Starting in 2004, Comiculture mixes things up! Below are images from the stories appearing in our new book, coming soon!
And now, some words from the publisher...
Hello There!
The first 2 issues of Comiculture magazine brought us plenty of critical acclaim and many enthusiastic readers. With issue #2, we expanded distribution to incude Borders bookstores as well as some newsstand outlets. However, the the state of the industry has forced us to reexamine our publishing strategy. Bottom line: it's really expensive to produce a high-quality, full-color, glossy magazine like Comiculture! Without advertising revenue (hard to get when you have a small-press print-run), it's pretty much impossible to break even, let alone turn a profit. The fact is, that you can't charge all that much for a magazine and be competitive, regardless of the number of pages and quality of the material.
ALL-NEW Cover by
Steve Buccellato
Some potential readers cringed at our $6.95 cover price, even though issue #2 contained 92 pages of content! That's the equivalent number of pages of more than 4 "standard" comic books (typically 22 pages each). Since the average price for a comic these days is about $3, people routinely pay about $12 for 88 pages of stories, yet still had a problem with our $6.96 price.
It all comes down to perceived value; what people are used to paying. Most magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Maxim or People sell for $3 to $5. The publishers of these magazines can afford to sell for such low prices mostly because they are filled with ads. That's where they really make money. And that's where they have an edge over small companies like ours.
If you follow the business end of the comics biz, you're probably aware that the healthiest part of the business these days is in so-called "Graphic Novels." That's right, we're jumping on the Graphic Novel bandwagon. In the new year, we'll be abandoning our "magazine" format for more of a "book" format. Frankly, our other choices were to discontinue publishing altogether, or save costs by lowering our production values. Instead, we're going to be wacky and go for higher production values!
Volume 2, Book One of Comiculture will have a card-stock cover, and even more pages that our magazine had. The first book will contain the material originally slated for issues #3 and #4 of the magazine. We'll pick up on our original serialized stories and include many more stand-alone stories by some terrific creators! Including, Down The Rabbit Hole, wherein Buddy Scalera and Alan Evans introduce their new heroine: Clarissa! We also bring you new original work by Klaus Janson, Shannon Wheeler, Jim Krueger, Steve Olliff, Marie Javins, Kevin Kobasic, Karl Altstaetter, Chris Burnham and many more!
Because we're changing format, our new book will not have some of the "timely" features the magazine included. Therefore, any reviews of comics, music or movies will now appear exclusively on this website (see "Departments"). The new book will include more general non-comic story content, such as creator interviews and articles about the medium. For Volume 2, Book One we've lined up interviews with Marvel's Executive editor, Axel Alonso, indy creator Andi Watson, and we'll take a look at the superb art of Mark Chiarello. Stay tuned for more info about our upcoming release and more images from the book! Thanks for sticking with us!
