Sta.sh
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Total prizes reach 1000 
!!!! 
But of course there are always the rules......
Please please please fave the journal!
Make another journal about this giveaway and provide a link of that journal in the comments (this will help spread the word about this giveaway)
this journal 
Rules
Should be about School Times!
oints:
, comment and watch!
Hey!
I just found out that it will take a little longer for the comic to be available for purchase. Apparently that part of the process is partially manual and takes a bit of time. The good news is that the good folks at Comixpress actually are working on getting it in their online shop, a fact of which I was not entirely sure of until I checked today's inbox. Anyhow, as soon as it is ready, I'll post about it here!!
Thanks to everybody who is showing interest and sharing a bit of the excitement with me. I've drawn comics on any paper I could find since I was a kid, printed up tons of mini comics, done a few comixpress projects, and even been professionally published several times, but this is the very first comic ever that I really feel good about. It is the birth of something new and awesome, a level of energy and fun I am going to continue with from now until they have to grab the shaky pen from my senile and ancient hand when I am caged away in some old folks home or rotting on some algae eaten mattress in some forgotten hovel of the future. It is a new era of LIFE. Of intellicon galactonius! So I am really, really excited about the fact that the test printing stage is over and that soon it will be available for sale online.
I tried to keep the price down pretty low (two bucks American for 30 plus pages ... it's funny that I consider that cheap now!!) ... but of course the shipping fee will be an uncontrollable irritating factor which I cannot apologize enough for!!
Thanks everyone for getting into this! I hope I have good news soon!
sincerely yours,
vince "buzz" coleman
The ad that they put on the back of the comic kind of speaks to that... "Whether you're a beginning creator bringing your first book to print, a seasoned veteran in need of a specialty print run, a reader looking for great new comics, or an indie-friendly comic shop looking to stock some of the best new work around, comixpress is here to serve you!"
Notice readers are targeted third in list of four potential income sources for comixpress.
Room for improvement, definitely. But then again, ten years ago this service didn't even exist...
Kind of makes you wonder what it will be like ten years from now...
And they really are doing something awesome...
Anyhow, yeah, as far as people starting up new services... there certainly are enough people out there who really love comics and who have a detailed grasp of printing. Maybe the main problem is that most people in that position are either too busy making their own comics or are not business people by nature?
Then again, on-demand comic book printing is so brand spanking new that I suppose we just need to give it more time. How many college kids are using these systems now? How many of them are dreaming up starting up their own businesses? It's not hard. A computer savvy college cartoonist teams up with his business major friend, and gets a wealthy relative (we all have them somewhere) to invest in the printing equipment...
But one odd thing is that the people who run these services don't hire someone like you as a consultant.
Anyhow, I imagine their services will continue to get better little by little, and that new and perhaps better services will step up. We also have to explore that Amazon offshoot service I told you about a while back. I spent a loooooong time in digital file production mode, so I am going to burrow down into pen on paper mode for a good long while (as interesting as prepping files can be, nothing beats the sheer drug like high of drawing) ... I guess whenever I get ready to print another comic, I'll try out that Amazon offshoot service and see how that works. I can't wait to check it out! It's a pretty exciting option!
Right now I am just ecstatic (X-Statix?) to have my comic actually exist in the physical world and to be deep into working on free form psychedelic drawings for the next one. It's not a perfect world, but it ain't bad!!
On the topic of delivery costs, though, let me tell you that Amazon Japan is absolutely awesome when it comes to graphic novels. Amazon Japan used to not exist when I first started living here, and even after they started up, they kind of sucked for a while until they got rolling. Now I can get pretty much any graphic novel I could get at Amazon USA at pretty much the exact same price (plus or minus a little bit depending on the dollar to yen conversion rate). And a lot of the time they have sale prices, so I am actually able to buy graphic novels cheaper here than I would if i bought them in comic book stores in the US. Not that anything like that could make me choose Amazon over a comic book store if I lived in America, of course. But it is a pretty amazing deal.
The only problem is individual issues. They don't sell them. But if you are willing to deal exclusively in trade paperbacks, it's pretty sweet here now.
Comixology is filling the gap for me in terms of single issues. I can now get most of the stuff I would want to buy if I were getting single issues from a comic store in the US. Of course, it's all digital, and that takes some getting used to. Since I got an iPod Touch, though, I am enjoying the digital environment more than I did with a computer or with an iPad. For some reason I like the smaller format of an iPod when it comes to comics.
So now I can pay a couple bucks to get issues of, say, Madman or I Vampire, when that kind of thing was impossible for me before.
Things have changed a lot since I came to live in Japan! When I first got here, I had a dial up internet connection and almost no English language tv/movies/books/comics. So Amazon Japan, comixology, a home WiFi connection, and the iPod are really things to be thankful for!!
Anyhow, I will let you know about Create Space (the Amazon spin off on-demand-printing company) when I have more info.
I read stuff on my iPod touch too but I think it's wrecking my eyes so I want to get an iPad one of these days. You really like the tiny iPod Touch screen better, eh? I bet you won't when you hit my age though!
I like comixpress on the iPod because you can have individual panels fill the entire screen one panel at a time, and the iPod screen is just the right size for a panel. At first the panel to panel format freaked me out because I felt lost in a sea of panels with no full page views to get a feel for where i was on any given page, but then I figured out how to toggle it so that I see the page on entering and leaving it, so I am constantly in touch with where I am even though I am viewing a panel at a time.
I can do the same thing with the iPad, but for some reason the iPod is infinitely more enjoyable for me. Before I got one, I used to look at digital comics on the iPad, and it was so not fun that I almost gave up on being able to enjoy digital comics alltogether... but the iPod saved me.
Then again, I actually have this weird condition where I sometimes cannot experience pleasureful feelings in response to stimulus that should be pleasureful. I don't know the medical name for it, but I am treating it with self hypnosis (after visiting several doctors and having failed attempts at counseling), and it is getting noticeably better. There are other things that are higher on the list than recovering the ability to feel joy from the iPad viewing environment, but maybe one day I'll get there...