Wulf the Briton 2
Four years ago I bemoaned the fact that I couldn't find any of Ron Embleton's excellent artwork for Wulf the Briton (CLICK). Recently Peter Richardson contacted me with the news that he edited Ron Embleton's Wulf the Briton: The Complete Adventures by Ronald Embleton, which was published by Book Palace Books last year (title link). The bad news is the price: £125. At a time of recession, I doubt that your local library will be prepared to order a copy. The British Library charges heavily for loaning special items. I can't understand why the Express group doesn't publish graphic novels of this series. The alternative is to set up a dedicated website which makes a small charge to readers; this is how modern comics are beginning to be sold (CLICK, CLICK). There's a new generation out there that would be wowed by Ron Embleton's art. Read Philip Lindsay's review on Amazon (title link).
posted by Unknown @ 4.5.11
2 comments
2 Comments:
I can readily understand the concerns you have raised about the price of this book. It was a concern of the publishing team as well.
The problem we had was that a book on Wulf the Briton would have an even smaller potential readership than Dan Dare. We are talking here about specialist books for a niche market. A large print run as a means of getting unit costs down was going to be a non starter. We simply would be tripping over piles of unsold books for years to come.
So bearing that in mind and also bearing in mind that this is a readership that wants perfection in projects such as this, we decided to create the best ever tribute to one of the greatest UK comic strips by collecting all of Ron Embleton's Wulf the Briton stories into one volume and then reproducing the pages the same size as they appeared at the time of publication. As the series ran for over three years under Embleton's stewardship the book is simply huge both in terms of dimensions and page count.
With a large page count and the large dimensions the print costs were such that the book was going to be expensive. However having said that, when people actually see the book they are of the opinion that it is well worth the cost.
To shed a bit more light on the story, we approached Express Newspapers over a year ago and received a lot of help and support for the project from them. We then tracked down friends and colleagues of the artist, so that we could explain and contextualize the fascinating story of how this great strip came into being. We even managed to source some of the very few pieces of original artwork that have survived and have never been seen since outside of the collector's circuit - in fact some of them haven't even been seen within the collector's circuit.
The scanning and restoration of the comics pages was both time consuming and meticulous and we feel represents the best work done so far in re-presenting pages of classic UK comics to a modern readership. Our intention was to make owning this book the equivalent of having access to the original comics with no diminution in the print quality whatsoever.
In short we have followed through with our avowed aim to make this book worthy of it's price tag and I'm pleased to say that the emails and phone calls we have received from readers all around the world have been truly heartwarming.
The most rewarding of all the responses was from Ron Embleton's widow who was just so overjoyed that her husband's work was still so fondly remembered.
For this correspondent at least, that more than made up for the very long man hours poured into this project and was the richest reward that an editor of such a book could hope for.
Wow! I didn't notice the dimensions of the book, but it must be tabloid size.
It sounds a real labour of love. I hope the sales break even at least.
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