We recently connected with Joeming Dunn and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Joeming, thanks for joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

Looking over all the possible discussions I felt this was the one that could be the most impactful. My parents both immigrated to the United States from Taiwan so they both had a unique perspective about both cultures and trying their best to integrate both me and my brother to the best of both worlds. So here are some of their things that impacted my life. 1) Cultures….they never said one culture was better than the other, Embrace them all and hope you find the good in both.
2) Priorities….they always taught me that what your prioritize is important, however they also emphasized that not everyone has the same priorities and that is why many disagreements occur and that may measure you as a person. If you can come together and try to compromise on the different priorities that you have. I remember my father said…sometimes the best contract between people are the ones where nobody is happpy. It means that each got something and each gave up something. They always hoped we could prioritize the right things to make our society better.
3) Respect…I was always told about the golden rule from the both of them. No matter the circumstance you have to treat people with respect and treat people like you want to be treated. There are circumstances where you want to get angry but you should always treat them with respect and put yourself in their shoes.
4) Fear and hate…my mother especially is one of the most bravest persons on Earth. She does not let anything bother her and she does not live with any fear or hate. I believe one of the main reasons is that she does has not use technology. She still has not ever used a computer and has never used an ATM in her life. Until recently she has not owned a cell phone and the one she has she uses to mostly watch Chinese Soap Operas. She avoids the news like the plague. But she does not fear or hate dictate her life. She does express concern when things occur but it does not make her respond with fear or hate.
5) Faith…they taught me to not question people’s faith. People come from different aspects of life and believe many different things and follow many different tenants. My job is not to question them…accept them all. Do not judge people especially based on what they believe. You may not agree with their faith but it is not our job to question them. And you hope that they will not use their faith to disrepect or instill hate and fear (see #2…3 and 4)

Joeming, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Wow…this is a loaded question because of the multitude of different things I have been involved with.

1) Doctor…I am a medical doctor but mostly due alternative care like acupuncture. My father was a professor at the medical school here in San Antonio and while both of my parents were open to any profession both coming from an asian culture they always “encouraged” a field of medicine. I was not keen on that as a high schooler as I was mostly interested in comic books, sci-fi movies, and role playing games like Dungeon’s and Dragons. In high school I was not the best student for the first year and half but came to the realization that I was not going to be in school forever and I better get my act together. When I graduated I eventurally decided to attend Austin College in Sherman, Texas mostly because of their teacher program but they also had a robust pre-med program. Also they offered me the best scholarship of all the schools I applied to. At the beginning I thought teacher was my pathway but one month of student teaching changed my mind, at the time I was not a very patient person and dealing with some of the students got me upset. My intention was to be a science and math teacher so at the time I had the prerequisites for applying to medical school which my mentor in college encouraged as a different path. I took the MCAT and did fairl well and was accepted to the University of Texas at Galveston. When I completed my degree I was a bit disenchanted with the medical profession. I will not go into the details but some of the directions I thought medicine was going disturbed me (and still do) again I was thinking about the priorities in our society. I did take some time off from medicine after completing my internship and residency (see comic publishing next) but eventually returned taking over the acupuncture medical practice my father had established for many years. I have been practicing for 30 years and I use the many tenants my parents taught me as my guide in my practice.
2) Comic Book Publishing…I grew up reading comics…as being the kid of foreign parents English was not our first language and reading comic books was one the easiest things to do to get me excited about reading. The added plus was to be immeresed in the world they created. As me and my brother read more and more we became infatuated with emulating the stories and art they provided. My brother was especially good at the artistic part of comics and almost everyone could see the immense talent he had. I tried my hand at art but never could get over the artisitc quality my brother had. Eventually I went to college and so did my brother but the art bug never left him and he took his hand in trying to work at the big comic publishing houses…which he failed. Not being deterred he decided to create his own publishing company…Antarctic Press…with the goal of creating a company that would be open to all comic creators to showcase their work and in addition they would own their work. At the time (and still to some extent, but it is much better) if you worked for a comic publishing company, your ideas would be owned by the company. His company would let creators be creators. At the beginning he had some success but bookkeeping was not one of my brothers strengths and he had some trouble with the bookkeeping. Well I have always been good with numbers and he asked me to help which I did. So he became the art part of the company and I became the money part of the company and we thrived together. When I finished my medical training I dived head first in the company and together we grew it becoming a top ten comic publishing company in the mid nineties. But as time went by things change, markets change and the most important thing is that because we were a creator driven company…we did not have the consistantcy of having the core titles other companies have. In other words, a company like Marvel can always depend on Spiderman being there for them to sell. Most independent companies depended on their one big hit or on licenseing (which we could afford some but not the most popular) to keep them in business. And comics being periodicals that come out on a weekly basis we could not keep up and due to changing market dynamics as our titles came and went we could not sustain. Now we have not gone out of business, we did change and adapt to the everchanging market, taking advantage of the internet, doing more conventions to sell and having a passionate group of people who want to do comics even if the pay and accolades are not so good. Over the years I have been good at “juggling” making sure money is allocated in the right places at the right time to make sure things keep on moving. We are closing in on our 40th year of publishing and while we have not broken any land speed records we pride ourselves of continuing to publish and getting creator owned content in the market place. We have not lost our core tenent of creator respect.

Any advice for managing a team?

I am not inventing the wheel on this question but over the years I try to do this 1) Honesty…this is a tough one because to be honest to achieve “success” in our society, especially what we consider great success where people know your name for what you do, you probably had to backstab someone or treat someone poorly. I am not perfect and I am sure there are plently of people who dislike me and my business but I try to be honest with all the people I deal with from creators to employees to vendors
2) Open minded…I am always open minded to peoples ideas and suggestions. I may not agree or implement them but you have to be open minded to ideas or going forward is difficult.
3) Communicate…Good news, bad news, indifferent news…I don’t care what you tell me but tell me…we deal with all of the news in a forthright and honest way to make sure we respond appropriately
4) Expectations…I try not to watch dog or manage people. They know their jobs and give them the freedom to thrive or fail
5) Know the rules…there are certain rules which we follow, we communicate them and explain them and hopefully people understand them so if the rules are not followed, they know the consequences.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

This has happened multiple times over the years of business…but every time we did the above and everytime we came through. We were honest with the situation, we were open minded to ideas to help get out of the situation, we communicated what need to be done…we all had certain expectations and we knew what rules we had to follow to achieve them,

Contact Info:

• Website: www.antarctic-press.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antarcticpress/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/antarcticpress/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/antarctic-press/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/APressDigital
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bendunn6716

Image Credits
Gold Digger by Fred Perry..one of the first AP books