If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve come to check out our new website. You may be aware of our “failed” Kickstarter campaign or seen some of our Tumblr or Twitter sales. If you have, you know that Escape Pod Comics was never meant to be a website, but a true brick and mortar comic book store, the kind of store we all wish comic shops could be- with knowledgable staff, huge selections of every genre, signings, classes and fun events. While we garner the funds to open that store, we’ve decided to use the internet to create a sort of “place-holder”, a space to remind people we’re still plugging away at our dream.The problem with this is that we need content and things of interest if we’re going to keep people coming back. We certainly want people to visit the site frequently, so that they can learn about our progress and maybe buy stuff to help us get started, but what can we do to make them?
Well, we could become yet another “comic news” site and spend all our time chasing down “stories” and regurgitating press releases but that would have to become our main thing, if we wanted to compete in the cut-throat world of Comic sites.
We could also become a “serious” comic site, one that does retrospectives and interviews and has multiple articles a day written by scholarly comic fans and pros who know their stuff. That one is out because we just can’t afford that kind of staff.
We could just be an online shop ,a place to get great deal on comics. Well… that one IS kind of what we’re doing, but if we were to do it right the amount of time devoted to uploading and cataloguing every item we have for sale would mean no brick and mortar store for at least a year, which is not the plan.
Our last chance seemed to be to combine all of those, prune away the most difficult parts and ask friends and sort-of-friends to help with the content. So we have Jason Smith talking about why he hates the new Wonder Woman, Katelan Foisy grabbing a few words with Grant Morrison, Nick Sousanis giving us a small part of his doctoral thesis on and using the comics medium. We also have a shop, though right now it’s just loaded with left over rewards from our Kickstarter at much cheaper prices, that will contain a wide range of used comics and graphic novels at discount prices. But, frankly, this site is just a place-holder- the main goal is still creating our store , IRL.
Once we’ve done that, the site will host all our latest news, special sales, and streaming classes. We like to think of this not as Esacape Pod Comics 2.0, but as Escape Pod Comics 0.7, the beta version of something that is almost almost ready for it’s larger release.
As of now, the plan is to have 3 different articles or classes going up weekly with items added to the store on a regular basis; as soon as our Last Tumblr Sale is done, the remaining books will be added here and as soon as those are added, the books remaining from previous sales will go up. If it all works out properly, soon enough we should have a proper retails space and the site will undergo changes to refelct that glorious reality. Once again, and always, we thank you for your time and support- for helping us to create the comic shop of the future!
PS: if you came to his article directly, you’re missing out on our stunning landing-page, created by co-owner (and my wife) Sarah Luchins. Click on the link, you’ll be glad you did.