Hello friends of Sparkplug!
We
hope you’ve had a good 2013. It’s been another year of big changes for us—the
most significant, of course, being my coming into ownership of Sparkplug. This
year has been a reflective one; though our publishing output was smaller than
past seasons, we have made some great additions to our distro catalog, attended
a lot of fantastic shows, and given a lot of thought to the future of
Sparkplug.
As
I am writing this in November, however, we are not in good shape financially. I’ve
had to stop paying myself, and though I wasn’t paying myself much, that money
did make a significant contribution to my income; it’s going to be more
difficult to continue as a publisher when I’m relying solely on my minimum wage
retail job.
But
I’ll be fine—I’m more concerned about our publishing schedule for next year. We
have some awesome books planned! We’re going to finish Elijah Brubaker’s Reich series, hopefully by fall 2014. I would
like for Orchid 2 to (finally) be
released by then as well.
In
addition to completing two of Dylan’s projects, I am looking forward to starting
some projects of my own. In February, we are planning to launch the Sparkplug
Minis series, a collection of limited edition short-run minicomics by
up-and-coming artists. The first book will be Portland artist Asher Craw’s Hungry Summer, which will finally answer
the question of what happens when a bro-dude meets Baba Yoga. Hungry Summer will be ready in time to
debut at LA Zine Fest in February. The second book, Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi’s Smoking Spaceships #1, will debut at CAKE in late May. Suvarnasuddhi sent me some preliminary
sketches, and let me tell you, they are gorgeous!
I
have two more issues in this series tentatively planned for summer and fall. Get
them while you can, because once they run out, we won’t be reprinting them. If
this series does well enough, I will likely add a subscription option in 2015.
Finally,
if you’ve been following William Cardini’s Vortex
series, you’ll be excited to know that we’ll be publishing a collection of all
four minis in the summer of 2014. Cardini’s work is great—a weird mash-up of
psychedelia and 8-bit sci-fi—and I’m so stoked to be doing this book.
So
those are our plans, and I hope you’re as excited as I am. To make these books
happen, though, we are going to need a lot of support from our fans and friends.
As always, you can make a donation directly to us via the Donate button on the
right-hand side of our blog (http://sparkplugcomicbooks.blogspot.com/). These donations are so greatly appreciated and go
directly toward producing our books. I’m also going to
offer preorders for our books, which will be the best way for you to help us and
add some great comics to your library simultaneously. Reich #11 preorders start today! Please, just look at that cover
and tell me it’s not one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen. Visit http://sparkplugcomicbooks.com/shop/comic-books/reich-11-pre-order/ to get your issue and contribute to a good cause: keeping us
in business so we can continue to publish these amazing independent comics.
Thank you for standing by
us, and happy holidays!
-Virginia
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