If you have placed an order since April 1st, I will be ordering your shirt from the printer tomorrow and shipping out as soon as they arrive. I hope to be placing shirt orders every two weeks from here on out and weekly as soon as the store really picks up.
Thank you for your patience as I am using a new supplier and am getting adjusted to the new process. I really appreciate your support.
That also means if you are planning to order a shirt and would like to receive it with the first batch, you should probably order it before Thursday (the 17th) afternoon.
I would also like to get your feedback on the items I am working on adding to the store. Let me know which items hold the most interest for you.
- More shirts – I hope to get a new design up every week or two.
- Prints of comics – These would be full color prints, suitable for framing, about 8.5×11″ size. They would also be signed.
- Stickers – haven’t found a printer yet for these but I have some designs in mind. Do you know of a good sticker printer? Do you have a sticker you would like to see? Sharksplode?
- E-Book – with behind the scenes info on the making of the first 100 comics (I’m not to 100 quite yet). It will have sketches, outlines, script notes and an mp3 with audio commentary.
- Real Books – here’s a dilemma. I would love to print an HE book in full color (preferably the first 2 years of comics) when the time comes, but that is a ways off. I can’t do full color with a print on demand site like Lulu.com because they would charge ME $25-35 per book depending on page numbers. I wouldn’t want to charge more than $20 for the book to YOU guys. That means I can either have NO books for a very long time, or do a black and white book (very affordable through Lulu) with the first 100 comics. If you bought that, it would be with the knowledge that a full color version would be on the way 8-10 months later. Would HE make any sense in B&W. Don’t know how I feel about that.
UDPATE:
I might not be able to place the order until tonight or tomorrow (Friday the 18th) morning, so if you want to get yours in, go ahead.
Stickerguy.com has always been kind to me. Not sure if his prices are still competitive, as the last time I ordered something was a few years ago. They're not incredibly flexible or fast, but if you want black and white, they're a great way to go.
I'd be all over a print if you offered it. -Especially signed; it'd almost be like owning art. I'd only suggest that you do the dimension of it, including signature, so that it would readily fit within an off-the-rack matting piece. -Read: general photo dimensions. And stickers are always a good idea.
ordered 2 shirts, I would love a onesie for my daughter or a baby-T like 12-18 months
I'm quite impressed with your ideas for making money from a free comic. JoCo may be revolutionary, but at least he started with a conventionally marketed product. Good for you.
Anyway, my thoughts: Keep the shirts coming; good move. Signed prints are a great idea; I'd buy some. Stickers are also kick-ass; my guitar case needs bling. I'd suggest maybe an ovular version of the "Fancy Bastards" T-shirt, with "Godspeed" and "You Fancy Bastards" curved around the top and bottom of the oval with RocketJosh (TM) in the center, perhaps with Joel and Eli looking on from opposite ends as opposed to from the side to preserve the ovular shape and the central focus on Josh. Man I should be a fucking designer. Oh and I think that the old Green HE logo would make a good sticker, but don't get me wrong, I love the new site design. Kind of indifferent about the eBook; I might be interested in it. And I understand while you're looking at sustainability options that you'd consider a black and white book of comics, but I don't think its a good idea. People might buy it but I wouldn't. You do such a great job with coloration and shadowing and gradients and I fear a lot of that would be lost in B & W. I hope you can find a better color option, but I personally would be content to buy a more expensive color version, maybe hard cover and signed. I may be decidedly more fanboy than a lot of your fans, but don't forget what you said in one of your video blogs; your fans are geeks. We're the people who wait in line outside of a comicbook store to buy the new pewter statue of Darth Vadar in his weird Bubble Shell from Empire for the discount price of $79.99; you might have an audience for a $40 – $50 dollar signed hard cover collection. Of course, this should probably be a large collection of the first 100 or even 200 comics; perhaps it would be a good idea to have cheap black and white 50-75 books of comics and then every 200-225 comics to release a more expensive, color anthology. I don't know if the overhead and potential loss is worth the risk. Maybe you should set up a weekly HijiNKS ENSUE poll to ask your audience what they'd buy to potentially predict these overhead costs. God damn I should be your manager.
Alright, I'm done abusing the semi-colon. I'd best order a shirt lest I miss the deadline!
Shirts and stickers are win. Prints are situationally sweet. E-books are "eh". What's a real book?
I'm still big on the eBook and pBook ideas. I'm with jfardink in thinking that B&W isn't as good an idea, but if there's no (or minimal) preproduction costs for print-on-demand I don't see why you shouldn't try it and gauge the, you know…demand (I would probably not purchase a B&W book myself).
An eBook compilation would be really cool. I could use it to conveniently show my friends how cool this comic is. Sketches and behind-the-scenes work would be neat to see, too.
As for a printed book, I'd only get it if it was in color. It'd be a cool gift, though.
I'd buy some bumper stickers if you decide to make those and certainly more shirts.
As far as books go I would wait until it's affordable to do physical books. An E-Book really isn't that appealing since I can just look at all of them while I'm online. I enjoy physical books simply for the purpose of when I travel, they're nice to have (I've collected all of the Penny Arcade books released so far simply by going on vacation).