Visiting Artist: Spike Trotman

Spike’s visiting artist board, drawn by Luke Howard

C. Spike Trotman is a cartoonist and owner of Iron Circus Comics. She is a Kickstarting pro, running eight Kickstarters since 2009. She started with the first volume of her web comic, Templar Arizona.

Spike was animated and gregarious. And she spewed forth the backwaters of the comics scene.

In 2005, she began posting Templar Arizona online. In 2007, it won the Rising Star Award from the Glyph Comics Awards. It is an ongoing story with a character driven storyline. Her readers were clamoring for a print edition of Templar Arizona, so she funded that first volume using essentially a tip jar on her website.

Then in 2012, she was on the hunt for erotic comics geared for female readers. A small anthology called Smut Peddler had ceased putting out issues. She asked so many times when the next one was coming that she ended up doing it herself. She funded it through Kickstarter, and it was a smashing success. She even applied her fearlessness to ask Emily Carroll, at the beginning of her rise to stardom, to do her cover. And so began her publishing company, Iron Circus Comics.

This model has become the basis of her business. Through Iron Circus Comics, she has published other anthologies, including Sleep of Reason (horror) and New Worlds (science-fiction). As with erotica and Smut Peddler, she sees a hole in the market where she is looking for comics that she wants to read and makes an anthology to help fill that hole.

And now she is expanding into single creator/team comics. She published (and edited) Shadow Eyes by Sophie Campbell and Erin Watson about an aspiring vigilante teen. More recently, she published The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal, E. K. Weaver’s web comic. Spike is extremely excited about this comic because she is stepping up her game yet again.

Then right after leaving us in White River Junction, she started yet another Kickstarter for her next project, an erotic graphic novel, Letters for Lucardo. And all this is the briefest look at what she has accomplished. We can only expect more from this rock star.

Photos courtesy Abe Olson.