Growing a Private Garden

About a year ago I started Mundo Mendo, a members-supported website I fully own and control. It's a place where I share my comics, essays and art with a small group who get exclusive access for a small fee*.

Own your channels

There are enough cases of companies (Instagram, WeTransfer, Behance, Adobe Stock etc) offering users space to showcase/upload work and they all end up profiteering from it, on one way or another. While many creators choose to build their audience on someone else’s turf, it was important for me to have full control of who is to gain from where I publish my work .

I use Ghost for the CMS because it works and it’s a non-profit foundation. Open source, independent, and funded 100% by its users. No investors. No bullshit. It’s pretty simple to set up and to maintain, has plenty of themes to fit everyone’s needs and is flexible in terms of layout and typography.
The system hosts the pages, takes care of the payments (via Stripe) and keeps things running for a small fee. If I can avoid it, I try not to do anything for free, as I know that when you don't pay the product is you.

Taking the Rougher Road

Specific examples of individual illustrators or comic artists who have built and maintain their own membership websites are extremely rare. In fact, I searched and haven’t been able to find any.

Because I defend creators on their right to exist and eat, it’s my hope to inspire others to do something similar and bypass the current Silicon Valley offering. It’s not only important for creators to control their art, but also controlling the context where it’s seen and experienced. Anno 2025 we have the tools to do this easily; not as easy as opening a Patreon, but our freedom is well worth the effort.

The Work you Cannot Not Do

My friend Craig Mod has been running his Special Projects membership program for more than 6 years. Following his generous advice and expertise, I decided to do something similar and try to learn as I go.

As Craig well points out:

A membership program should be seen as an accelerant for work you must do. That is, it should be born from the desire for creative autonomy and for an untethered opportunity to explore with great curiosity and rigor, topics that may or may not be ‘commercially’ friendly.

This is the work you do when there’s no payment, no client, no earthly reason to do it, yet, you know you should be doing it. For your sanity, for the world. Lest your mind will explode.

The Reasons to Not Start a Membership Program

You definitely should not start a membership program for the money, whether you end up making a lot or a little is totally inconsequential. The fact that members are waiting for your stories is the only motivator to sit down and make. And when you make -without clients, without briefing, free and carelessly– inevitably the body of work will grow. Work that wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t had the program in the first place.

All creatives need to make personal projects and having your own channel to share them is crucial to keep control and ownership over them. The membership site is your repository for those projects and who really likes your work will be happy to pay for them.

The Atlas

Being a magazine person for so many years has marked me; I am used and enjoy making sections and labeling articles. Every story fits under one of those sections and Mundo Mendo has a map, an Atlas where they are all neatly laid out.

The labels also help me come up with new stories that aren’t too disconnected from what I did before. New labels are added when needed. Having an index of everything also helps have an overview of the production.

Make Something with Weight

{Title and principle borrowed from this brilliant essay by Anu Atluru}

Many talented comic book creators struggle to make a living from their work alone, relying on side income from print sales, editorial illustration, or teaching to survive financially.

For me, Mundo Mendo makes comic-making work: the members help me sustain it, the amount of stories grow and eventually they will be published in paper volumes: real books.

Right now I am preparing Volume ONE (±250 pages) of Mundo Mendo Printed Version, which I will self publish and sell on my own websites. The idea is to keep making volumes until I am dead or sick of this, build a growing collection as I go. This way, the reader will be able to read the whole site on a screen and on paper too.

Naturally, I intend to keep self publishing the volumes. maybe leaving the translated versions to others.

Year Two

The first volume being a nice way to close the first year, I see this period as my baby steps into this. I would like more people to join so I could feel even more of this partly self-imposed pressure to make. It’s the fuel that keeps me going and it’s mostly a good feeling. Definitely, it’s all a lot of work, at times it can be a pain but I know the satisfaction comes when seeing all the stories together.

The worst case scenario is that when I die my children will just inherit from me many copies of unsold Mundo Mendo volumes.
Sorry, kids. I still love you.

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It's important to know that I grant one-year access for free to students and the unemployed. Please email me to request one if you want it.