Monday, June 11, 2012

What I have been up to…

Yet again I have been neglecting my poor Blog – I spend most of my time on the Facebook Spandex Comic page, so join me there! But here is a quick round-up of stuff!

The Spandex book was released on 24 May, and I launched it at Kapow, which was really cool – sales were slow but steady, and I had the support of my friends and some Titan Books people, so it was great fun! Plus Jonathan Ross visited my table and it turns out he is a big fan of the comic!
Then I did a signing at Forbidden Planet, which I was nervous about, but it was fun! It mostly consisted of my friends turning up – and I told them they didn’t need to buy the book, but they did anyway. We had drinks after, which were great fun.

The reviews have been very positive – and it’s weird, because I have already had the issues reviewed before, so I didn’t consider it was going to happen again. And now I’m getting a lot of American reviews and they are really positive and excited! My favourite overall reviews were from a journalist who writes for Q – he wrote a really in-depth analysis – and I the Ain’t It Cool News review was amazing.

I did get kind of worried about all the gay hoo-hah – there is so much gay comics stuff in the press, and I worried that people might just get bored of it all – and Spandex – but I think Spandex has strengths beyond being a gimmick.

But all in all, it’s very cool to see my own book in comic and book shops!!!

So anyway, I am also working on Issue 7 of Spandex. It’s going slowly but surely – I am aiming to get it out for Thought Bubble, which should be do-able.

I’ve also been working hard on The O Men – scanning and tidying up pages. Book one was a bit stressful, so I want to pace this out a lot more, so it’s less of a nightmare! Book two should be out for Thought Bubble, and after that, I’ll release the books maybe just once a year.

Good digital deal!

Well after my post below, I actually found a good digital deal! I bought the new Walking dead trade digitally, and it contains all the original covers and letters pages, plus some ads – you don’t get any of those in the actual book! So that’s pretty cool.

Selling original art

I have started selling original art at conventions – pages from issues and art used for pin-ups and stuff. It’s hard though – I am a bit of a hoarder, so it’s difficult to ‘let them go’… But there’s no point really keeping them.

One thing I have noticed is that whereas all the O Men art is on one page and identical to the printed page, when it comes to Spandex, very few ‘final’ pages actually exist. I’m now in the Photoshop age, where a final page comes from sketches across four or five different places.

It’s also weird thinking how much to charge for it. A lot of the comic pages, I sell for between a fiver and £10. I sold the original art to Spandex 2 for £30. Too much, too little? To be honest, I think I am charging what I feel it’s worth.