|
The Untold Story of Colt the Armadillo #1 The first issue was without a doubt, the most challenging issue. Being only 18 years old at the time, I was not prepared for publishing my own comic book and the first issue proved it. You could create a business series on how not to run a business by following all the mistakes I made with the first issue. The first mistake was that I never really had a business plan. Most businesses will map out where they are and where they want to go. They will determine the potential customer base, the competition, the costs of goods, the cost of doing business (rent, labor, insurance, etc...), how much capital it will take and how much they should charge for their product. That would be the intelligent way to do business. But I had little business experience, so I pretty much did things by the seat of the pants. I had raised some capital and went about hiring artists to do the book with no idea how much it would cost or how much to sell it for. My second mistake was insisting on a painted cover. I had paid Ryan Brown to do a nice painted cover of Colt on a horse. It was a very nice painting and made a nice cover. The problem is the painting was four feet tall and nearly three feet wide. While this may not seem like a problem, it meant that the picture had to be shot multiple times and shrunk and put together by the printers. It also meant it would cost thousands of dollars to have this done. The cover cost more than the rest of the book. In hindsight, I would have asked Ryan to either create a smaller one or gone with a basic cover. But I was stubborn and it cost us. Another problem we encountered was I had no idea how much to charge distributors for the comic. The general rule back then was that independent comics would charge the distributor 40% of the cover price and they would in turn charge the comic stores 50- 60% of the cover price, depending on how many they ordered. But I sent a price sheet that was asking the distributors to pay 60% of the cover price plus shipping. As you can guess, I did not have any takers. In fact, only one distributor carried the first issue, Capital City. And this was because we accidentally forgot to include a price sheet. They ordered 800 copies of the first issue. While we sold 800 copies of the first issue, the problem was we printed 10,000 copies. As you can guess, this is another mistake I made. To this day, I do not know why I printed 10,000 copies before taking orders or how I came to the conclusion to print 10,000 copies. Whatever the reason, I was left with over 9,000+ unsold copies and alot of debt. And with the very expensive cover, I did not have enough funds to publish a second issue. Soon after the first issue came out and things did not go as planned, my cousin and co-publisher, Dave Zjaba left the company. We had a dispute over who should be on the front of the second issue. I wanted to feature Colt again and he wanted to feature Zero. To be honest, with all the mistakes we made, that should have been the last thing we were worried about. So he decided to cut his losses and move on. With the shape of the company and the gloomy future, it was a smart move for him. We did go to a show to promote the issue and hopefully sell some copies. It was the American Heroes Show in Michigan and it would be a blessing and curse by attending that show. While we were there, we met with Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We got along quite well with them and I got a nice sketch of Colt and one of the ninja turtles by Peter Laird. This would later help the book. But it also allowed Dan Berger and Ryan Brown to get to know Kevin and Peter and both would later go to work for them. But that is the story of issue #2 and #3. In the end, Colt #1 came out and was a resounding flop. Don Thompson reviewed it and gave it a luke warm review. We did manage to sell some at the show and from an ad we took out in the Comic Buyers Guide. I also came away with alot of experience in publishing a comic book. It was costly experience but it was experience. I had a much better idea on how to do it in the future.
|
|
[Main
Page] [Colt
the Armadillo] [Crossed
Swords] [Unicorn
Kings] [Prose
Stories] |