Mike Perkins
Mike Perkins
Publisher at INVADER
Mike is the main point of contact for all creative teams and the editor-in-chief of INVADER. He is the creator of Beware... and a contributor to the NYT best-selling series FUBAR. He chooses and oversees all INVADER projects from beginning to end, from submission to publishing to licensing, and handles the social media presence. Michael is also an Emmy award-winning writer/producer, working as a scriptwriter/creative director and story producer for production companies and clients around the world. As an automotive journalist of more than 20 years experience, he was instrumental in building the online presence of CarGurus - writing, producing, directing and presenting more than 100 video reviews for the outfit as they established their presence on YouTube, and currently writes for Donut Media's YouTube channel, as well as their automotive history podcast, Past Gas.
Photo from Mike Perkins
“I didn't study [art] in school. I mean, in high school I took art classes. Not just the base requirements. I kept going with it through a lot of ceramics in high school. In college I did a little bit of, but that was not my degree or anything. But, I don't know, we were just kind of a little bit of a creative family. My mom, even though she became a nurse, had started out as an artist. And my brother is an artist. And so we were always just doing creative things together. You know, writing and drawing comic books, even as young kids.”
“I fell in love with journalism when I started reading about the new wave, the modern. And when I say modern, I mean back in the 60s and 70s. I realized that that was going to be a really powerful and important tool. Moving forward, the journalism world completely upended while I was in college, and that was the massacre of so many publications. But I still thought it was an important thing that you actually had people going out and investigating the truth, not just everyone's opinion. I don't know if I was right in getting a journalism degree, but I was definitely right in that thought and have been proven so in the last 25 years.”
Photo from Mike Perkins
“So many people think about art as this personal journey and something that is so intimate and is just something that you're working through yourself, but I really feel as though collaboration leads you down paths you never would have expected or never even been thinking about. You're going to find things that you weren't even looking for. It's like that saying, ‘I knew not how empty my cup was until it was filled.’ You can sit there and do art by yourself forever, and that's great, but when you're working with somebody else, you're going to be forced to go down roads that you never would have otherwise.”
“I don't usually make art for me. I really enjoy making art for other people. So, something like woodworking, you're talking about just so many hours and so much effort and so much arthritis because I do it all with hand tools. I can't stand power tools. They're so loud that it takes away all of the meditative, relaxing part of doing it. So, I'm okay with something taking longer, but you've got something that's taking hundreds of hours to create. That has to be done for somebody I love.”
“It's so easy to see all of the horrible things that happen in the world and want to fix that, want to do something to change that and feel completely impotent. And it's easy to forget that you can do a lot to just make your friends or your neighbors better and that counts too.”
Invader Comics t shirt
Photo from Mike Perkins
“You know when you love [a comic book]. You know when you pick up a book and you just [think], oh, this was written for me. Or when you hear a song and you're like, oh my God, they wrote this for me. They didn't, but they did. I want people to be able to trust us as a curated collection of books, to know, if you liked this book of ours, the next book you grab is going to be of equal quality. It may not be your thing, but it's going to be of equal quality. You can trust us that no matter what book of ours you grab, it's going to be good.”
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