panels, restrained color palettes and a willingness to lean into gore and dread — has become recognizable enough to attract readers looking specifically for that kind of work.
For Mobile specifically, the legacy of the Clown Town competition is less about any one title’s success than about the visibility it gave to local creators working in genres that rarely make headlines outside specialist publications. LaPorte and Rachels continued to work together after the competition ended, producing The Blind Eye and other titles, and their experience navigating the small-press ecosystem has become a kind of template that other Mobile-area creators can study and adapt. Competitions like Small Press Idol gave those creators a way to test their work against a national audience without having to relocate to New York or Los Angeles, and the visibility they earned — winning rounds, generating press coverage and attracting readers outside their immediate networks — helped legitimize independent comics as a viable creative path.
LaPorte’s June 6, 2010 appeal also illustrates how a small creative team can use online platforms to organize a national audience around a single release. Even when the team did not win the overall competition, the contacts they made and the visibility they generated laid groundwork for future projects, which is the lasting value of these contests for many of the creators who enter them.