Comics UK

Covered on down the tube, looks very interesting and could well be the future of comics..anyone seen a copy yet?


http://www.dinkybox.co.uk/acatalog/books_magazines.html

The product looks great. Wish they'd put the call out about distribution though. At the moment, it seems you can only buy from their website, making the cost of an issue approaching £7 with p&p.

chrissmillie wrote:The product looks great. Wish they'd put the call out about distribution though. At the moment, it seems you can only buy from their website, making the cost of an issue approaching £7 with p&p.

Distribution isn't thateasy-or cheap-to get, unfortunately...

BeanoKev70 wrote:Covered on down the tube, looks very interesting and could well be the future of comics..anyone seen a copy yet?


http://www.dinkybox.co.uk/acatalog/books_magazines.html

Future of comics? Not to slight Smart Bomb (for it indeed a smart looking comic) but there are numerous small press/indie comics out there.

Smart Bomb No.1 has been out since October. Picked one up from the Birmingham Comic Show. (See what you miss if you don't attend conventions folks?) I've been trying to find the time to review / preview it on my blog. Will do so next week.

If you think £2.50 is high for postage you might wish to order several comics from Indy Planet (they print Smart Bomb) which would balance the costs out a bit, even though they'd be coming from the USA:

http://www.indyplanet.com/store/

I've used them several times. They print to order and ship pretty quickly.

Lew

I use indyplanet myself. But it's still a lot of money. It looked to have something of the zeitgeist. Being able to bulk print 1000 or over would half the cost with no postage if they could distribute it. Yeah, it's tough to distribute (believe me, I know) but if you're not cheap, then it's going to be a struggle to sell in quantity without one.

chrissmillie wrote:I use indyplanet myself. But it's still a lot of money. It looked to have something of the zeitgeist. Being able to bulk print 1000 or over would half the cost with no postage if they could distribute it. Yeah, it's tough to distribute (believe me, I know) but if you're not cheap, then it's going to be a struggle to sell in quantity without one.

As these indie comics are mainly seen by the fan audience surely it's time for that audience to understand that these are the sort of realistic prices one has to pay for a comic now? Smart Bomb is £4 for 44 full colour pages. That's a good price for what essentially is a rare limited edition comic, when you compare it to a £3 High Street comic with less originated material and with a far higher print run.

If the audience is waiting for a cheap new comic to come along they're going to be bitterly disappointed. There are only two professional comics that are under £2 now (Beano and 2000AD, and the latter goes up to £2 next week). Independent comics that try to compete with that format are naturally going to cost more. I know fans can't afford to buy everything, but if they're serious about supporting the industry they have to get used to a comic or two not leaving them much change out of a fiver.

Lew

And when The Beano has one of those bumper gift issues, even that isn't under £2 now.

But the Beano isn't £7.

I think, like Kev, that the comic does look good. One that could be ideal for the mass-market, rather than comic fans. I just wish they could have presented this to a few people first to see if there's a way in. It's a back-handed compliment.

BTW, I have tried to get Starscape presents DEAD news-stand distributed, so I do know how hard something like that is. But maybe, taking advice from John Freeman, Dez etc, they could have been persuaded to put together a media pack, submit it to Game etc, find a break even point for mass production, submit to advertisers etc etc. Most indie comics couldn't do that but this one looks to have real potential.

chrissmillie wrote: But maybe, taking advice from John Freeman, Dez etc, they could have been persuaded to put together a media pack, submit it to Game etc, find a break even point for mass production, submit to advertisers etc etc. Most indie comics couldn't do that but this one looks to have real potential.

They could still do that if they wished, but perhaps Wil Overton wanted to produce a comic the way he wanted it first, without any meddling from retail middlemen? Bear in mind it's a spoof, and not actually based on any real video games.

Lew

It's perfectly possible for small home-made comics to be sold for "realistic" prices. Just so long as you're prepared to make a massive loss!

It was only student loan anyway, that's not real money!

Hi all
Hope you don't mind me popping up and nattering a bit about my little comics project. It was great to get a little mention on John's site and the kind words here so I thought I'd just explain a little about the price/why it is what it is etc.

Firstly, please don't imagine that Smart Bomb is anything more than a UK small press comic. It may sound posh that distribution is through http://www.dinkybox.co.uk but that's only because dinkybox is owned and run by just my wife and myself. I also work full-time and Smart Bomb was just a nice thing for some friends and I to do as a little free-time project last year. The £4 price was arrived at simply because when everything was toted up that's roughly what it cost me to get it done (100 copies, printed, shipped from the US, with the free cards, a bag to put it in and some stickers done). While it's true that I could post it out to people for less than £2.50 that's got more to do with dinkybox sending things out by recorded delivery in card envelopes (a decision we made after running the shop for five years with so many things not being delivered/damaged in the post etc). I’d love to sell it for 80p and a first class stamp but a small run and digital print on demand makes that impossible (no economies of scale there). That’s why I also made it free to read online.
I had some nice mails after the Birmingham show offering to stock some copies in shops and for distribution but the way its produced at the moment just doesn’t allow me any margin to do anything like that on a bigger scale than just giving 5/10 copies to a shop and not worrying if they sell or not.

I certainly don’t think that SB is the future of anything. Maybe because it’s all-ages (in so much as there’s no swearing or nastiness) and is hung around a video games theme it might be thought of as a good angle to aim at kids but as Lew said (nice to meet you at BICS by the way) at its heart it’s just a parody as none of the games mentioned are real. I would imagine a proper newsstand games/comic mix would need real reviews of real games and strips based around existing characters.

I’m really happy with how #1 turned out. We’ve only got 1 or 2 copies left out of our 100 so it paid for itself, no-one is out of pocket and we had fun doing it (well, we’re doing an #2 so I hope the others had fun doing it!).

If anyone has any ideas on places to send it to for review or comments on how it could be better etc. I’d love to hear them.
And Chris – If you’d like a copy, send me an address and I’ll pop one in the post to you
Sorry for waffle.

SMART BOMB..... great title for a comic, Wil.