Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, Dirk Wood, full bleed, idw, stephen king, woodworks

IDW Launches 200 Page Hardcover Quarterly Culture Magazine, Full Bleed

Published Tue, 12 Sep 2017 13:00:05 -0500

Comics are serious business! And IDW aims to prove it with potentially the most serious magazine ever.

Biff! Bam! Pow! Comics aren't just for kids anymore! In fact, they aren't even for comics! IDW is launching a new "culture magazine" called Full Bleed in December via its Portland-based Woodworks imprint, but this isn't your grandma's culture magazine. To show just how serious IDW is taking this, the 200 page magazine, which mixes comics and prose, will be printed in hardcover, serving both as a vehicle to explore important topics such as comics, music, fine art, design, and more, and also as a heavy, blunt object suitable for bludgeoning someone to death, not that Bleeding Cool advocates using it in this way.

The Hollywood Reporter has interview with editor and Woodworks founder Dirk Wood about the most Portland thing to ever come out of Portland, and Wood fittingly describes the creation of the magazine in the same way one might describe the ingredients of a craft beer, taking Graeme McMillan's suggestions of influences like McSweenys, Deadline (not the Hollywood gossip site), and RAW (not the pro wrestling show – we think), and adding:

Indeed, it is ambitious, and yes, there many inspirations, including all three you mention here! In addition to those, I'd add in the old Comics Journals that Fantagraphics did, with their long interviews, and maybe a dash of VICE, and Rolling Stone, oddly. Not in format per se, but content. To the naked eye, Rolling Stone is all about music. But then you flip a page to find an article about climate change. In some respects, I'd like to do for comics what Rolling Stone has done for music, examining the rest of the culture around and through the medium of comics.

Wood continues:

Portland has a pretty obvious love of handcrafted and artisan pursuits. The food is well documented, the coffee, the beer. Why not do the same for books? IDW is well known for print quality, and we're taking this one to that next level.

It sounds like one of the most intellectual sort-of-comics to ever be produced, and we feel like we're getting dumber by the minute for not having purchased it yet. Thankfully, IDW has a solution: you can preorder the book on Kickstarter.

IDW has always tried to break new ground on ways to get our product out there. We were one of the first companies to heavily pursue digital comics, and now, we're doing this (practically the opposite). Full Bleed is, at its heart, a magazine. And magazines traditionally can't survive without two things — advertising and subscribers. Well, there are no ads in Full Bleed, and Kickstarter seemed to us to be the equivalent of the modern-day subscription service. And its marketing power can't be denied. We wanted to find every potential reader we can, and this seemed like the way to do it.

The first issue has interviews with Alan Moore and Stephen King (not at the same time). Read the full interview with Wood over at THR, and head to Kickstarter to preorder a copy of this thing for… holy crap, 25 bucks?! Well, artistic greatness doesn't come cheap.

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