Today sees the one-year anniversary of the launch of Graphic Eye. It's been a strange, interesting experiment; launching a new website in an already-crowded scene, wrangling writers and cartoonists, and trying to maintain some semblance of a regular schedule. The site has had some ups and downs, its golden periods of quality articles and its half-hearted ones where life has got in the way, and some pieces have been posted that I wish had never been written. Reflecting on our last year, though, my feelings are that the successes have outweighed the failures, and so, older and somewhat wiser, today begins the next phase of Graphic Eye.
Even though we use the Blogger platform, I've never referred to the site as a blog -- my definition has always been "an online comics magazine" where the driving principle was always thoughtful writing and interesting cartooning. We avoid news, since other sites do that better than we ever could, and other fluff pieces, since the aim has never been to generate clicks or become fodder for casual browsing. With this came the decision to avoid advertising on the site. Early on, we used AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links, but not only did this cheapen the look of the site, but also ran contrary to our principle of valuing art over commerce.
However, today you may have noticed a new link on our navigation bar: Store. Yes, as of today, we have become a small-press publisher and are looking for your money. We felt this was a more honest way of supporting the site and our meagre operating costs, and also a better way to increase the exposure of our roster of cartoonists. We will be appearing at some small-press comics fests in the near future, plying our wares, shaking hands and kissing babies.
Our debut publication is Iain Laurie's Horror Mountain -- a 22-page odyssey into the mind of our resident cartoonist. We've been sending out advance copies, and it's already gained high praise from Nick Abadzis, Frank Quitely and Jeff Lemire -- we hope you'll enjoy it even half as much as they did. In the following weeks, we'll be featuring some other works by Iain, including his multimedia meditation on boxing, Slugmix.
Later on in the year, we hope to release new works by Craig Collins and Ian Burns, and possibly some other surprises. Of course, we'll still be keeping our (mostly) regular schedule of reviews, interviews, features and comics -- we'll just be a little more tangible.
I hope you'll stay with us and continue to support our endeavours, whatever form they may take.
Thank you for reading!
Gavin Lees
1 comments:
Happy Birthday dudes!!!
Awra' best!
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