The Phoenix have launched 'The Phoenix Presents', a series of books in which they will be publishing collected comic strips. The first two books have been announced, Jamie Smart's first six months of Bunny Vs. Monkey and the first year of Von Doogan, by Lawrence 'Lorenzo' Etherington.
The Bunny Vs. Monkey Book is 64-pages and the Von Doogan book is 48-pages, and they are both to be released in June this year. Pre-orders are available and if you pre-order you can get them for £5.99 each, £1 less than the full price. The Phoenix have announced that they will be producing nine books this year, and the third book will be Corpse Talk coming out in July. The other books will include Star Cat, Gary's Garden, Pirates of Pangaea and Long Gone Don, but I am unsure of the final two titles. The Phoenix will be having a proper announcement some time in the next week, which I'm sure will reveal more details.
The first two books can be pre-ordered from the Phoenix website, just click on the link below.
http://www.thephoenixcomic.co.uk/product-category/comic-books/
7 comments:
This is the future for British comics I think; books, not periodicals. We're so far behind Europe in this regard.
I've never bought the Phoenix before - mostly because it's a weekly serial thing, which I wouldn't be able to afford, and partially because I haven't liked what I've seen each time I've looked at it.
I've loved everything I've seen by the Etherington Brothers so far though, so might get one of those books.
And yep, we're definitely MILES behind Europe. I worked in a French bookshop about ten years ago, and they had a whole FLOOR for comics collected in book form, like these. Truly incredible, it was.
I've never understood why DC Thomson or Egmont haven't developed books like these that can be sold in the UK and other territories. I know we still have annuals, and Egmont did that Thunderbirds collection, but it'd be good to see them do books in the international format like these Phoenix titles.
D.C Thomson did try something like this in the late 1970's when they released Red Dagger, which collected series of their strips into one comic, I think it was monthly. I wrote about it last year:
http://www.wackycomics.com/2013/03/curious-comics-red-dagger.html
Admittedly, it's not a book that was on sale all year round, but it was heading that way.
Red Dagger was just a flimsy comic collecting strips never intended to be read in collected form though George. So the rhythm of the story was fragmented. I think a nicely designed book with stories written for that format, like the European model of Asterix, Tintin, etc, would do better. And on the shelves of a bookshop, rather than buried within an untidy pile of comics in a newsagent.
Why not have periodicals with stories that can later be collected into books? Why is whatever "the continent" does always "ahead"? Don't we have faith in ourselves? And what's this "international format"? Asterix, Black Butler and Spider Man are all sold internationally, in different formats!
We have tried periodicals, for over 100 years. They're not as popular as they used to be because most kids today haven't developed the weekly/monthly habit of buying them. Trying the book format, with a longer shelf life and better production values, might be a worthwhile alternative.
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