My Fantagraphic Books experience in full! (For Kelvin lol)

This is such a 'fascinating' story, that I thought i'd tell it all in one go, rather than it be in bits and pieces all over my blog - for my tale is now over.
I ordered 6 Love and Rockets comics off Fantagraphic Books back on 3rd October, to complete my collection. All good. Nice prices. Customer Services were a bit odd and stand-offish with a query I had, but never mind...
Then I got a round-robin email off them saying any comics ordered between the 8th and 20th of October would be delayed by a couple of weeks because of warehouse restructuring.
I thought well I'm fine then... But nothing came by the end of Oct so I contacted them and of course, they said my package was affected but it went out last week, so I should just keep an eye on the post.
Mid-November, nothing, emailed them again, response: we sent it last week, please keep an eye on the post. I emailed them to say 'so when did it go out then?' they said keep an eye on the post.
Mid-December comes and still nothing. My mates say I should give up on the package. I'm a bit upset, as it's pretty much ruined my reading experience.
Then i happen to be in a London comic shop, and they've got a load of Love and Rockets back issues just in - including several of the ones I ordered from FB. After a bit of oohing and ahing (during which a couple of issues got bought already) I decided to buy the issues I had ordered - a bird in the hand... Which just left me with 3 missing issues, so if the package did turn up, it wouldn't be a complete waste of time.
Three days later, a package turns up from Fantagraphics. Get this. It contains the three issues I bought at the comic shop but nothing else. They had sold out of the others. You'd think they could effing tell me by email or soemthing? So I was still missing three issues.
Plus I had to chase FB for a refund on the missing comics.
So anyway, I looked online for my missing issues, but could only see them in America. Trying to figure out what is in each L&R trade is very difficult, but i did it in the end, and bought the trades which had my missing issues (they contained new material too, so it wasn't a complete waste of money).
All in all, I kind of regretted my initial impulse online purchase buy (I didn't even consider shopping in town for them!) but I'm glad I got to read them, as it is a beyond-excellent series... But jeez, Fantagraphics, sort yourselves out.

Reviews!

I was pretty stunned to see this review of Spandex 3 on the Forbidden Planet International website today:
http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2011/a-technicolour-ray-of-light-in-the-grey-spandex-issue-3/
Wowsers.
I love the FPI Blog, it really fills a hole that Comics International and other UK comics mags left. Check it out!

Website Success...?

I had an email from the 'wordpress' people who host my Spandex website, and they had some interesting and somewhat strange stats for me.
First up, they said that the Spandex Comic website had 42,000 visitors in 2010! But then they said the maximum number of visitors I had in one day was 2. So how does that work out??
And then they said that the most frequent searches done which led to my site were 'Pussy', 'Spandex Pussy' and 'Pussy in Spandex'
:-o

Lovely Spandex 3 review here

I almost completely missed this very cool review of Spandex 3 here, by Sir Rol Hirst, creator of Pjang and many other excellent comics: http://rolhirst.co.uk/
Rol calls issue 3, "an emotional action horror rollercoaster that deals quite wonderfully with the thorny subject of depression, and how we handle it" The review is halfway down here:
http://rolhirst.blogspot.com/2010/11/read-these-comics-now.html
My fave review so far, thanks Rol!

Sp-hand-ex 3 review

There's a lovely review of Spandex 3 here, by Kelvin Green.
http://www.comicsbulletin.com/reviews/12914878177694.htm
Kelvin has been reviewing my comics since the O Men days, and I always look forward to hearing what he says about them. I think we are on a similar wavelength, so if he 'gets it', I know I've done something right. I think Kelvin was the guy who gave me the famous 10 out of 10 for O Men 24 in Comics International, which Dez Skinn reduced to a 9.
Kelvin doesn't mince his words though, and he will criticise things where criticism is due. His latest one points out problems with my hand-drawing and perspective.
I've always known these things are problems for me (and feet!) and I hope I've improved a bit over the years, but also, for me, my 'policy' is that the story is the most important thing, and the drawing has a style, and I hope the readers just 'goes with the flow'.
But one thing that the review has made me do is actually make a conscious decision to study drawing hands (and feet!) because, for some reason, it's something I've never done - so maybe it's time to sort out where I'm going wrong.
(Incidentally, I am seethingly jealous of the way Jaime Hernandez draws hands. How does he do it?? Is there nothing the guy can't draw??)

Caped Crusaid

There's a really cool exhibition on at the moment in Orbital Comics - Caped Crusaid, which is a bunch of postcards drawn by various comic artists and celebrities. It's highly recommended and you can check out the cards here:
http://shop.ebay.co.uk/capedcrusaid/m.html
You can bid to own them!
I contributed two, although no one ever bids on mine :-(
You can see mine above!

No Love and Rockets

All I'm reading at the moment is Love and Rockets! My concentration span at the moment, doesn't seem to allow me to read novels (I've got a lot on my mind!), so I'm now just reading graphic novels - and that includes the entire run of Love and Rockets. I'm kind of reading them in a funny order - I'm reading the original Volume One books (the bigger versions), plus the various Volume Two series simultaneously (mainly because the start of the Vol 1 stories are quite hard-going in places).
However, there is a snag. I don't have all the Volume 2 stuff, and I got excited when I saw you could order them direct from the publishers, Fantagraphics. I didn't even think of just heading into town to see if Gosh/Orbital had them, I just ordered them immediately (they were doing a good deal). That was 3 October... It should have taken two to three weeks... I'm still waiting!
The thing is, I ordered them, and then a week later I got a round-robin email from them saying any comics ordered between 8 October and 20 October would be delayed because of stock management. But it's okay, cos I ordered the comics before then? No, of course not, as they explained to me when I double checked a couple of weeks later...
So then I checked mid-November to see when they were sent out - vague response - 'it went out last week'.
Checked again start of December - 'it went out last week'! So which week did it go out then??
So I'm basically regretting ordering them and I think their customer service sucks somewhat - not very helpful, slow and slightly sarky too.
And the kicker is, I was in Orbital on Saturday and saw they had a complete run of Love and Rockets Volume 2 - including the ones I'm missing. Well fuck it, I want to read it, not having them is spoiling my experience, so I bought them lol (and I managed to buy one I'd alrady got d'oh). (I was very excited that Orbital had Whoa Nellie 2, which is an issue that even Fantagraphics didn't have)
So now I'm just missing issue 1 and the final 2 issues of Luba's Comics and Stories - so who knows, maybe the package will turn up this year so I can read them??
And the final kicker is, I was reading Love and Rockets volume 2, issue 13, and there's a big printing error - 3 4-page sections are repeated, so I think I'm missing bits of the story. Darn.
Mind you, my Book Two of volume 1 has about 20 pages missing - I only discovered that when re-reading it! No wonder it never made sense...

(The funny thing is, some comic fans might actually find this interesting - wheraes I probably lost the non-comic fans at 'hello'.)