Editor’s note: during October, Worcester Magazine’s Last Call profiles Creepy Creators, makers of art in many media for Halloween and beyond.

A comic book artist, illustrator, and publisher, Derek Rook treasures the spirit of indie art, including in graphic novels, literature, and more.

With collaborator Steve Van Samson, who was recently profiled in Last Call, and fiercely individualistic talents known as Roughians, Rook runs Worcester-based Rough Housing Publishing, which, as announced on the business website, provides “not-so-funny books, music, and pulp media!”

Rook and crew will make a guest appearance at the Halloween Micro Con, set for Oct. 28 at That’s Entertainment! in Worcester.

They are also believers in promotional swag, including posters, stickers and other mementos to amplify their offerings. Among their signature works are tales by Van Samson, “Mark of the Witch Wyrm” and “Black Honey,” both available in a series of specialized editions.

For Last Call’s Creepy Creator series, Rook spoke about life as an independent publishing mogul of matters monstrous and metaphysical, including struggles, triumphs, and sharing laughs and adventures with a cohort of kindred spirits. And, there can sometimes literally be a secret sauce to success, in this case, a customized hot sauce.

Please tell me what Rough House Publising offers.

So, Rough House Publishing is an online indie publisher. It is something I started back in 2011. I’m a graphic artist and comic book artist … this is a way for me to publish my own imprint, and to publish my own stuff … it’s a mixture of create-your-own works, like novels and comic books … we have done original novels. So far, we’ve done two. We are very genre-based. I wouldn’t call us 100% horror, but we’re at least 95%. We do anthologies, longform omnibuses. We did one giant novel, and that was a dark fantasy book … we operate like some of those smaller, indie Blu-Ray movie (distributors.) We do the same thing, only with books.

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Tell me the how, when and why of Rough House Publishing’s origin story.

Like I mentioned, I am a comic book artist. I have been in the business for over 20 years. I took a break for while. I was doing something else, entirely out of art, when I got back into it. The market is very fickle. It’s filled with indie publishers. Their intentions might be great, but sometimes projects fall through, and artists are somewhat on the short end of these forced concessions. I wanted to make an imprint where I could publish my own stuff, and keep all my projects under one roof, so to speak. Then, during the pandemic, when everything had shut down, we weren’t even sure where we were going to go from there. That is where “Mark of the Witch Wyrm” came from. Steve was sitting on it, because he didn’t know if it was a Rough House project. Quite frankly, up to that point, we were an exploitation horror comic, and not sure if the audience would tolerate it. But the world was coming apart at the seams. We said, “We could all die tomorrow of COVID, so the hell with it.”

Are you a cooperative publishing venture?

When I set out to find a partner, Rough House Publishing was always predominantly myself … a few years ago, I went looking for a partner, someone on the same par as me. Steve is a graphic designer, as well as being an author and writer. I am as well. So, we were able to duplicate efforts. We are more of self-publishers. As partners, we publish each other’s stuff. The only time we go out into the universe to grab people at this point, is when we want to do an anthology of artists, and we want each artist to take a different story. But we don’t accept submissions for scripts and other things. At this point, we are more interested in kind of raising our own flags … we hope we inspire authors and artists to do things on their own, as well.

What are the challenges you face?

I think earlier on in our career ,we were young and ready to take on the world … but you learn really quickly that there are only very few people in the business who share that level of commitment, and dexterity needed in the business. It’s a difficult endeavor to sustain yourself. It’s fun to go to a con, and meet people, and show your work … but a lot of the time, they don’t realize the 15 months of hard work and money that went into that project.

Is this your fulltime endeavor, or do you have other irons in the fire?

It’s my fulltime endeavor, as far as we don’t take breaks. Right now, we are working on two to three different projects. With our last book, “Black Honey,” the premium editions were sold with a black honey hot sauce, which is something brand-new for us. We ran into a hot sauce company called Silk City. They design all different flavors of hot sauce, and we are both connoisseurs of hot sauce … now, we are coming out with a Rough House hot sauce line next year. People wanted the hot sauce, even if they didn’t like hot sauce. People wanted the bottle, just to have it. I think half the people didn’t know it was an actual condiment you could have to eat. People thought it was a jar of something called black honey. So, I’m really hoping that all the people who purchase it could actually try it.

So, put it on their food, their cereal or whatever?

If you have met some of our fans, there are people who would have it put it on our cereal, without a doubt.

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Is there anything from your experience that you care to pass on?

Rough House Publishing is not my first publishing company. I actually had one in the early 2000s as well. That is where I cut my teeth. That is where I learned the hard way, when nothing was free. The last 10 or 12 years, 15 years maybe, have been a complete renaissance from the way things used to be. Back in the day, if you wanted to publish a comic book, you had to go outside the U.S. They made you print a minimum or 3,000 to 5,000 copies up front. That was depending on the project, and that was a $10,000 or $20,00 affair. I don’t know too many artists in any creative format that have $20,000 around. If by the off chance you did, you still had to sell those books. If you didn’t, or if they sold slowly, you could wash your dishes with is, or paper the house with it. That was par for the course in those days. You had to advertise in a magazine. A full-page color ad could be $2,000, and if they were solicited through magazines in comic book stores, you’d pay $5,000 a month to advertise, and that did not guarantee sales. These days, we use social media, which is obviously free, and has multiple platforms to do that. We have used it for past projects, and the popularity of our past projects propels us forward, and we advertise to our followers, and we advertise to our niche audience, the convention circuit. That includes moviemakers and publishers. We usually do a pre-order. We always have to put a few thousand dollars of our own money. We like to give people more than 100% of the money that they spent. We give the old-school experience, when you were excited to purchase, excited to receive it in the mail.

Is it hard to maintain the work-life balance?

Interestingly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever been that question before. The answer is, there is very little work-life balance. Yes, it is all-encompassing. Yes, it is a 24-hour thing … when we say we are a punk-rock outfit, a DIY outfit, we mean that. It’s largely just (Steve) and I, and that is why I took on a partner to begin with. It’s still months and months of putting things together. We do have a life outside of it, families and things, but a large portion of it is just dedicated to it by default. We can’t do it half-assed, so to speak. That is why we keep it in-house, because not many people have that stamina, to make those things come to life.  

To learn more, visit roughhousepublishing.com.