As I tell our fearless leaders here at Dying Scene, I swear to you all I’m not trying to turn this site into a comic book site. However, there is no denying that the ethos and DIY spirit of punk rock intersects with indie comics or most forms of art for that matter. It can sometimes be a lot of hours of work for little, if any success. Which is why it has been great to see Apollo City Comics grow over the years.

Initially starting as a podcast by founder and creator Brandon Bloxdorf, Apollo City Comics takes a punk rock approach to publishing by releasing an anthology series similar to the compilations released by indie record labels we all loved growing up, starting with …And Out Come The Comics. Over the last year, Apollo City Comics has released a number of titles from some of the creators featured in this and other anthologies they have put out. We caught up with Brandon to talk about Apollo City’s latest anthology, This Comic Kills Fascists and other projects coming soon.

Dying Scene: For the people who read this and don’t know about Apollo City Comics, give us a little bit of a history.

Brandon Bloxdorf: Essentially, this was a podcast I started because I had been writing for comic book websites and I was trying to figure out how to break into comics. I was a musician most of my life. I had been in bands and they just didn’t work out the way I wanted. It was too much drama and too much crap. And so I thought, “I love comics. I love literature. I should try this out.” I just didn’t know how to break into the industry. I didn’t know how to make a comic. I didn’t know how to find an artist or how to pay an artist. Just all of it was a mystery. So I started the podcast in 2018 to find a way to study craft. If I could study craft, I could learn some secrets and develop a series. I’ll go to school for English. I’ll just take a creative writing approach. If you fast forward a few years, I was just stuck doing the podcast and talking about books. I actually started interviewing indie creators primarily because I wanted to find out stuff from them. They’re the ones who I’d be on the level with. It didn’t make sense for me to interview Scott Snyder and Tom King and all these bigger industry people. And I was like, indie people, that’s what I got to do. So we started interviewing them. 

I met a guy named Mark Bernal and he was starting up a publishing house called Lesser Known Comics. It seemed like such a good opportunity to be a part of. They’re like a hippie commune that kind of exists through one another. I had a bunch of life stuff happen that caused me to move over here to Virginia. Luckily enough, that’s where Mark lives, too. He lives right outside of DC. I got fired from my job. I was at a low point. We went to Baltimore Comic-Con trying to pitch Teenage Babylon. He suggested just making a punk anthology that’s on theme with your story, build an audience, and then you’re not starting from zero. I put together this punk anthology. I opened submissions through the podcast. I had like eighty people submit. The Kickstarter was funded in under an hour for a $1,000 goal. We made five times our goal with that Kickstarter. Then I had people asking me questions about how to put together an anthology. Apollo just took off in 2023. Like, right when that punk anthology finished up. It’s been a year and a half, and we’ve put out 14 books. We just launched a dual anthology this morning. It’s crazy where Apollo’s gone from to a pinnacle point in the indie community. I also work for a very popular printer that indie comic creators use, Comix Wellspring. I’ve just maneuvered myself into the indie comic scene in an insane way. 

The first anthology was …And Out Come the Comics. Did you have any… I don’t wanna say rules, because it’s punk rock, there shouldn’t be any rules. Were there any parameters, I guess?

Yeah, I’m very inspired by Heavy Metal, the 1980s movie. It transformed me as a kid. I wanted to do my version of that in a way— A bunch of short stories one to six pages long. That way we could get a variety. I just wanted to know, what does punk mean to you through this story? How does punk reflect in your mind? Is it an ethos? Is it like an attitude? What is it? All of these creators submitted a story basically telling their best version of what punk means to them. There’s so many mixtures and ways to interpret art and some of these stories, but that was the whole thing. Punk rock and indie comics saved me, they gave me hope. I just wanted people that were involved with comics in the punk rock scene and had something to say about it. Granted, there’s a lot of goofy, cool stuff, you know, and there’s some personal stories, some funny stories, or just dragons getting their heads cut off.

I was gonna say Big Fucking Sword feels like a Heavy Metal comic. 

Hell yeah. That was one of my favorites, man. Dylan’s such a good artist.

I like those little blurbs about punk rock means to you and the other writers. It was a nice little touch. 

That goes back to finding myself. You hear so many people talk about what’s punk rock, and what’s not punk rock, like, it’s a very loose definition. I think we need to follow a loose definition versus being nitpicky about it. You’ve met those punks, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I knew all those punks growing up. I’ve got kids and they’re about to be teens. So, I’m teaching them to not be those punks.

Yeah, I used to get made fun of as a high school kid for not being punk enough. I’m more punk than you guys because I don’t give a fuck. 

So, the newer anthology is, “This Comic Kills Fascists.” When does the physical version come out?

I got it from the printer on Tuesday. So, I’m gonna go to this convention. After that, I’ll be mailing out all the physical copies. The digital version came out in January. I think we put it up just to start raising funds when we go to print since we didn’t do a kickstarter for it. That’s one of the most exciting books we did. It was such a fast turnaround and kind of showed us that we know how to make a book on the fly. The election happened and literally the day after we decided we were doing this book. We opened submissions within our circle. We got twelve in and we narrowed them down and we created this resource book.

I really liked that part of it.

And honestly, so much has changed since the election itself. We’ve already wanted to do part two. There are so many communities that are heavily affected by what’s going on. We really want to keep on doing this. It really came out being a big fan of Anti-Flag. Chris No. 2 was who I modeled myself after as a bassist stylistically. I really loved Anti-Flag because they gave me hope. They informed me about politics, gave me a viewpoint and gave me something to understand that was tangible. Since they’re not around anymore, I wanted to do that, but through comics. How do I figure out how to be what Chris No. 2 is and Joe Strummer was, but through what I have and what I could provide in my community?

That was the missing component and missing your favorite band in general. They would inspire me and just be the anchor I needed to know things would be alright in the world. What happened to that band hurts a little extra because of those details, but we’re always trying to be our heroes. We want to respect our heroes and do what we can for them. So I thought it was a good way to honor them in a sense, you know?

You have a couple other anthologies on the website. 

That’s where things kicked off with Alex Batts, the co-owner of Apollo City Comics Publishing. He saw the punk anthology and had this idea for a cyberpunk anthology. He just didn’t know how to execute it and wanted some advice. I didn’t know him at all. We met in person and it was like a great first date. We talked for like four hours. It just worked so well. He was such a productive person and understood the vision and scope of what I wanted to. He really became the backbone of everything. I’m good at organizing and managing community. Back end stuff is where my brain just clicks out. It takes me forever to do some stuff. I’m good at being in front of people. He’s good at taking care of all the technical tidbits and contracts and staying organized and keeping me on track. 

That’s how CyberSync came together. That was a great book. We gotta bring it back in print. We’ve sold out of all of our first run. The same thing kind of happened with Kai Brown and The Shadow Anthology: Dark Sides Calling. We’re publishing two of her other books this year. These three anthologies kind of defined what Apollo City Comics is. We have punk rock, we have sci-fi, and we have a book about introspective passion, you know, like really looking inside yourself. It’s always been about passionate people making passionate comics and we’ve kind of ran with that since then.

I was looking at your other books. What are some of your other favorite books? Are they ongoing series, or are they on going as they can be?

Hyperforce is an ongoing series. That’s with Adam Matthew Smith. Issue two is launching at the end of March. That’ll be on Kickstarter. We’re actually opening up the pre-launch page. That could be up to twenty issues, but there’s a long stretch for that series. Outerspaced, that’s with our friends, Eric Allred and Ben Collins. That has about ten issues planned as of right now. Another part of Apollo that works out really well is our stoner line. All of us are very 420-friendly. They’re doing another book called Too High to Die, which is probably coming out next year..

Oh, nice. Is it like a horror thing?

It’s actually Home Alone meets Die Hard. It’s about big pharma versus little farm growers and how big corporations are taking out these like the bottom half.  It’s a comedy, but we’re going to have them making these crazy devices to fight off this brigade of big pharma people trying to take over their shop. There’s a lot of humor in it. There’s a lot of anti-establishment stuff sprinkled in.

Awesome. Those all sound fun.

I have the Broadcast Dialogues. That’s my other book; it’s an eight-page book that will be my big space opera sci-fi book, launching this year, too.

That’s awesome. Those all sound fun. Tell me about the Found Footage anthology.

That one just wrapped. It was our February Kickstarter. I teamed up with a great creator, Jade Lauder, who has his own line of comics called It’s a Horror Show. He’s done four issues of it already. They’re kind of like one-off stories. Some of them were also in the Punk Anthology in his submission with the punk rock werewolf. His love of Trick r Treat, Creepshow, and VHS kind of brought this about. He’s actually making art that goes in between some of these submissions. It’s kids going into a comic book shop and they’re reading these stories. Those are the submissions we’re reading from the creators. I have Teenage Babylon short story in there.

You have your two anthologies that you just launched today, Kick Out the Jams and The One Hitters.

I actually have Kick Out the Jams. It’s a beautiful book, forty pages. I printed it because we had the funds. We’re doing this one week Kickstarter because right now we’re wrapping a documentary this week. We’re doing an in-store event and going to Indie Creator Con.  A bunch of the Apollo team is crashing at my place starting tonight. I have someone driving in from New York and some people driving up from Texas. Eric Allred and Javi Martinez—they just had these stories kind of floating about, and we made it happen. Kick Out the Jams is really about how much we love music in itself.  We got all these cool music stories from our friends, put them into one anthology. The title is an homage to the MC5. It’s always fun to do those things too. 

For One Hitters, we were going to do a preview book at Indie Creator Con. It’s a twenty-four page anthology. We are actually debuting a series that I’ve been working on, The High Adventures of Weed Wizard and Bong Boy. Our first chapter is going to be in this anthology. I’m excited for that story to come to life.

That’s awesome, man. It’s good to see how much Apollo City Comics has grown.

Yeah, believe me, it’s a trip. June will be our two-year publishing anniversary. So it’s kind of wild. It felt at the time like I wasn’t making progress, but then all of a sudden we’re publishing 14 books in a year and a half. I’ve been doing this since 2018, trying to figure it out. Yeah, it just happened to click, and it just worked. And when it works, you just run. That’s what people need in the community, from music to comics, is just someone to listen, check it out, and give it a chance. We’re going to make our dreams come true because all of us who do this don’t want to live in regret. I don’t want to do that day job thing and then just have it take over my life. I’m glad that we’re shooting these shots now because you never know when things can change. I think you’ll like so many of our upcoming releases. We’re doing volume two of the punk anthology. My book, Teenage Babylon, which is a cosmic punk rock love story, will be out this year as well. 

I liked what I saw of Teenage Babylon in the punk rock anthology.

It’s way different now, too. We have a new artist on it, and Christian has taken it in a totally new direction. It’s gonna be a gorgeous book.