FCBD 2015 bits and bobs

Hey guys! Blog post time!

I know, FINALLY, right?

A few things you’ve probably noticed by now:

We have a swanky new site! Many thanks to our friend John, who helps us with the CSS and hosting of Cottonstar. We thought it was about time to move to a more accurate depiction of the comic’s feel. The old site was nice but it had a distinct parchment-and-wood feel, where the Cottonstar ship is in fact made of metal, and the story is set in the future as opposed to ye olde fantasy pirate days. We took the opportunity to fix up a bunch of other things too, like layout and alignment issues, navigation button errors, and a couple of other bugs. We also cleaned up the cast page.

If you notice anything that seems buggy/broken, please let us know!

Then, our gorgeous cover for Chapter 5. We’re so happy with it. Daniël Hugo did a fantastic job on it, and we can’t wait to get going on this part of the story! These were the prints we were talking about. We’re not exaggerating when we say that they are of immaculate quality. We bought one (number 1 of 20, naturally!) and it’s so beautifully printed. No matter how hard you squint, you can’t tell that it’s printed. It looks like you peeled the image straight off an HD screen and turned it into paper somehow. We’re definitely going to use the printer that he used when we do limited edition prints in future.

FCBD was pretty good! We had a bit of a printing disaster beforehand, with most of our comics being misprints. It was really crushing and we were really upset. We ended up having only 23 we could sell. There wasn’t even an option to reprint because the printers’ machine broke and could only be serviced on the Monday. It was far too late to find, proof and print with another printer, so our hands were tied. There were friends and fans who were kind enough to put in preorders though. We sold out of Chapter 4 fairly early on so we’re really thankful for the nice folks who were willing to wait. Many people were buying chapters 1-3 as well, which is great, because it means there are new readers. 🙂

Apart from that, people didn’t seem to want to buy as many prints or buttons this year. I think we sold maybe two of each, which is rather unusual for FCBD. Many books sold though and that’s great. We’ve covered our printing costs. The printers are collecting the misprints on Monday and will be replacing them.

Attendance was amazing this year. The venue is bursting at the seams, and we’re all hoping that a new, bigger venue is on the horizon… but we’ll see! There are plenty of photos on facebook and some videos on Youtube. Our friend Rowan was awesome enough to compile it all in a blog post over on his pop (nerd) culture blog called Geek Ink. You can view that post here: clicky!

Ben and I don’t have a decent camera between the two of us, but here are a few fuzzy-ish pics (click to enlarge):

You may have read on our Facebook page that we’ve had a bit of an adventurous week. We spent a day or two recovering from FCBD, then when I turned on my PC, there was a loud bang and a flash, and my power supply was no more. RIP. We were really worried that other components may have gotten damaged (especially since I had JUST put in a brand new SSD), but the universe was merciful, and it was only my power supply. Still, it’s an unexpected expenditure which we’re rather bummed about. 🙁 Fortunately the nice folks who took care of my machine have returned it and are giving us until the end of the month to pay, so at least I can carry on with work.

Then on Saturday we had our engagement party, which was really more of a laid-back picnic than a party, in the beautiful Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. There was champagne, family, friends and a mountain of apple turnovers. It was nice.

Lastly, there’s an expo at the end of the month that we got a kind of last-minute invite to. It’s called Electronic and Gaming Expo and they would like for there to be artists there too. So Readers Den will have a stand there, and so will we! It’s the first of its kind in Cape Town so the organisation was a little last-minute. Hopefully that won’t be the case in future. However some decent names will be there (Lego, Playstation, Microsoft, Corsair etc) and it looks like it’s shaping up to be a really cool event. There will also be some gaming tournaments. It’ll run from the 29th to the 31st. You can follow their facebook page for more announcements. Since the expo has a strong focus on gaming, we’re considering supplementing our usual fare with some fan art mashup originals to sell, and possibly some postcards. We’ll see!

Thanks as always for reading, commenting, talking about, and supporting us.

<3

Ben & Danelle