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Now, most of you know that Image Central is more of a co-op than a pub lisher, yes? So once the first printing sells out, in order to do another print ing, the creators would have to front the cash for it… and that’s a little self defeating, as then Ellis and Weston and dePuy and Heisler would become de facto self-publishers. And since there is no publisher, per se, the com pany can’t put up the printing bill. So it’s rock-and-a-hard place time. First issue and its overprint sold out; that’s great. But there’s also an unfilled, waiting demand for more. Believe me when I tell you there were a whole lot of retailers who mis judged the interest in that book, and who probably could have sold anoth er 100% of their initial order on a second printing. All Image had to do was solicit Ministry of Space #1 again, and the eco nomic hit would have been shifted to the retailers, who, this time, actual ly wouldn’t have minded bearing the brunt of it because they knew they had a waiting audience for the product. It could have been solicited in Diamond Dateline, like that dead Princess Diana thing Topps did back when she wasn’t yet cold in her grave. Second prints of Ministry of Space could have been in shops in six to eight weeks, because all of your pre press is already done, and Image could have got another cut of the book, and the creators would have extra cash, and the retailers would be heroes for putting a sought-after book into their customers’ hands. Just a big bag of money sitting there, unclaimed.

Why do people not use common sense? Has the whole world gone mental?

A Tale of Two Kitties August 17, 2001

Some of you may recall that back in February, our cat shuffled off this mor tal coil, the poor bastard.

So after a suitable time, we got another cat, and because the missus and I were still a little gun-shy about cats vis-a-vis the harsh world outside, the five-year old cat we picked up from the ASPCA, Willie, spent his first few months at Chateau Lar under a luxurious house arrest. Oh, sure, we got him some play toys, and some catnip, and a little patch of grass for him to chew on to aid his digestion, and a scratching post and everything. But it was still a house arrest. And every morning at five or so when he sat on the sill and meowed to the other cats in the neighborhood that he was up and ready for action, it would occur to me that maybe Willie had been an outdoors cat wherever it was he had spent the first five years of his life.

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