INTERVIEW: IDW kickstarts new ‘Full Bleed’ campaign

Full Bleed is a 200-page, print-only comic and culture magazine. Think about those compound modifiers for a second. In 2018, there are still companies and creators willing to put out 200 pages and in print only.

The tome, which is gearing up for the release of its third installment, has a wide variety of  topics covered, including music, art and even Metallica. In order for fans to hold a copy of Full Bleed Vol. 3: Heavy Rotation in their hands, they need to head over to IDW’s Kickstarter campaign.

If successful, the new volume will deliver a rare interview of Grant Morrison, opening up about his feud with Alan Moore; a discussion with Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and Anthrax’s Scott Ian; and contributions from Julia Alekseyeva, Abdulkareem Baba Aminu, Peter Bagge and so many others.

Dirk Wood, of IDW, curates and edits the book with the help of CEO and founder Ted Adams. They are determined to see the campaign fully funded, meaning books should be in the hands of readers in 2019.

Recently, Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Wood about Full Bleed Vol. 3: Heavy Rotation. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.

For those unfamiliar with Full Bleed, what can fans expect if they contribute to the Kickstarter and become readers?

They should expect the world’s only 200-page, hardcover, print-only comics and culture magazine! I’ve been spreading this message around, but that’s because I think it’s fairly accurate: Take the old, great Comics Journals, a bunch of Rolling Stone magazines, mash them up with a beautiful art book, and voila. You’ve got Full Bleed.

Comics, fiction, non-fiction, essays, long interviews, gallery sections, it has a little bit of everything. With Rolling Stone, the starting point was always of course, music. With us, it’s comics. But like Rolling Stone, you never quite know what we’re going to cover on the next page, be it film, music, TV, politics and so on. It’s a diverse mix of both content and format, and we’re really proud of it.

Why did you and IDW go the Kickstarter route for this publication?

The short answer is that we knew this project would be a challenge out of the gate. There’s a reason there aren’t a lot of folks putting out 200-page, print-only hardcover magazines! It’s neither easy, nor cheap.

So, we knew we’d have to get the word out in a different kind of way, and it’s no secret that Kickstarter provides that kind of platform and can really make a project enter the public eye in a way we needed this to.

But also, I look at Kickstarter as sort of a modern spin on the old subscription model. In ‘ye olde days,’ to survive making periodicals, you needed two things: ad revenue and subscribers. Well, we don’t sell ads. So, for this to work, we had to have subscribers. And that’s why each Kickstarter is more important than the last, to add to that subscriber base.

All that said, we also were the first publisher to find a way to involve comic shop retailers in a way that they could get their copies at a discount, via the Kickstarter, via their usual distribution system. So that’s been a big part of our plan. And the numbers in comic shops have gone up with each volume, so that’s clearly working.

How long have you been working on this volume?

You could say ‘years in the making!’ We really started this process about a year and a half ago, Ted Adams and I. But the first six months were really just trying to figure out what we were doing and how to launch this thing. But once we got cooking, we just started acquiring great stuff out of the gate.

And it’s really been a jigsaw puzzle, figuring out what goes well in each volume. So, some of the things for Volume 3, we’ve had them in the can for months. Some things just came in. Our cup runneth over with great content, as they say, so it’s been a real kick moving stuff around and making the best books we can. 

How did you get access to this Grant Morrison — Alan Moore interview?

Back before Volume 1 came out, I was introduced to Gavin Edwards by a mutual friend — Gavin is true pro journalist and has published with everyone from the aforementioned Rolling Stone to Playboy to you name it. The first thing we did was a lost Alan Moore interview that appeared in Full Bleed: Vol. One, that was a lot of fans’ favorite thing in the volume.

So when he told me that he interviewed Grant Morrison in 2011 for six hours, but the magazine that sent him only printed a tiny sliver, and he had hours and hours of stuff on the cutting room floor that had never been seen … well, it was clearly a no-brainer. 

Are there already plans for future volumes of Full Bleed?

Most definitely! Volume 4 is probably at least half way done, and we’ve got plenty of stuff in the can beyond that, too! Volume 3 is complete already, so trust me, my mind is already in buried in the next one. And we’ll [have] a few other related things we’ll be able to announce soon, too.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

The IDW Kickstarter for Full Bleed Vol. 3: Heavy Rotation is now up and running. Click here for more information.