The Comics Bureau

Tom Hum­ber­stone, editor of the superb Sol­ipsistic Pop, writes up a fas­cin­at­ing piece about get­ting the smell of Solop­sistic Pop #1 right.

The first book had to do a lot of things. It had to estab­lish itself as a per­fect venue to view and dis­cover the lead­ing altern­at­ive comic artists based in the UK. This book had to look like it would be at home on a shelf in Water­stones and Art/Design book stores. These com­ics needed to be prin­ted prop­erly. On good paper­stock. Exposed to litho­graphic plates for max­imum qual­ity. The col­ours needed to be just right. Everything needed to be just right. Going through Lulu or any other POD com­pany wouldn’t be enough. I knew we needed to find a reli­able, reas­on­able, and respec­ted print­ers who could offer their own thoughts and feed­back on the pro­duc­tion. Someone we could a build a strong rela­tion­ship with for future volumes.

Addi­tion­ally, I wanted to give a nod towards the humble but sim­il­arly beau­ti­ful ori­gins of small press com­ics by fea­tur­ing two hand stapled mini-comics. There’s some­thing to be cher­ished about pho­to­copy roller marks and mis­aligned crop mark­ers. I didn’t want this book to sug­gest oth­er­wise. Sol­ipsistic Pop is about try­ing to look for­ward to the future of Brit­ish altern­at­ive com­ics, but by doing so, the past and present also needed to be acknowledged.

Need­less to say, Sol­ipsistic Pop is an excit­ing bound for­ward that occa­sion­ally glances over its shoulder, but I’ll write up a more suc­cinct review once I’ve stopped sniff­ing it.

If you don’t have your own copy yet — Get over here and get one! Still not got one? Get over here and pre­view it. I should state that the online pre­view lacks the olfact­ory stim­u­lus of the prin­ted version.