Tell Your LCS HEADSPACE Is Coming
by ryankl
El peeperinos, I come to you asking a favour.
HEADSPACE – the Monkeybrain comic by Eric Zawadzki, Sebastian Piriz, Marissa Louise, Dan Hill, Chris Kosek, and myself – is about to be collected in its entirety by IDW and it’ll be in stores April 29.
But — it’ll only be in stores if those stores think they can sell the book. They won’t magically order 15 copies and assume you’ll all turn up with fistfulls of cash by the fire drums screaming “500 ON RICHARDS!” – no, they’ll order what they think they can sell. So if you go in and tell them you will buy a copy, they’ll order a copy. Hell, they might even order one more – just in case. If 5 of you hit your shared LCS and preorder with the store, they might order 8 copies to have 3 shelf lurkers – because if this book has 5 peeps pre-keen, then it’ll surely move, right?
But, I’ll stress this again, if no one preorders it, the store will assume this things a bigger fizzer than a bath bomb and will proceed to order none so their business remains financially secure. Fair play, and all that.
WHAT WE AT HEADSPACE HQ NEED YOU TO DO IS SIMPLE!
Go into your LCS [Local Comic Store] and follow the following script:
“Hi, shopkeep, would you mind ordering and setting aside a copy of the HEADSPACE trade from IDW in April, I’m pretty sure the Item code is FEB150469. Cheers, boss/mate/muscles/cobber/captain/[insert cool nickname here].”
Conveniently, for you, that scripted sequence can just as easily be copy+pasted into an email to your LCS.
I’ve constantly said that indie comics like these live or die on the vine based on word of mouth and I appreciate every kind thing anyone has said about our little story that could.
If you are on the fence, hit the digital issues on ComiXology for 99pence each, or take the word of Christopher Sebela, because he’s a good dude:
“From page one, HEADSPACE takes the quiet life of small towns to some strange places. And once you’ve gotten your bearings, it giddily saws all the legs off your chair and sends you tumbling down a vertiginous hole of guns, monsters, dead folks, betrayal and that inescapable feeling that you’ll never know which way is up again.” — Christopher Sebela (HIGH CRIMES, ALIEN VS PREDATOR)
Or if Sebela has wronged you, sample these fine testimonials:
Zac Thompson at Bloody Disgusting said: “The concept is brilliant and executed with such skill that’ll you’ll barely find time to take a breath. The pacing is perfect and the world building is insane.”
And Pipedream Comics named us the 3rd best Monkeybrain book of 2014 as they said Headspace’s: “-dark fairytale mixes elements of the Truman Show, Hannibal and The Prisoner to create a brilliantly surreal take on the world of a small town sheriff.”
——-
Head to your LCS stat and preorder the HEADSPACE tpb for April. We aim to please.
Without Fear 
Yes but that trade is listed as being only 128 pages in Previews and Amazon: is it a typo for a complete collection of #1-8? Or is it Vol. 1 of 2?
No, not a typo. The issues from Monkeybrain are shorter, usually 12 pages each, so the whole collection fits the 128 pages.
Ooh, I get it now: the Comixology issues are advertized as 24 pages, so 24 × 8 for the complete series didn’t seem to compute with the trade’s pagecount — but that’s 24 half-pages, it’s that’s “3 panels per tablet page, so 6 per art page” point you recently blogged about…
Okay, I’m an idiot and for my “penance” I’ll just pre-order your book!
($20 for 128 pages is rather steep, hence my googling about the trade’s pagecount. One site was even saying, “HEADSPACE #6-8 will be up quick, with a trade collection of the first five issues on the way too”, making the matter even more confusing about contents and pagecount both.)
Thank you for your time and apologies for the false alarm!
Th comixology issues’ page counts include cover, credits, and all the back matter. But we do full art pages for Headspace. It’s Deer Editor and another project that were tablet pages.
I agree, 128p for $20 is more expensive, but only compared to those fantastic Image trades at $10. I don’t know how they do it. Though I know IDW always deliver a good package, and the trade will have some extras collected in it. Plus a foreword by an astounding writer, and good mate. Literally the first and only person I asked.
Don’t feel penance is required, ;), but a preorder would be rad, and I stand by this work as my best stuff yet.
Oh, I’ll get it right eventually: so each digital is 24 pages with 12 full pages of story plus backmatter, and that’s why the complete #1–8 will fit into that trade!
(I feel like that hilarious priest in Alessandro Baricco’s novel OCEAN SEA, who wanders north but the road collapses, south but the horses stops, west but he gets a nightmare about his hometown, so the penny drops and he goes back east just in time, grumbling that God could have sent just the dream.)
And I’m pre-ordering also because I’m quite interested, hence all the googling, so it gives me an excuse not to wait for reviews of the complete series, as I’d normally do. Actually, the two “genre books” I’m anticipating the most from this Previews are HEADSPACE and BRAINSTORM, near-future sci-fi both!
(As for those Image trades, I assume the creative team is taking a bath on the $10 Vol. 1 in order to hook people on the $15+ further volumes, but of course we can’t expect that for a single-volume story…)
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