Ryan Claytor is a busy man. The cartoonist and professor of comic art, who first came to prominence in the pinball community back in 2019 thanks to his co-authoring and illustration of the inaugural Coin-Op Carnival publication, has been involved in numerous pinball-related and non-pinball projects.
Last year he celebrated twenty years of his Elephant Eater Comics imprint with the publication of an anthology entitled, One Bite at a Time. The lavishly designed hardback book detailed many of his projects – and the processes behind them – over the past two decades.
Coin-Op Carnival was one of those projects covered, but there were also two collaborations with Mr. Jones watches, promotional material for Multimorphic, and illustration for his fellow Coin-Op Carnival author, Nick Baldridge, for his EM & Bingo Pinball Podcast, amongst others.
Now though, Ryan has decided not to wait another twenty years before spilling the beans on his various works and the processes behind them, and instead to produce a yearly review in the form of his new Annual Dispatch.
The format of Annual Dispatch couldn’t be more different to One Bite at a Time. While the latter came in, what Ryan described as a “tour de force in terms of format design”, with more than 250 oversize pages incorporating a wide range of creative story-telling devices, the new publication is produced in the more simplistic style of a tabloid newspaper.
The projects featured in this initial release include several related to pinball.
Ryan both designed the logo for the recent PAPA 22 World Pinball Championship, held at Enterrium in Schaumburg, Illinois, in memory of Lyman Sheats, and helped create a bespoke neon sign for the event promoting the Suicide Awareness campaign.
The twelve month period also covers the publication of One Bite at a Time and so looks back at the creative processes used within that book to aid the story-telling and the context of the projects within.
As with his book, Annual Dispatch is being offered through the Kickstarter platform, where a range of rewards is available to backers of the project. These include digital and physical copies, pin badges, stickers, original artwork and invitation-only discussions with Ryan about the publication as well as his wider career.
This will be Ryan’s twentieth self-published project. The content is already prepared and ready to print, so he is fully confident of his ability to successfully fulfil his backer’s chosen rewards.
To promote his new publication, Ryan is holding a series of media appearances and interviews, with Pinball News being the first stop of the tour.
So, we began by asking Ryan why he changed the format of his process narratives from a plush hardback to this simpler tabloid newspaper style.
He told us, “Like many cartoonists, newsprint holds a fascination for me. I’m sure this alure has a combined force, due both to North American comics’ origins in nineteenth century newspapers and eventually being reprinted in pamphlet form (which were also printed on newsprint). I even have a ton of comics from my youth that were still printed on old, pulpy newsprint nearly a hundred years after those Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids strips from the late 1800s, so this feels somewhat like a full-circle/right-of-passage moment.”
With tabloid-format newspapers traditionally considered to lack the gravitas of their broadsheet rivals, we wondered if Ryan considered the larger ‘broadsheet’ format for his Annual Dispatch.
He said there were two reasons why the size he chose works well for him. “I wanted a publication that was larger than my art book to give more weight and detail to the images, while at the same time balancing the price for the reader. The other happenstance of the tabloid size is that the proportion of the pages are extraordinarily close to that of my art book. All this to say, if there’s demand for me to continue this Annual Dispatch project for another decade or two, I’ll more-or-less have my pages ready to collect into another hardcover down the line.”
Although Ryan is probably best known amongst Pinball News readers for his pinball-related projects, he has created many other products unrelated to the game over the past twelve months, several of which are featured in this first Annual Dispatch.
We asked him which of his pinball projects are included in this new publication. He explained, “I was the event artist for the recent PAPA 22 World Pinball Championships event, so that will definitely be in there. I was also humbled to design a neon sign honoring the late great Lyman F. Sheats Jr, which will see a couple of spreads in the publication as well. Finally, during the campaign for One Bite at a Time, I sold a limited number of ‘in-book paintings’, several of which were pinball themed. So, there’s a fair amount of pinball content. Beyond that, there’s also some additional neon work and more gaming-related artwork I created, which I see as tangentially related to pinball.”
With so many strings to his bow, we suggested the depiction of himself as a ‘Cartoonist’ in the Annual Dispatch’s front page headline was, perhaps, a little too modest. What, we wondered, would be a better, fuller description?
He proffered, “When people ask who I am and/or what I do, my response is that I’m a Cartoonist and Professor. You’re right, my creative output spans beyond comics, but in my mind, it all comes back to comics. I equate making comics with a custom puzzle-solving experience. There are macro and micro considerations, from overall story, to breaking that down into beats, then page counts, panels per page, and even elements within each panel. With that said, each of these disparate media I work in, whether it’s a single illustration or a neon design, creating custom clamshell boxes or finishing a massive tome, they each share some DNA of that iterative working process with their own restrictions and limitations, and ultimately that custom puzzle solving experience, for which I feel comics has done a good job preparing me.”
Thanks to several high-profile business failures and extended delays in the pinball world over the past few years, there is understandable caution towards any company or individual asking customers to pre-order their products. Despite this, Ryan thinks his proven track-record of delivery and the benefits of using the Kickstarter platform to promote and market Annual Dispatch should outweigh any concerns backers might have.
He told us, “The pre-order model is SO helpful to self-publishers, like me, who operate on very thin margins and don’t often have the luxury of producing products in higher quantities to take advantage of lower unit costs. So, knowing a more precise quantity of product to produce is great. However, unlike pinball, the comics community has really embraced the crowd-funding model and developed centers of support around it. I’m really proud, not only to have earned a ‘Backer Favorite’ badge for maintaining transparency in my campaigns and fulfilling them in a timely manner, but equally as proud for earning a ‘Superbacker’ badge for supporting nearly 200 different projects. I mention that to say, I’m not alone in those rankings. Many comics creators you see on the Kickstarter platform are not simply coming to it as a place to distribute their passion projects and connect with readers, but also to lift up others doing the same.”
As a result, the actual number of copies of Annual Dispatch ultimately produced when printing begins in mid-November will greatly depend on the number of backers and their chosen reward levels.
In the meantime though, anyone wanting to get their hands on a physical pre-production copy of Annual Dispatch will be able to do so at this year’s Pinball Expo where Ryan will be both exhibiting on the show floor and moderating one of the seminars.
“You’re right”, Ryan told us, “I’m back at Expo this year and I’ll be at table 438.”
“Expo is the only public location I’ll be sharing my proof copy of the ‘Dispatch. Folks can swing by to take a look at the only copy currently in existence, and I’ll also have copies of my other books, including One Bite at a Time, the precursor to the ‘Dispatch… and potentially a new secret project to share.”
Talking about other projects, we had to ask Ryan about a second issue of the publication which first brought him to attention amongst the pinball community, Coin-Op Carnival. With he and co-author, Nick Baldridge, both involved in numerous projects, will they find time for issue #2?
Ryan has some good news on that front. “Nick and I both love Coin-Op Carnival and are so thankful it’s found a similarly interested audience. To answer your question, the plan is to work with Nick on my next big illustration project which is NOT the follow-up issue to Coin-Op Carnival, but rather an electro-mechanical scratch-build game called Robo-Frenzy. Once that’s complete, then we’ll set our sights on Coin-Op Carnival #2.”
If you can’t be there in person, follow the extensive Pinball News coverage of Pinball Expo 2025, where you will be able to watch the seminar about the new PAPA 22 World Championship, hosted by Ryan, as well as see him and the only proof copy of Annual Dispatch at his stand on the show floor.
Before that though, the Kickstarter project for Annual Dispatch goes live today. Head over to the project’s page at AnnualDispatch.com and check out the ways you can help support it.
