No Limits

Pictures with a story. That's what comics are. They can be vividly detailed or utterly simplistic in design, they can be dialogue heavy or absolutely devoid of any speech. They can be wrought with emotion or juvenile entertainment. They can be all these things and everything in between.
-Opening lines from City Limits, George Rohac, Jr., Editor

In August 2005, Rohac attended a Web comics conference with some friends in Baltimore, Maryland. He left the conference tasked to manage the publication of a book, a compilation of comics created by these friends and other creators.

"Friends of mine, Ananth [Panagariya] and [Mohammad] Haque [contributors to City Limits] approached me about doing a book and having me manage the back end of it. So we sat down with a bunch of creators on the last night of the convention and started hashing out ideas," states Rohac. "We created this city and a couple of sad characters and we gave it a set amount of time that it would take place in and just let the creators do their thing." And out of that session, Port du Ciel was born.

Port du Ciel is a city, like any modern city. It's almost as faceless as the crowds of people that walk the streets. In its nebulous country, our fair city is full of stories. A notorious gang boss makes headlines when he is acquitted. Rumors of a metal skeleton wandering the streets. A troupe of actors prepare for some Halloween street theatre. Things that hide in the shadows slink in alleys. All the things that accompany the strangeness of a city … it could be any city, anywhere.
—City Limits, Katy Ullman, Editor

Now a Communications major at Penn State Altoona, Rohac already can add "publisher and editor" to his list of credentials. He represents a new breed of publishers: a generation that looks beyond traditional publishing houses and main-stream advertising to the new frontier of the Internet as their main source of promotion.

Rohac spent much time researching the formation of his own company, Blue Day Media LLC, to publish City Limits. Next, in addition to finding a printer for the book and submitting it to the Library of Congress and Books in Print, Rohac went to work promoting their comic anthology on the World Wide Web.

Many of the creators already had their own Web sites in place and promoted City Limits through ads on their pages. Others mentioned the book in their blogs, generating more interest in the comic and animé community. Rohac submitted scans of the early pages to some on-line sites to generate some press. This publicity alone was sufficient to sell enough pre-orders to pay for the first print run of the book before it even was submitted to the printer.

"I was very surprised," reflects Rohac. "We've sold nearly 700 already. Whenever we started the project, I knew it was going to do well, but my expectations were pretty blown away when we got the print run paid for before it was even printed."

The creators and editors spent the summer promoting sales of City Limits at comic and animé conventions, the main audience for their book. Rohac is hopeful that by mid-December City Limits will be available on Amazon.com and he's working to get it distributed by Barnes and Noble Booksellers by spring 2007.

Work already has begun for the sequel to City Limits, although Rohac plans to turn over the main editing duties to City Limits contributor Panagariya in order to focus on his studies. Ultimately, Rohac plans to become an intellectual property lawyer. "The majority of my friends are artists, writers, musicians … so I know first-hand that many in this group are not well-informed about their rights when it comes to signing contracts or their rights in general," explains Rohac. "With the digital age coming, there are a lot of new issues, like how to treat on-line movies or music for sale."

How does Rohac feel about being published while still in school? "Really, I find it kind of odd," he states. "I congratulated everyone else, but something in the back of my mind just hasn't clicked. I can give everyone else on the project credit, but for me, it's just something else that I've done and I'm ready to move on to the next thing."