Christmas Prescience

So just before Christmas a great thing has happened. SFX, that well-respected and much-loved British monthly that covers all aspects of SF/Fantasy/Horror has spotlighted Dick Turpin and the Restless Dead as their 'zine of the month. They describe it as a "whimsically dark engaging read" which is a quote I'm more than happy with, and will sit there with Comic Shop Voice's opinion in November that we "create comics that everybody can tap into, everybody can enjoy" as our most favoured soundbites.

The SFX review appears within their lively letters pages, and being one of the most popular sections in SFX means that a fair proportion of the readership will see it and perhaps even go so far as to buy it. However the biggest thing SFX has given us, apart from being our first mainstream printed press exposure, is awareness. If even a handful of SFX readers stop by our table at our next convention appearance and pick up one of our comics based solely on the fact they've heard of us through the magazine then job done. If just one person remembers we featured in SFX at Christmas we won't complain, because it means the exposure worked and somebody who never knew of us now does.

The issue of SFX featuring our review came out last week. This week the January 2009 Diamond Previews hit the UK comic shop, featuring our Dick Turpin as one of the comics available to order in the Previews UK section*. The timing couldn't have been better in my opinion, with a comic being highlighted in the former being offered for sale in the latter. Maybe, just maybe, some UK comics fans will ask their retailer to stock the comic because they liked the sound of it in SFX and that little bubble of awareness inflates ever so slightly.

You see, Time Bomb Comics is still a very small fish, but we're a species that some are beginning to recognise and remember. This awareness, this prescience, is something solid that we can build on as we enter our busiest publishing year yet.

And at this time of year, what really could be better than some Christmas Prescience?

*9781845765132 is the Previews order number for Dick Turpin and the Restless Dead, but expect to hear a lot of this number over the next few weeks...