ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It’s been quite a while since comic books were considered to be just for kids. Once a medium associated exclusively with children—and one whose harmful effects on them were often hotly debated—comics are now the foundation of a multibillion-dollar, multigenerational pop-culture industry. They’re the basis of some of the most lucrative Hollywood films ever produced, and the revenue generated by merchandise alone is staggering.
For St. Petersburg’s Matthew Sardo, however, it’s still the comics themselves that matter most.
“I’ve been into comics since I was, I don’t know, four or five,” Sardo says while sipping a socially distant beer outside an EDGE District restaurant. “I’m 44, so the Saturday morning cartoons were huge, Spider-Man and Godzilla and all that good stuff. So comics were always there, a part of my life.”
He even owned his own comics shop in Chicago, before relocating to St. Pete in 2012 and putting his journalism degree to work at AM radio station Sports Talk Florida. After a few years of that, though, he lost his taste for working for someone else, as well as the uncertainty of keeping a job in the changing climates of both news and radio.
He launched the culture site Monkeys Fighting Robots with a partner in 2015.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I'm gonna put all my eggs in one basket, and focus on things that I like to cover,’ which is pop culture and comics,” he says. “I built a podcast studio in my office and interviewed tons of people [for the website]. It was going well.”
Not well enough to suit his partner, apparently; when the site didn’t immediately skyrocket to millions of hits and direct competition against the more well-established sites in its category, a bit of a struggle ensued. When the dust settled, Sardo retained the brand and, rather than seeing the debacle as a failure, turned it into an opportunity to return to his first love.
“I think in 2017 or 2018 I put the mandate down that we’re only going to focus on comic books because there aren’t a lot of comic book-centric websites out there,” he says.
There are definitely comic book-centric websites out there, but many of them focus on the more superficial cultural aspects of the industry or serve as nostalgic trips into past generations or collectible obscura. Monkeys Fighting Robots is—along with the ubiquitous reviews, of course—a love letter to the art itself, an editorial submersion into the creation and evolution of the works.
“Most comic book websites start talking about film and TV and all of a sudden there's offshoots and there's less conversation about, like, the artwork or influences or the color palette used or just the lettering,” says Sardo. “All that stuff is really interesting and you can do a deep dive into it, and there's not a lot of websites out there that actually talk about it. So that's what I wanted to do.”
And, naturally, “there was always this thing in the back of my head about doing a comic book.”
A successful Kickstarter campaign yielded the eponymous physical comic in 2018, with its clever, edgy, and epic military/sci-fi storyline of, well, monkeys fighting robots. Sardo brought the book to one convention, and demand grew to the point that, at the next convention, fans were already clamoring for the second issue. Sardo, who at this point was familiar with the work and timelines involved in publishing a book, felt a bit under the gun. It was another St. Petersburg resident with experience in the field, artist, and writer Jamie Jones, who helped usher in the next phase.
“We said, ‘why don’t we make a weekly comic strip?’” remembers Sardo. “You can sell the first issue to somebody and then when they ask what else do you have, they can go to our website where we publish a new page every week. That was our fix for the conundrum of not having enough content.”
With multiple “issues” of the slightly differently-titled “Tales of Monkeys Fighting Robots” available online, MFR was able to continue its momentum, and plan for the future.
“I had this whole big idea for 2020, of touring comic book stores and different conventions,” Sardo says. “I made a whole road trip schedule of all these different places.”
And then COVID hit.
“I was super depressed,” he says. “I'm a huge sports fan, sports got canceled. I used to review movies, movies got canceled. And comic books got canceled! They stopped publishing comic books, and we review comic books on a weekly basis, so there's two months where nothing happened."
“I had to do something, we’ve got to keep this moving and we’ve got to figure out some silly positive way of putting something back into the universe because there's so much negative going out, and I was like, ‘why don't we publish a magazine?’”
The MFR team took to social media, hitting up their contacts in the independent comics network, and launched another Kickstarter campaign. The support was there, and the result is a thoughtfully and beautifully crafted publication that delivers both the editorial for which the website is known and new stories for fans who’d rather read comics than read about them.
“I said I was going to do a magazine that was half articles and half comics and asked who’d like to be in on it, and everybody raised their hand,” says Sardo.
Published this past July, the magazine went from crowdfunding to publishing in under two months—a feat those who habitually contribute to Kickstarter only to receive the product eight months later or not at all will likely find improbable, to say the least. It’s also not a feat Sardo will attempt again. On the strength of the first issue, a funding campaign for a second is already underway, but the magazine won’t be published until January; MFR is looking to settle into a six-month cycle of publication.
Sardo wants to expand beyond publishing, both on the web and in print. Plans for a 2021 independent convention were scrapped due to the coronavirus, but he’s keeping a date reserved for 2022. Still, the main thing for him remains connecting with other people who realize that, beyond the movies and merchandise, comic books themselves are still alive, well, and vibrant.
“There’s a comic store in Canada that has copies of this magazine,” he says. “There’s a comic store in New Jersey that has copies. It’s all over the map… and, you know, seeing the pictures sent in from Kickstarter contributors holding it and saying, ‘hey, I got your book,’—it’s pretty awesome.”