Mr. Magazine

“I think print means different things for different people. We are going to try to do a print product. There’s something wonderful about the tactile, something more permanent about print than digital. It’s harder to do, so you have to give it more thought. And it’s less disposable.” Brian Braiker…

A Mr. Magazine™ Re-Launch Story…

“A new Brooklyn Magazine, under new ownership and new management, with a new sensibility–and during a pandemic.” The opening paragraph of the editorial for the new Brooklyn Magazine says it all. Written by one of its new owners, Brain Braiker, the magazine has been revived and revamped and is almost ready to hit the marketplace.

I spoke with Brian, who many of you will remember is the former editor in chief of Ad Age, and we talked about this purchase he and his business partner, digital media executive Michael Bassik, have made. And during a pandemic no less. Starting out as digital, Brian said he and Michael were basically waiting for the right time to bring the brand back to print. And it looks like September 2021 is the right time. Brian promised that Brooklyn Magazine relaunches with a modern look and feel and will celebrate the communities, culture and commerce of Brooklyn.

It sounds exciting and long overdue. Mr. Magazine™ says welcome to the brand new Brooklyn Magazine. And now, please enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Brian Braiker, President & Editor In Chief.

But first the sound-bites:

On what made him decide to buy and revive the print magazine Brooklyn: This was sort of a serendipitous occasion. I teamed up with a partner who really approached me with this idea after I had left Ad Age. I was thinking about what to do next; I had been at various publications, as you pointed out, all up and down the masthead. I didn’t know that I wanted to go back and be a beat reporter somewhere, covering the industry for someone else.

On launching as digital first and now bringing a print quarterly into the mix: We’re looking to do a print run in September as sort of a proof of concept. If it does work, we’ll take it quarterly or semi-annually. We haven’t decided yet; we’re going to see how the first one goes.

On his mission and vision for the new Brooklyn Magazine: The mandate now is, as we’re relaunching during a pandemic, New York’s small businesses are hobbled. There were accounts early on that people were leaving New York and New York was dead and all that. Of course, we don’t buy that for a second. Brooklyn is scrappy; Brooklyn is a city of strivers and creators. I think it’s going to be really interesting to see who stays and how they rebuild. We’re going to be feeling the economic impacts of this pandemic for years. And we want to be there to watch that, chronicle it, and participate in this rebirth and rebuilding of Brooklyn.

On what he thinks the role of print is in today’s digital age: I think print means different things for different people. We are going to try to do a print product. There’s something wonderful about the tactile, something more permanent about print than digital. It’s harder to do, so you have to give it more thought. And it’s less disposable.

On changing his plans for launching the print magazine from Spring to September: We’re totally improvising as we go along here. We’re trying to figure out the economics of it; we’re trying to crack the business model. What’s the expression? We’re trying to put fuel in the plane as it’s flying. (Laughs) Change the tires on the bus as it’s rolling.

On the biggest unexpected challenge he’s had to face: We’re in the middle of it right now. We’re still trying to figure out how to build a model that generates enough revenue and that’s very difficult. So we’re working on that. I think we’re leaning into various potential revenue streams and building that up. One of the things that we’ve struggled with a little bit is getting our tech stack together and the email service provider and the membership technology; we’re going to launch a membership program, cracking that code and figuring out what the right offerings for a membership would be. It’s all of that. So, we’re in the middle of it now.

On what makes him tick and click: My favorite part is being finished. (Laughs) I love having the thing. At Ad Age, we put out a magazine every two weeks, before that I was at Digiday for a number of years, those are more on the B to B side of the business. I’ve been in mainstream media as well. One of my favorite things to do is interview people; I love doing the podcast a lot. And having a platform gives you access to people that are engaging and interesting  and doing amazing things. So, that’s a highlight, just meeting people and talking to them and interviewing them.

On the biggest positive surprise he’s had: There’s a lot of love for the brand. A lot of people remember Brooklyn Magazine; a lot of people are excited to have it back and that obviously puts a bit of pressure on us to do it right. But there’s so much love for not just the borough and the brand that’s Brooklyn itself, but Brooklyn Magazine has a lot of goodwill toward it. And it’s been really positive and uplifting to see people not only rooting for us, but rooting for our neighbors and the city at large. That’s been lovely.

On what motivates him to get out of bed in the mornings: I do have a passion for Brooklyn, and I have a passion for creating and telling stories and telling people’s stories, and arts and culture and the way cultures are expressed through a diversity of voices and lenses. What gets me going is living in a community where I’m also working, in a sense, for the community and becoming more deeply ingrained in that community.

On how he unwinds in the evening: We just binge-watched “Call My Agent,” which is a French show on Netflix, which was really just amazing and I’m sad that I’m done with it. During the pandemic it’s been hard to really get out and do anything. Now that it’s cold and snowy all the time, then end of the day is usually a glass of something and a screen of a different size with something streaming on it. When it’s warmer I do love riding my bike around the city. 

On what keeps him up at night: (Laughs) Money. Securing a future for my kids that is meaningful to them and they feel safe and provided for. And I’m not working until my very last day because I’m trying to make ends meet. And fear of death, just like everything else. (Laughs)

And now the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ interview with Brian Braiker, president, editor in chief, Brooklyn Magazine. 

Samir Husni: For someone who was an observer of the industry, editor in chief of Ad Age, working with the industry on several different publications; what made you decide to buy and revive a print magazine, Brooklyn, in this day and age?

Brian Braiker: (Laughs) Have I learned nothing? This was sort of a serendipitous occasion. I teamed up with a partner who really approached me with this idea after I had left Ad Age. I was thinking about what to do next; I had been at various publications, as you pointed out, all up and down the masthead. I didn’t know that I wanted to go back and be a beat reporter somewhere, covering the industry for someone else. 

I started consulting a little bit; I was working with some big tech platforms, helping them with understanding the marketing community a little bit and also writing for them. They don’t really have great writers in the tech platforms. (Laughs) I was working on white papers for them and stuff. 

Michael Bassik approached me with this idea of acquiring and reviving Brooklyn Magazine. And it was really exciting to me. The idea of being an entrepreneur and having an ownership stake in something for the first time really appealed to me. And I do understand the business and I understand how hard the business is, so I wasn’t naïve about going into it. I’m certainly not going into it with any blinders on. 

It was a weird time with the pandemic; it was in full effect. We were in lockdown. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for 20 years now and I love the borough and there’s nothing really here that does what we’re trying to do. It was a combination of factors. It was the right time; the right place; the right partner; the right subject matter; and the right position, so far as having an ownership stake.

Samir Husni: Take me through your roadmap. You launched as digital first; you had the website; you had the podcast. And now you’re bringing a print quarterly magazine into the mix. 

Brian Braiker: We’re looking to do a print run in September as sort of a proof of concept. If it does work, we’ll take it quarterly or semi-annually. We haven’t decided yet; we’re going to see how the first one goes. 

To rewind a bit, Brooklyn Magazine had about a 10 year run under a previous ownership. It was a glossy quarterly. I think it had a monthly run for a little bit. It spun out this whole events business and that’s where there business model ended up being. They went dormant for various reasons, more or less defunct about a year and a half ago. So it existed already. It’s not like we started something from scratch. When we acquired it, we acquired the archives, the URL, the social footprint, and most valuably the email distribution list that they had built up overtime. 

We didn’t acquire any of the debt; we didn’t acquire the events business, so it really was almost starting on third base. We didn’t have to build it from nothing. When Michael approached me last May, it seemed like a really interesting opportunity. And no time like a pandemic to take a risk. 

And that was it. We acquired it in May and I decided, at least initially, that it would be all-digital, not revive print at first, just sort of get the brand back up on its feet. We worked with a design agency that has a small stake in the company as well. They did a total rebrand and they did a beautiful job on the logo and on the website. I launched the podcast, which is weekly, and I really enjoy doing that. It’s one of my favorite parts of it. 

So we have took something that had existed and had brand recognition and had advertisers and had had an audience, and we’re bringing it into 2021, in terms of Brooklyn is not really what it was 10 years ago. And none of us are who we were 10 years ago. There’s a lot of ways we can update the brand and the message.

Samir Husni: You wrote in your first editorial that Brooklyn is going to become, if not already, the third largest city in the United States. What’s your mission and vision for this new Brooklyn Magazine?

Brian Braiker: Brooklyn Magazine in its heyday was really good at tapping into what was just under the surface culturally that was about to blow up. Brooklyn, New York really became this global brand around the early 2000’s or so, they really started blowing up. And Brooklyn Magazine was there to chronicle it as it was peaking as this global brand, this hipster enclave. And I think the magazine did a really good job of tapping into that energy and that vibe.

But Brooklyn is more than that, because it is the 4^th largest city and we were watching to see when and if it surpasses Chicago. Brooklyn is tremendously diverse; it’s a collection of lots of different neighborhoods, not just really the Williamsburg cultural elites and Dumbo and Park Slope. It’s Bensonhurst; it’s Bedford-Stuyvesant; it’s Dyker Heights; it’s Canarsie. So we’re trying to go deeper into the borough, into more areas, into more neighborhoods, and addressing more cultural expressions. It is still a lifestyle publication, but we’re looking at where lifestyle intersects with more than just what’s cool, but also politics and commerce, small business. 

The mandate now is, as we’re relaunching during a pandemic, New York’s small businesses are hobbled. There were accounts early on that people were leaving New York and New York was dead and all that. Of course, we don’t buy that for a second. Brooklyn is scrappy; Brooklyn is a city of strivers and creators. I think it’s going to be really interesting to see who stays and how they rebuild. We’re going to be feeling the economic impacts of this pandemic for years. And we want to be there to watch that, chronicle it, and participate in this rebirth and rebuilding of Brooklyn. 

The last incarnation of Brooklyn was really the glory days of the city and everything was great and cool and exciting. Now it’s a slightly scary time, businesses are closing and people are struggling, but there are lots of really small stories of hope and inspiration that will hopefully ultimately prevail. So it’s a new orientation, because it is a new time. 

Samir Husni: What do you think the role of print is in this digital age?

Brian Braiker: I think print means different things for different people. We are going to try to do a print product. There’s something wonderful about the tactile, something more permanent about print than digital. It’s harder to do, so you have to give it more thought. And it’s less disposable. 

So in that regard, when you talk about independent bookstores; we’ve all been locked up at home for a year and Amazon has really used that to its advantage. But the bookstores are still here and they’re still trying to make it and we want to highlight that, that the little guys are still here too. 

There’s something almost premium about a print product that outlasts even its own digital counterparts. I have old issues of Brooklyn Magazine and it’s a delight to flip through them and touch them and feel them. I’m also not overly nostalgic for print, it’s a binary. They both feed into each other and inform each other and make each other better, both print and digital. 

Samir Husni: Your original plan was to launch the print product in the Spring, but now you’re telling me September.

Brian Braiker: We’re totally improvising as we go along here. We’re trying to figure out the economics of it; we’re trying to crack the business model. What’s the expression? We’re trying to put fuel in the plane as it’s flying. (Laughs) Change the tires on the bus as it’s rolling. 

Fortunately, it’s me and Michael and we’ve hired a publisher, Tom, and we get to decide when we do things. (Laughs) And right now it makes sense to wait until September. It seems like a logical time to do it. Hopefully, the vaccine will have had its time to shine and people will be able to go out a little more at least. And now that we know who we are and what we’re doing better, we’re having those conversations with advertisers and figuring out what timeframe makes sense. And it does feel like September makes sense. 

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest unexpected challenge that you’ve had to face and how did you overcome it?

Brian Braiker: We’re in the middle of it right now. We’re still trying to figure out how to build a model that generates enough revenue and that’s very difficult. So we’re working on that. I think we’re leaning into various potential revenue streams and building that up. One of the things that we’ve struggled with a little bit is getting our tech stack together and the email service provider and the membership technology; we’re going to launch a membership program, cracking that code and figuring out what the right offerings for a membership would be. It’s all of that. So, we’re in the middle of it now.

The honeymoon is a little bit over, but these are all fun things to think about and we have a pretty good runway where we can try things and experiment. 

Samir Husni: Looking at your role now as editorial director, editor in chief, podcaster, and comparing that to your previous role as editor in chief of Ad Age; which part of you do you enjoy most, the creative part, the editing part, the idea; what makes you tick and click?

Brian Braiker: My favorite part is being finished. (Laughs) I love having the thing. At Ad Age, we put out a magazine every two weeks, before that I was at Digiday for a number of years, those are more on the B to B side of the business. I’ve been in mainstream media as well. One of my favorite things to do is interview people; I love doing the podcast a lot. And having a platform gives you access to people that are engaging and interesting  and doing amazing things. So, that’s a highlight, just meeting people and talking to them and interviewing them. 

Making things. Having a thing, whether it’s a story that I’ve written or a package that I’ve edited or just the whole Brooklyn Magazine and website as a complete product; having made a thing, the creative effort that goes into it, that’s really satisfying. I am not a business person; that’s not my forte and that’s why I have a partner. 

I’ve been in this industry for about two decades now and it’s always exciting to put a thing out in the world and have people react to it, have it touch people’s lives. Or if you’re really lucky, influence people for the positive, whether it’s helping small businesses or shining the light on someone who deserves recognition, or whatever. So it’s really tapping into a platform to use creativity, hopefully, in a positive way.

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest positive surprise you’ve had?

Brian Braiker: There’s a lot of love for the brand. A lot of people remember Brooklyn Magazine; a lot of people are excited to have it back and that obviously puts a bit of pressure on us to do it right. But there’s so much love for not just the borough and the brand that’s Brooklyn itself, but Brooklyn Magazine has a lot of goodwill toward it. And it’s been really positive and uplifting to see people not only rooting for us, but rooting for our neighbors and the city at large. That’s been lovely. 

Samir Husni: What motivates you to get out of bed in the mornings?

Brian Braiker: My dog who needs a walk. (Laughs) I have two kids, they’re 15 and 12, but what gets me out of bed in the morning is doing something creative for and about a place that I really love and love living in. When I was at Ad Age, you’d meet CMO’s, you’d meet marketers; you would become part of that community. And it’s interesting, but it’s not a passion, for me anyway. I’m always impressed by people who are passionate about marketing. (Laughs)

I do have a passion for Brooklyn, and I have a passion for creating and telling stories and telling people’s stories, and arts and culture and the way cultures are expressed through a diversity of voices and lenses. What gets me going is living in a community where I’m also working, in a sense, for the community and becoming more deeply ingrained in that community. 

Samir Husni: How do you unwind in the evenings?

Brian Braiker: We just binge-watched “Call My Agent,” which is a French show on Netflix, which was really just amazing and I’m sad that I’m done with it. During the pandemic it’s been hard to really get out and do anything. Now that it’s cold and snowy all the time, then end of the day is usually a glass of something and a screen of a different size with something streaming on it. When it’s warmer I do love riding my bike around the city. 

And having the dog is fantastic. It opens up the city in ways that you don’t expect. You see different rhythms of the city and meet different people.  

Samir Husni: My typical last question; What keeps you up at night?

Brian Braiker: (Laughs) Money. Securing a future for my kids that is meaningful to them and they feel safe and provided for. And I’m not working until my very last day because I’m trying to make ends meet. And fear of death, just like everything else. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: Thank you. 

“The other answer is we’re dinosaurs to some extent and we love print and we’re drawn to that form ourselves. It’s one that we’ve been familiar with. We used to go to the printers and stand by the presses while it came off the web press. And it was really exciting. I still have that coursing through my veins and the idea of having something arrive that’s not digital.” Peter Kuper…

“From what I can see from the sales of my books and the sales from World War 3, a lot more people want to buy a print book than an e-book.” Seth Tobocman…

“I was discovered via ink on paper. And I value that enormously. As a millennial, I absolutely appreciate and value and love print. I worked on the college newspaper when I was in college and I remember picking up from the print shop, the smell of the fresh ink, and seeing my own work in print; I don’t think of my work as real until I see it in print.” Ethan Heitner…

World War 3 Illustrated is North America’s longest-running anthology of political comics. Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman are the founders of the magazine, which they started in 1979. It was among the first American magazines to treat comics as a medium for serious social commentary and journalism. WW3 isn’t about a war that might happen. It’s about wars ongoing – wars across the globe and in our own neighborhood, the wars we wage against each other and with ourselves.

The magazine was started and driven by passion, a labor of love for cartoonists and artists who were committed, and still are, to the political angst that seethes and thrives in our society. I spoke to Peter and Seth recently, along with Editor Ethan Heitner, about this 41-year-old go-to for lovers of all things cartoon-ly political. It was a fascinating discussion with all three. 

Seth told me that today World War 3 Illustrated is an imprint of AK Press, where they’re now selling it as an annual book. He remarked that it’s thicker and also comes out once a year and it has a square binding. Issue #51 is titled “The World We Are Fighting For” and is a beautifully-done book that is both captivating and relevant. 

So, please enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman, founders and editors, and Ethan Heitner, editor, World War 3 Illustrated. 

But first the sound-bites:

On the genesis of the magazine (Peter Kuper): I’d say two words: Ronald Reagan. He was heading toward the presidency. He hadn’t been elected yet, but we were seeing the writing on the wall with great terror. And what was also on the wall was a lot of our work that was responding to what was going on in the United States at that time. A general warlike direction, with the Cold War going on, the hostage crisis in Iran; there was just this general vibe of Ronald Reagan is going to be our president with his bad acting, itchy finger on the button, and so the title World War 3 Illustrated seemed appropriate.  

On the motivational thinking behind the magazine (Seth Tobocman): I remember Peter saying to me , I think there’s going to be a war; we should do an anti-war magazine. That was what I remember him saying.

On the business plan for World War 3 Illustrated (Peter Kuper): We have a very firm business model, which has kept us around for the last 41 years, which is nobody gets paid and there’s no money really generated besides enough to produce the magazine. I joke about this point, but there’s a real strong truth to it, because if you’re an editor on the magazine that just means you get to work more and maybe hated a bit more by the people who don’t get published, but it creates an equality in the process. It’s understood that we’re doing this for the passion and the love of the form. And the desire to communicate these ideas. 

On the role print plays for them in today’s digital age (Seth Tobocman): From what I can see from the sales of my books and the sales from World War 3, a lot more people want to buy a print book than an e-book. I don’t know if it’s true for the mainstream comics, I know they make some pretty fancy e-books for Marvel and DC Comics, it’s almost like you’re watching a movie, so it might very well be that their e-books sell better, but it seems to us that there is a market for print books. 

On Editor Ethan Heitner, who is a millennial, being discovered via ink on paper (Ethan Heitner): I was discovered via ink on paper. And I value that enormously. As a millennial, I absolutely appreciate and value and love print.

On what role Ethan plays at the magazine (Ethan Heitner): There’s not really clearly defined roles beyond editing individually. The structure is very loose. Part of the way Seth and Peter set it up and the way it has continued, things are dealt with on an issue by issue basis. There isn’t really a lot of stepping back and trying to tackle more long-term structural issues for the magazine. There’s this loose collective that theoretically we all need to contribute, but as far as who actually makes what decision and what people’s roles are is fluid.

On Ethan’s opinion of what the role of print is in a digital age (Ethan Heitner): I think what Seth was saying earlier, people have a hunger for print. People my age and younger are exhausted by digital, especially during this age of the pandemic. There’s a desire to have something physical to hold in your hands. It’s really coming back and it’s something that people are missing. I think they’re realizing they maybe went too far in the other direction. 

On the future of World War 3 Illustrated (Peter Kuper): We’re already plotting for another issue and the fact is, what we have been doing the whole time is not World War 3 in the traditional apocalyptic sense, it’s more like our daily lives, the things that we’re encountering all the time. And there are a lot of first-person accounts. With what’s going on right now, all of us have direct contact with the pandemic. The graphic novel revolution has exploded and people have stopped having that question about it. As a form, it’s only gotten stronger and that’s one more good reason we’ll keep going on. 

On what makes him tick and click (Peter Kuper): Doing something that you love, drawing cartoons, definitely gets me out of bed in the mornings. And it tends to relate very often to the news. I’m looking to see what’s going on and it’s a form of therapy in addressing it. But I’m still so utterly excited about doing the drawing on a piece of paper that it gets me out of bed every morning.

On what keeps them up at night (Seth Tobocman): Arguments that I get into with people keep me up at night. The fact that all my friends who used to be radicals in the ‘80s are kind of Trump supporters which totally freaks me out. I’m like, what do I say to them? That’s what keeps me up at night, how do I convince people that they’re being completely ridiculous. Usually there’s not a way.

And now the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ interview with Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman, founders and editors, and Ethan Heitner, editor, World War 3 Illustrated.

Samir Husni: World War 3 Illustrated is a comics and graphics publication that was founded over 40 years ago, in 1979. That’s quite a milestone. What was the genesis of the magazine?

Peter Kuper: I’d say two words: Ronald Reagan. He was heading toward the presidency. He hadn’t been elected yet, but we were seeing the writing on the wall with great terror. And what was also on the wall was a lot of our work that was responding to what was going on in the United States at that time. A general warlike direction, with the Cold War going on, the hostage crisis in Iran; there was just this general vibe of Ronald Reagan is going to be our president with his bad acting, itchy finger on the button, and so the title World War 3 Illustrated seemed appropriate.  

Seth and I were both in art school at the time in Brooklyn at Pratt Institute. We were doing political comics, but there was really no outlets for the kind of things we were doing. And we were interested in getting published, but not like vanity publishing alone because there was other work that we saw on the streets, things that would be on a wall and then with the first rain would disappear, things that were really striking graphics and great commentary, but it wasn’t showing up in the mainstream and we wanted to make sure we could codify that. 

Seth Tobocman: For me, there were a couple of things. One of the things was definitely the Iran hostage crisis. I kind of bumped in and out of college and never finished. I had been at school at NYU for a few years for film and dropped out, then went to Pratt part-time to get my drawing skills together because I figured that was what I was going to do in life. 

When I was in school at NYU, there were a lot of students from Iraq there. I met a lot of foreign students. There were Socialists and Monarchists, and one guy who supported the Ayatollah Khomeini, all in my dorm. They would sit in the lounge at the dorm and no one would sit next to the Monarchists. So I was very aware that there was a real issue in Iran. And my Socialist Iranian friends were worried about the Savaq tracking them down in the United States. I was aware that these people had an issue.

Then suddenly around 1979, everybody in the U.S. could say Iran. In the grocery store where I’d gone every week with my mother they were selling these big buttons that read “Fuck Iran.” And it was interesting because they were selling them to all the people who would have slapped you in the face as a kid for saying the word fuck. And suddenly, they were wearing that word in big letters on their chests. And they were selling dart board of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and it was very clear to me that these people didn’t know anything about this country. They had been told this country had attacked Americans for no reason and that they hated Americans.

Looking at the papers at the time, including the New York Post and the Daily News, I just kind of looked at them and said, if these people are allowed to comment, then I think I have a right to comment because I’m not the most educated or sophisticated person in the world on this subject, but these people clearly aren’t either and they’re allowed to have a voice. 

So, I thought putting out a comic book about that would make some kind of sense. And another thing was we had this Three Mile Island meltdown, which made everybody in New York very aware of nuclear energy. And a couple of years before that there had also been the White Nights in San Francisco, which were the riots that followed the assassination of Harvey Milk. And a lot of my friends in high school were gay kids, and they were the most political kids in my high school. A lot more sophisticated than the hippies in my school actually. 

So, I was very aware of the issues around Harvey Milk. And the fact that there had been this riot. So, all of those things were kind of in the air at the time we decided to do World War 3 Illustrated. 

That said, I don’t think we were very sophisticated about politics. I had read “One-Dimensional Man” by Herbert Marcuse and there’s a quote from that book on the back cover, but I’m not sure I really knew what it meant. (Laughs) 

Peter Kuper: Just in the brass tacks of doing it; Seth and I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and had both moved to New York. Our interest in comics also extended to doing a fanzines, so we had actually had experience starting our first fanzine when we were 11. And we did subsequent issues. So when it rolled around, we said we’re interested in comics, but there’s not really an outlet for it. The leap to doing a magazine wasn’t completely out of the blue; we actually had a pretty fair amount of experience with printing. Even dealing with the distribution in small aspects. 

Seth Tobocman: We had one issue of our fanzine that sold 1,000 copies through the mail, because it had a lot of interviews with professional cartoonists. We dealt with printers and the mysteries of finding out what actually appears in print and what doesn’t appear in print. And those questions were answered in middle school actually. I lost interest in comics in high school, but gained interest in comics at the point when I was dropping out of college. 

But we were very active comics fans in middle school. And we put out four magazines, and actually Pete put out a fifth, Between the two of us we put out five different issues at that time. 

Peter Kuper: We love the smell of printer’s ink and going to the printer, and learned something about the process too. So it was in our DNA already. 

Seth Tobocman: We arrived at 1979 with a knowledge of how to do that. We applied that to our own work and we were in a publishing environment that was still pretty hostile to everything we wanted to do, that is, I would say that there were four comic books published in the U.S. aimed at adults at that time, including ours. There really was no adult comics market in 1979 in the U.S. There were things we saw from Europe; there were the old underground comics, but the old underground comics had really become a genre fiction by 1979. They only had certain types of stories; they knew what they could sell and what they couldn’t sell, so they weren’t really this freeform thing that maybe they had seemed to be earlier. So, there was no place to print this type of work. 

Also, the left in the U.S. in the beginning of the 1980s was almost non-existent. I was in a peace organization in college consisting of five people. It was seen as very uncool to be involved in politics or socially critical at that time. There was a big reaction against the movements of the sixties. It was very hard to find someone our age who was politically active. I found more older people who were politically active. 

So we really felt that we had to create this thing ourselves, so that we could put out what we thought. And even though we were somewhat naïve and simplistic in our approach to a lot of things and a lot of our early comics looked like science fiction comics than they do political cartooning, the fact that we had done this attracted all kinds of people. That a couple of young people were putting out a political comic book. And those people came to the magazine and we learned from each person who came in and we developed our thinking through them. 

Samir Husni: Most magazines are published as a reflection of society, yours was more of an initiator. You took a tiny seed and watched it grow. Did you see that with nourishment this would happen or were you two just young and threw caution to the wind and said what the heck, let’s do it?

Seth Tobocman: I remember Peter saying to me , I think there’s going to be a war; we should do an anti-war magazine. That was what I remember him saying. We’d grown up through a period of the 1960s and we lived in Cleveland Heights, which was the neighborhood my father decided to live in because it was close to his job at the university. 

And we knew when we were kids that all kinds of crazy things were going on. And then we knew when we were teenagers that all kinds of crazy things were no longer going on, which was an odd perspective that we had. We saw these things come in and then we saw them go out as sort of passive observers from the security of Cleveland Heights, which wasn’t always secure. I remember one time my father brought all his research home because he was afraid his offices would be burned down. 

Peter Kuper: There was a time period during the sixties where there was a lot of marching and people’s lives were on the line going to Vietnam and so it made people very proactive. And then post-Vietnam and post-Nixon, there was a cooling off period and a lot of the steam went out of the engine in that respect. 

We grew up reading underground comics and I thought I was going to be an underground comic artist. I remember being frustrated by the fact that every time our generation arrived somewhere, things were just closing. There was a beat generation and a Summer of Love and then the underground comic scene. And we arrived just in time for them to tell us sorry, that door is now shut. 

To zoom forward, I think what we’ve found with World War 3 is that those groups weren’t there for those people either, they had to form them. So, creating World War 3 was kind of like producing an environment where we would have an interaction with other artists; where we would create a community and we’d be able to have that thing that we felt was missing. But it was not going to spontaneously appear. 

Samir Husni: It seems to me that World War 3 Illustrated was driven by passion. What about the business plan? Did you ever think we have to make money to continue doing this?

Peter Kuper: We have a very firm business model, which has kept us around for the last 41 years, which is nobody gets paid and there’s no money really generated besides enough to produce the magazine. I joke about this point, but there’s a real strong truth to it, because if you’re an editor on the magazine that just means you get to work more and are maybe hated a bit more by the people who don’t get published, but it creates an equality in the process. It’s understood that we’re doing this for the passion and the love of the form. And the desire to communicate these ideas. 

It’s not like there’s a golden ticket involved in it. The only frustration is the extent to which that holds us back from doing more, because finances have to be dealt with. We’re not business people. Having said that, we’ve managed to pull off a number of things, surviving for all of these years being number one, without having money involved. What we do make gets turned back into producing the next issue. 

Seth Tobocman: When we started out, maybe there were times we thought that someday we’d get paid and be able to pay everyone involved in this, but we really didn’t know. We had to feel our way around it. Very early on we got some distribution from some local distributors. There was a company called Trojan that mostly distributing porn, but they distributed us and they distributed Raw in the New York area. There was a guy named Joe Massey who was our distributor for many years, but those were very small quantities. 

What was really the breakthrough for us was around the 4^th issue we connected with Mordam Records, which was a distribution company set up to distribute the records of the Dead Kennedys and set up to distribute the magazine Maximum Rocknroll, which was a punk rock fanzine, with a somewhat left orientation coming out of the West Coast. West Coast punk was really political; East Coast punk was not. 

Peter Kuper: What’s really important here is that was at a time when there were comic shops, but we very strongly believed that there was an audience like ourselves who were really interested in adult material in the comic form. But a lot of those people didn’t want to walk into a shop that had a giant Superman cutout when they walked through the door. And they were really put off by that. 

By getting a record distributor, we reached into this area that was a very solid base and we ended up in Tower Records back when they had record stores. People would stumble upon us, and then you didn’t find comics on the shelves in record stores for the most part. They started to carry alternative comics that were developed from publishers like Fantagraphics, but that was a huge breakthrough because we were constantly saying there was an audience for this, but we’re not reaching them in the comic shops. When we got through that door to this alternative area, it made a lot of things possible.

Seth Tobocman: We would get letters from all kinds of small towns where somebody would say they just discovered our magazine at the place where they bought punk records. And they would say they had never seen anything like it and it had changed their life to find it. We got a lot of those types of letters in the ‘80s. 

One of the good things that the punk rock people did, the West Coast people did, was they developed a lot of small business reps in various towns who only sold alternative records. They might be making money or they might not, but they were passionate about it. My general sense is, the Dead Kennedys records sold well enough to underwrite all the other things distributed by Mordam Records.  

Samir Husni: Why do you think you’re still doing print and publishing a printed magazine in this digital age? What role does print play today?

Seth Tobocman: From what I can see from the sales of my books and the sales from World War 3, a lot more people want to buy a print book than an e-book. I don’t know if it’s true for the mainstream comics, I know they make some pretty fancy e-books for Marvel and DC Comics, it’s almost like you’re watching a movie, so it might very well be that their e-books sell better, but it seems to us that there is a market for print books. 

What we’ve had to do in recent years is, first of all, Mordam Records, the whole record industry disappeared. Just vanished. When Tower Records closed we lost about 500 copy sales per issue. And the magazine distributors that we dealt with became smaller and smaller, asked for fewer and fewer copies. And I don’t think that had any relation to us, it had relation to the amount of business they were doing. 

Most recently, we have become an imprint of AK Press where we’re now selling it as an annual book. So, we’re calling it a book. It’s thicker and it’s once a year; it has a square binding; it’s 7×9, and it’s a book. Our distribution has gone back up a little since we became a book and an imprint of AK Press. So it seems like the bookstores have recovered somewhat from the loss they suffered because people still prefer a print book to an e-book, unless it’s a classic and they can download it for free. 

Peter Kuper: The other answer is we’re dinosaurs to some extent and we love print and we’re drawn to that form ourselves. It’s one that we’ve been familiar with. We used to go to the printers and stand by the presses while it came off the web press. And it was really exciting. I still have that coursing through my veins and the idea of having something arrive that’s not digital. 

Ethan Heitner: When people ask us why we haven’t moved to digital, I just want to crack up, because we wouldn’t know how. (Laughs) That’s why we’re still in print, because that’s what we know how to do. In 1979, I hadn’t been born yet. In 1980, I wasn’t born yet. In 1983, when I showed up on the scene, World War 3 was already an established fact of life, but I joined the audience of the magazine in the Tower Records days of the ‘90s. That’s how I got World War 3. 

When I first wanted to join World War 3 as a cartoonist in 2007/2008, the Internet started in 1994, the digital revolution began in 2007/2008; in 2007/2008 I moved to New York with the desire to become a cartoonist and join World War 3. And I found out that the issues that were being printed then did not have an email address, they did not have a website; they listed a P.O. Box on the inside cover for a contact. I was like, this is ridiculous. No way was I writing to a P.O. Box. (Laughs)

I’m making jokes, but actually I’m much less insistent on these things now because I don’t want to spend any more time in front of a computer than I have to either. And the way I did finally meet Seth was in a great, non-digital way. I was making comics that were being distributed at protests in New York City; printed flyers that were being passed out on the street and Seth found one of my flyers and wrote his phone number on the back of it and said give my phone number to whomever drew this comment and that’s how I finally got involved. 

One of the first things I did do when I became involved with the magazine was set up a Gmail account for the magazine, so people did not have to write to a P.O. Box to contact us. I eventually set up a Twitter account and a Facebook account and other social media. 

Samir Husni: So, Ethan you were discovered via ink on paper?

Ethan Heitner: Exactly. I was discovered via ink on paper. And I value that enormously. As a millennial, I absolutely appreciate and value and love print. I worked on the college newspaper when I was in college and I remember picking it up from the print shop, the smell of the fresh ink, and seeing my own work in print; I don’t think of my work as real until I see it in print. 

Samir Husni: Besides being a co-editor, what role do you play today with World War 3 Illustrated?

Ethan Heitner: There’s not really clearly defined roles beyond editing individually. The structure is very loose. Part of the way Seth and Peter set it up and the way it has continued, things are dealt with on an issue by issue basis. There isn’t really a lot of stepping back and trying to tackle more long-term structural issues for the magazine. There’s this loose collective that theoretically we all need to contribute, but as far as who actually makes what decision and what people’s roles are is fluid. 

In 2011-2013, I sort of tried to get us a little bit more coherent internally, just to get us a more consistent web presence, to think about questions of distribution, to think about questions of digital distribution, and I didn’t make a lot of progress, that’s when I set up our Tumblr account and our Gmail account, and I set up other social media accounts. 

In 2013, I got a little burned out, so I took a break. It was difficult. There’s this generational divide, in terms of technology. And it’s such a loose structure, that’s it’s hard to make change happen. Recently, Seth asked me to get more involved again and that’s why I helped with #51. That’s the first issue I’ve been directly involved with for a while. We started that process in 2016/2017. After Trump got elected, I got a little bit more involved again. In 2017, I actually rejoined the editorial board.

Samir Husni: As a millennial, what do you think the role of print is in this digital age?

Ethan Heitner: I think what Seth was saying earlier, people have a hunger for print. People my age and younger are exhausted by digital, especially during this age of the pandemic. There’s a desire to have something physical to hold in your hands. It’s really coming back and it’s something that people are missing. I think they’re realizing they maybe went too far in the other direction.

Peter Kuper: It’s like vinyl as well. There’s a younger generation that doesn’t want everything to be in zeros and ones. 

Ethan Heitner: It’s shifted from a more mass production model to more of a curated production model. But World War 3 was always sort of a curated audience anyway. World War 3’s audience is also not necessarily a mass audience. It would be great if it were, but we’re not kidding ourselves. We know that it’s not. It’s always going to be something that reaches that subsect of the population and that population is also maybe more appreciative of print. If the goal was to reach as many people as possible, then it would absolutely make sense to push more of a digital platform. 

Seth Tobocman: One of the things, and Ethan is aware of this, the advent of digital media changes the purpose of a magazine like World War 3. During the first 20 or 30 years of production of the magazine, if I saw a point of view that was interesting, but wasn’t getting out there; even if I disagreed with it, I would feel I had some obligation to help this poor soul reach an audience because no one would ever listen to them. 

Whereas with the advent of the Internet, everybody can get into the public in some form, no matter how weird they are or how unqualified. The first time a computer geek friend of mine showed me the Internet, one of the first sites he showed me was a site that told you Hitler was still alive and lived on the dark side of the moon and visited the Earth in a flying saucer. And that guy had one of the first websites. 

And the idea of getting something out right away is much better served by the Internet than served by print. And I think that really hurt the newspapers. Facebook is all about speed, not about quality. People put things out on social media before they even think about what they’re writing. That’s one of the problems with it.

So what we’re doing now has a different role, it’s like is this good enough to spend some money on printing so that somebody can spend some money on buying it? And will it have value in a year? Will it still mean something in a year? I think one of the really nice things about drawing comics is it takes so much time. If I’m writing something on Facebook, I might write something really stupid because it only takes me a minute, I don’t have time to think about it. If I write a stupid comic strip it’s going to take a lot longer to draw than to write it and if it’s a dumb idea, I’m going to change it before it comes out. 

Samir Husni: What do you think is the future of World War 3 Illustrated? Are we still at war after those 41 years?

Peter Kuper: Hopefully, because we’ve been publishing, we’ve kept the war from happening. That’s one of the great things that we’ve done. I have to say that I’m very happy about that success. As long as we’re publishing, there won’t be a World War 4. But we’re already plotting for another issue and the fact is, what we have been doing the whole time is not World War 3 in the traditional apocalyptic sense, it’s more like our daily lives, the things that we’re encountering all the time. And there are a lot of first-person accounts. With what’s going on right now, all of us have direct contact with the pandemic. 

So, the stories we have to tell are pretty bottomless. I don’t see any end to it. Only when we have passed as humans will there be a necessary end to producing this kind of material, whether it will be in the form of the magazine or not is impossible to say, but we certainly didn’t look in 1979 ahead and say yep, in 2021 we’re going to be doing a new issue. That did come as a surprise. 

So now, having witnessed our longevity I feel like yes, this could go on for years and years more because there’s a lot of people that really want to express themselves and need a form for it. And in mainstream publishing it’s very limited to do an 11-page comic strip about something personal, say? There are more outlets with graphic novels, for example, in the process of doing the magazine, we’ve witnessed a change from comics as a low art form, or not even an art form, to being one of the most powerful sections of a bookstore and online. The graphic novel revolution has exploded and people have stopped having that question about it. As a form, it’s only gotten stronger and that’s one more good reason we’ll keep going on.

Seth Tobocman: I think the definition of comics and who makes comics has really expanded. Pete and I both teach and our classes are mostly young women, which when we started the magazine there was a real push to say there should be more women working on the magazine. We generally had to find people who had never drawn a comic strip before and teach them to draw comics, so that we would have women working on the magazine. Comics in the U.S. was a very male genre. 

Ethan has done a lot of work with us to bring in cartoonists from Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon that we hadn’t known about. And I’ve become aware that there are a lot of comics being done around the world that are in a lot of ways very much influenced by the ‘80s alternative comics from the U.S. and Europe, but have a subject material on a notion of who the protagonist is; it’s much broader. I think there are a lot of new voices starting to use this medium. 

One of the good things about World War 3 and a good reason to keep it going is we have dinosaurs like me and Peter Kuper and Sue Coe on this magazine, and then we have someone like Colleen Tighe who is completely new and represents a different generation of people. So there’s a way of creating a continuity, saying this idea has been around, this idea has developed, and this idea has retained its integrity for this amount of time. And I think there’s a reason to go forward and continue it. 

Ethan Heitner: I actually do try to push Seth and Peter to say why are we doing this? What is the reason? It’s not the situation when they started, just getting a form or getting a point of view out there, because now anybody can get their point of view out there. And there’s also a lot more forms for graphic journalism comics that deal with politics. There are all sorts of websites and magazines that actually will publish a 16-page story. And they might actually pay you for it. 

So one question I always try to bring is what is the unique thing that WW3 does; it’s not a question that has an answer, but I think we keep trying to look for it. One of the many great advantages of the digital age is we now can get comics directly from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon; from anywhere in the world. And finding that work is very valuable. So as long as we keep finding that work that is valuable, that’s the fun part of putting together the magazine. It’s very exciting.

Samir Husni: What makes you tick and click and motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Peter Kuper: Doing something that you love, drawing cartoons, definitely gets me out of bed in the mornings. And it tends to relate very often to the news. I’m looking to see what’s going on and it’s a form of therapy in addressing it. But I’m still so utterly excited about doing the drawing on a piece of paper that it gets me out of bed every morning. 

Seth Tobocman: This is absolutely the right question because drawing comics get me out of bed in the mornings. I’m an old guy and I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll think about everything that went wrong in my life and then I have a comic strip to draw. So I get up and start drawing it. And comic strips take a long time to draw, you have page after page and then a deadline. So you always have some work to do, which is really helpful. 

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Peter Kuper: Doom scrolling, especially in the last four years, though it’s run longer than that. Seeing what madness has occurred, even in some final hour of the day. And on the pleasure side, there are so many things that I want to read and it’s just impossible to keep up with all of that.

Seth Tobocman: Arguments that I get into with people keep me up at night. The fact that all my friends who used to be radicals in the ‘80s are kind of Trump supporters which totally freaks me out. I’m like, what do I say to them? That’s what keeps me up at night, how do I convince people that they’re being completely ridiculous. Usually there’s not a way. 

Ethan Heitner: My three-year-old gets me up in the morning and he’s the one who usually wakes me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you all. 

“…There’s something about touching a magazine. I’m an older guy, but I believe there’s a lot of people out there, we have a nice subscriber base that still wants to get that magazine in the mail every month and touch it and feel it in the form of a nicely printed magazine, where it’s heavy print and done beautifully.” Scott Santos…

If you were to combine Hugh Hefner of Playboy fame and Bob Guccione of Penthouse fame, you would end up with Scott Santos, the founder, CEO and publisher of StripLV magazine.  But that’s where the similarities end. The married man of Italian descent has “four beautiful children” and lives a few miles outside of Las Vegas in the mountains. Scott cherishes his photography and creative work seen on the pages of the magazine and the pixels on the screen, but not as much as he cherishes his family life that gives him the reason to get up and face the day. The magazine is filled with erotic and beautiful pictures of women who Santos says he wants to feel empowered in the pages of his magazine. Published like a coffee table book with the focus on art and beauty, StripLV is celebrating its 15^th anniversary in print. And while Scott is an integrated publisher, with much accolades for the digital side of his business, he believes that there is something about print that speaks to people.

I spoke with Scott recently and we talked about his magazine and his brand. Being a photographer, one who does the images for his product, he has an eye for angles and beauty and tries to show a diverse quality in his work that projects the softer, more artsy images that he loves. Based in Las Vegas, the magazine showcases many different models in many modes of disarray, but with a haunting quality that blends very nicely with the eroticism the magazine touts, thus filling a major void left in this sector with the demise of Playboy magazine and the decline in sales of Penthouse magazine.  

So I hope that you enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Scott Santos, CEO and publisher, StripLV magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On launching a print magazine in 2006 when everything was moving toward digital: Growing up, I was always a big fan of Playboy and Penthouse and those types of magazines. And when I moved out here to Las Vegas I was in the real estate business at the time; I was buying and selling homes. There was no magazine in town here that spoke to the adult side of Las Vegas, but there was a lot of adult things going on.

On any challenges he faced during 2020: To tell you the truth, we’ve seen a surge in business from 2020. People want to get something every month in their mailboxes, so our subscription business and our distribution has actually increased dramatically since 2020. I think things are going to be good and people are going to go back to wanting something printed; I’m seeing that. It’s like vinyl; vinyl has had a surge in records. Our digital distribution as well, through Zinio.com, has been very strong. So, honestly, it’s been good for us.

On when he decided to make the magazine more of a national publication rather than just in Las Vegas: At the end of 2007 we struck a deal with a major distributor. And in 2008 we launched nationally with that distributor. It was Curtis Distribution at the time, they’re no longer in business. We spent a lot of money and we bought into all the airport Hudson News locations. My attitude back then was “go big or go home.” Then at the end of 2008 when the recession hit we had to rethink the whole business, because we were staffed up. I had offices with a big staff. I had to rethink how we did everything.

On how he achieves that differentiation in the magazine between erotic and pornographic photography and if that’s his goal: It’s completely my goal and purpose. I love women and I think women are beautiful creatures. And I want the women to feel empowered in the pages of our magazine. So I approach it like I really want it to be artful and beautiful, but I don’t want to be doing stuff that you might see in Hustler magazine. I mean, there’s a place for that, but not in our magazine. I want our magazine to be more like an art book, that’s how I want it to come across.

On the role he thinks print plays in the presentation of the erotic photography in his magazine: Well, even online I want it to be beautiful and I think you can present it that way. But there’s something about touching a magazine. I’m an older guy, but I believe there’s a lot of people out there, we have a nice subscriber base that still wants to get that magazine in the mail every month and touch it and feel it in the form of a nicely printed magazine, where it’s heavy print and done beautifully. But I want the digital to be beautiful too, so I work hard to make sure our digital presentation is beautiful as well. Our website and our digital magazine. But to me there’s something about print that still speaks. 

On whether he finds that the models photographed in his magazine are more interested in being on the cover of the printed edition rather than on the website: Of course. All my models want to be on the cover, that’s the most important thing. Obviously, we only have 12 covers a year, so not everybody can be there, but  it’s a big thing that the models really want. And you have to have a good one, that is very important. Once I get the cover, everything else seems to come together.

On whether he has received any pushback from newsstands, distributors or bookstores about any of his uncensored covers: It’s a fine line. We have had pushback from an issue maybe five years ago where we had to actually put a sticker on it. It was her butt. And the distributors made us put a sticker on it and that cost money, so you don’t really want that situation. Honestly, I try to push it as far as I can push it, but not too far where I’m going to have problems with it being on the newsstand. I want it to be erotic and if we do push it, we will sell more magazines sometimes.

On doing split covers: I’ve done a couple of issues before throughout the years where we’ve had multiple covers, but it’s a cost issue and being a publisher and a businessman and staying in business for 15 years, I have to think about those things. You don’t want to spend money where you don’t need to spend money.

On his biggest business challenge: The biggest challenge is securing advertisers. That’s the tough thing because a lot of the agencies and companies nowadays have younger people doing marketing for them, millennials, and a lot of millennials don’t believe in print. They just say no, we can do that on social media.

On cover prices and the business model: Our cover price is $9.99 and you can subscribe for $40 per year. But we have lots of people reselling copies on Amazon and stuff for much more than that. Back issue sales is one of our business models that we make quite a bit of money on, because we have 177 issues now. And we have some that sell for a lot of money. So we warehouse them and they ship them out when people order them because we have a lot of people who collect every issue. That’s one of our business models and where we make money, back issue sales.

On what he hopes to achieve with the magazine in another three years: What I want to do by then is be at a place where I don’t need any advertising dollars. Where I have such a strong subscription base and such solid distribution and sell-thru at the newsstands that any advertising that I need is just gravy. That’s where I want to be in three to five years.

On which hat that he wears: publisher, editor, photographer, he enjoys the most: That’s a tough question. I like publishing and editing the magazine, that’s probably my favorite thing to do. Selling ads is probably my least favorite thing to do, but I wear that hat because I have to. I don’t have a problem doing it, but I really like just sitting at my computer and bringing the whole thing together.

On how he has operated during the pandemic: It really didn’t affect us that much. The models, I still kept shooting, I didn’t really change that. I shot all year. We’re quarantined as it is. Basically, my wife and myself do most of the work on the magazine. Everything else we pretty much outsource. We have a staff but they work from home anyhow. So it didn’t affect us so much that way. There were some models that were uncomfortable shooting, so I didn’t shoot as much. But I have such a backlog of photography from years ago, that it didn’t really affect me. I probably shot once or twice a month during the pandemic.

On how he decided on the pictures for his limited edition print book of photography: I started with the models that I had a relationship with as far as liking them as people. I’ve been shooting for the magazine for about 17 years, because I started shooting before we started printing, so I just wanted to show the diversity in my work. My work has a look, but I also wanted it to show that I do have quite a diverse style.

On what motivates him to get out of bed in the morning: I love getting out of bed and doing the magazine. I’m so lucky to be a photographer and to do what I’m doing. I can work for myself and it’s wonderful. I get out of bed every day, go for  a nice four or five mile walk. My wife and I have four beautiful children and so it’s easy to get out of bed. I’m very blessed to be doing what I’m doing.

On how he unwinds in the evening: My wife and I will maybe put on a TV show or a movie and have a drink. And then just wind down, because it’s easy. This is not stressful; what we do is not stressful. I’m blessed.

On what keeps him up at night: Nothing much, I sleep pretty good. (Laughs)

And now for the lightly edited Mr. Magazine™ interview with Scott Santos, CEO & publisher, StripLV Magazine.

Samir Husni: First, let me congratulate you on celebrating 15 years of publishing StripLV in print.  

Scott Santos: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Let’s go back to 2006 when you decided to launch the magazine. It was before the dawn of the digital age as we know it; the iPhone came one year later, then the iPad two years later. What was your thinking behind creating a magazine with erotic photography and famous people and their lifestyles? It was an era where everything was moving toward digital, yet you launched a print magazine.

Scott Santos: Growing up, I was always a big fan of Playboy and Penthouse and those types of magazines. And when I moved out here to Las Vegas I was in the real estate business at the time; I was buying and selling homes. There was no magazine in town here that spoke to the adult side of Las Vegas, but there was a lot of adult things going on. 

There was a magazine over in Phoenix, Arizona that was distributed free in the gentleman’s clubs. And I thought we should do something similar to that here. We really didn’t think of doing it on a national scale. Basically, I was doing a free distribution magazine for adult businesses that would have a men’s interest and we would distribute it free at the locations here in Las Vegas. So, it started like that. I thought let’s speak to the adult side of Las Vegas, nobody was doing it and I thought I could carve a niche out doing that.

What it became was something quite different. From the beginning, I embraced the digital side of it; we always had a digital version on the Internet from day one. So we had free print distribution and we had free digital distribution as well.

The truth of the matter is, at the time I didn’t know much about publishing at all; really nothing. I was a photographer, but I came from the music business. And I used to photograph my bands on my label. So I really didn’t know much about it, other than I was a creative guy. And honestly, knowing what I know now, I maybe wouldn’t have done that back then, but I was that kind of person, someone who would just jump into things.

Samir Husni: As you look back at 2020, which was a very unusual year in terms of the pandemic and the social unrest. What were some of the challenges that you faced and how did you overcome them? 

Scott Santos: To tell you the truth, we’ve seen a surge in business from 2020. People want to get something every month in their mailboxes, so our subscription business and our distribution has actually increased dramatically since 2020. I think things are going to be good and people are going to go back to wanting something printed; I’m seeing that. It’s like vinyl; vinyl has had a surge in records. Our digital distribution as well, through Zinio.com, has been very strong. So, honestly, it’s been good for us. 

Samir Husni: You’re published now on a monthly basis. I discovered the magazines on the newsstand in Mississippi, so you’re no longer limited to Las Vegas. When did you make the decision to move from just Las Vegas to a more national magazine?

Scott Santos: At the end of 2007 we struck a deal with a major distributor. And in 2008 we launched nationally with that distributor. It was Curtis Distribution at the time, they’re no longer in business. We spent a lot of money and we bought into all the airport Hudson News locations. My attitude back then was “go big or go home.” Then at the end of 2008 when the recession hit we had to rethink the whole business, because we were staffed up. I had offices with a big staff. I had to rethink how we did everything. 

We learned how to do things smaller. We pulled back on our national distribution a little bit because it was costing us a lot of money. But originally, even way back then, I figured, I’m not going to give this magazine away anymore, we’re more of a national magazine; we’re called StripLV, or Strip Las Vegas, but I saw what was happening with Penthouse and Playboy. I saw they were going to fail and not do good, and I thought there could be a niche for us, but I needed to learn how to do it smaller and more economically. 

So we pulled back and kind of reined everything in and we survived the recession. We kept growing stronger by a little bit at a time, but only slow. And now we’re in all the Barnes & Nobles and Books-A-Million; we’re a pretty strong national presence as far as distribution because Playboy isn’t printing, so there was room on the newsstand for us suddenly. And Penthouse isn’t printing that much. So, we’ve actually opened up our print distribution quite a bit. 

Samir Husni: I’ve seen several copies of the magazine and there seems to be a sharp line drawn in the sand when it comes to the magazine’s differentiation between erotic and pornographic photography. How do you achieve that, if that’s your goal or purpose? 

Scott Santos: It’s completely my goal and purpose. I love women and I think women are beautiful creatures. And I want the women to feel empowered in the pages of our magazine. So I approach it like I really want it to be artful and beautiful, but I don’t want to be doing stuff that you might see in Hustler magazine. I mean, there’s a place for that, but not in our magazine. I want our magazine to be more like an art book, that’s how I want it to come across. 

Though it is erotic and there is vagina in our magazine. Some people, like Playboy, they shied away from that and I think the vagina is beautiful. I don’t want to shy away from it, I think you can show it in a beautiful manner. I want it to be like a beautiful picture that I would buy and put in my house. 

Samir Husni: Do you think that you can achieve that concept, that goal, only in print, that there is a big difference between seeing an erotic picture in a digital edition versus print? What role does print play in the eroticism and in how you present your pictures?

Scott Santos: Well, even online I want it to be beautiful and I think you can present it that way. But there’s something about touching a magazine. I’m an older guy, but I believe there’s a lot of people out there, we have a nice subscriber base that still wants to get that magazine in the mail every month and touch it and feel it in the form of a nicely printed magazine, where it’s heavy print and done beautifully. But I want the digital to be beautiful too, so I work hard to make sure our digital presentation is beautiful as well. Our website and our digital magazine. But to me there’s something about print that still speaks. 

Samir Husni: Many of the magazine publishers and editors that I interview tell me that the celebrities or people they feature are more concerned with being on the cover of the printed magazine instead of on their websites. Do you find that to be true as well, that the models that you photograph are more interested in being on the cover of the magazine rather than on the website?  

Scott Santos: Of course. All my models want to be on the cover, that’s the most important thing. Obviously, we only have 12 covers a year, so not everybody can be there, but  it’s a big thing that the models really want. And you have to have a good one, that is very important. Once I get the cover, everything else seems to come together. 

Samir Husni: With a magazine like StripLV, how far can you push the cover to the limit? I saw some of the covers where they weren’t really censored. Have you received any pushback from the newsstand or the distributors or any of the bookstores about any of your covers?

Scott Santos: It’s a fine line. We have had pushback from an issue maybe five years ago where we had to actually put a sticker on it. It was her butt. And the distributors made us put a sticker on it and that cost money, so you don’t really want that situation. Honestly, I try to push it as far as I can push it, but not too far where I’m going to have problems with it being on the newsstand. I want it to be erotic and if we do push it, we will sell more magazines sometimes. 

Samir Husni: Have you done any split covers? I have a magazine from 1978 called At Home, which was also a magazine of sexual fulfillment, but their subscriber’s cover was much more explicit than the newsstand cover. Have you considered having split covers, one for subscribers and one for newsstands?

Scott Santos: No, because it’s a cost issue. I’ve done a couple of issues before throughout the years where we’ve had multiple covers, but it’s a cost issue and being a publisher and a businessman and staying in business for 15 years, I have to think about those things. You don’t want to spend money where you don’t need to spend money. 

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest business challenge you’ve had to face?

Scott Santos: The biggest challenge is securing advertisers. That’s the tough thing because a lot of the agencies and companies nowadays have younger people doing marketing for them, millennials, and a lot of millennials don’t believe in print. They just say no, we can do that on social media. 

We’ve spoken to that and I sell video ads and we do social media marketing and content sales, things like that. But getting people to just take a print ad nowadays has become more and more challenging, even though I wholly believe that print ads work as I believe outdoor media works. But that’s me. A lot of the people that I’m dealing with, who sell these ads are much younger than me and they just don’t see it or believe in it. So that’s probably the biggest challenge. 

Samir Husni: It seems like with all  magazines, there isn’t a problem with ink on paper, it’s more about the business model, that dependence for years on advertising to make money. Now it seems the industry is more in the business of customers who count, that if you want to get StripLV, you have to pay $12 for a cover price or $20, which in the old days you could get a year’s subscription for that. 

Scott Santos: Our cover price is $9.99 and you can subscribe for $40 per year. But we have lots of people reselling copies on Amazon and stuff for much more than that. Back issue sales is one of our business models that we make quite a bit of money on, because we have 177 issues now. And we have some that sell for a lot of money. So we warehouse them and they ship them out when people order them because we have a lot of people who collect every issue. That’s one of our business models and where we make money, back issue sales. 

That being said, we still want to have advertising revenue, and that’s why I said that’s probably our biggest challenge, converting the younger people to understanding that print with a digital ad with some social media, we throw it in with the package. It’s a whole package when we sell an advertising client.

Samir Husni: You and I are having this discussion three years from now, what would you hope to tell me that you had achieved with StripLV and you are approaching your 20^th anniversary?

Scott Santos: What I want to do by then is be at a place where I don’t need any advertising dollars. Where I have such a strong subscription base and such solid distribution and sell-thru at the newsstands that any advertising that I need is just gravy. That’s where I want to be in three to five years. 

Samir Husni: You wear so many different hats in your company. You’re the businessman, the publisher, the editor and you’re the photographer. Which one of these hats do you enjoy the most and why?

Scott Santos: That’s a tough question. I like publishing and editing the magazine, that’s probably my favorite thing to do. Selling ads is probably my least favorite thing to do, but I wear that hat because I have to. I don’t have a problem doing it, but I really like just sitting at my computer and bringing the whole thing together. We print everything out and make a book here every month, so I can look at it before I go to print. And that’s probably the thing I have the most fun doing. 

Samir Husni: How have you operated during the pandemic?

Scott Santos: It really didn’t affect us that much. The models, I still kept shooting, I didn’t really change that. I shot all year. We’re quarantined as it is. Basically, my wife and myself do most of the work on the magazine. Everything else we pretty much outsource. We have a staff but they work from home anyhow. So it didn’t affect us so much that way. There were some models that were uncomfortable shooting, so I didn’t shoot as much. But I have such a backlog of photography from years ago, that it didn’t really affect me. I probably shot once or twice a month during the pandemic. 

Samir Husni: You’ve also created a limited edition print book of your photography. How did you decide on the pictures for the book?

Scott Santos: I started with the models that I had a relationship with as far as liking them as people. I’ve been shooting for the magazine for about 17 years, because I started shooting before we started printing, so I just wanted to show the diversity in my work. My work has a look, but I also wanted it to show that I do have quite a diverse style. I have studio stuff with flash and then I’ve got outdoor stuff that’s really softer and more artsy. So I wanted it to be diverse. 

Then just thinking about the ladies who had touched me in some way. They moved me in my heart and soul.

Samir Husni:  What makes you tick and click and motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Scott Santos: I love getting out of bed and doing the magazine. I’m so lucky to be a photographer and to do what I’m doing. I can work for myself and it’s wonderful. I get out of bed every day, go for  a nice four or five mile walk. My wife and I have four beautiful children and so it’s easy to get out of bed. I’m very blessed to be doing what I’m doing. 

Samir Husni: How do you unwind in the evening after a long day at work?

Scott Santos: My wife and I will maybe put on a TV show or a movie and have a drink. And then just wind down, because it’s easy. This is not stressful; what we do is not stressful. I’m blessed. 

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Scott Santos: Nothing much, I sleep pretty good. (Laughs) 

Samir Husni: Thank you.