The DFC Library

As you may already know, the DFC Library is about to emerge, blinking into the world with 3 beautiful hard back graphic novels.
Dave Shelton's wonderful Good Dog, Bad Dog will be the first to arrive on 4 March 2010.

followed by
Mezolith by Ben Haggerty and Adam Brockbank - auspiciously listed by Amazon as due for delivery on 1 April 2010.


Third in the series will be Kate Brown's Spider Moon on 29 April


If these first three books are successful, we can expect to see a second wave of books later next year and, perhaps, the remergence, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the weekly DFC.

All three books are available to pre-order from Amazon now.

Its the all new DIY DFC!

It's still work in progress and we need to get the approval of team DFC for this but the basic DIY DFC is now up and running. If you would like to give it a try please email me and I will send you a link to the website.

apologies to Sarah McIntyre for vandalising Cyrano

A long time later

I am finally catching up with the backlog of work created by the L'Aquila earthquake.

I met up with David Fickling along with a posse of DFC artists in Oxford during the literature festival and the conversation we had reinforced my conviction that the DFC is both saveable and must be saved.

The Save the DFC Pledgling campaign has generated an impressive sum to date (in excess of £16,000). Much of this was pledged in the first 4 weeks.

To fill the gap in Fridays, my son William suggested creating a 'Do it yourself' DFC. So from this Friday, a first attempt at this will be available for all to use.

...but first off to save the family...

I won't be able to post here for a few days. My wife and two boys are in L'Aquila so I am off to go and bring them back to the UK.

Thanks to all of you who have made pledges recently, I will get in touch when we are safely back.

Barnaby

The Idle Parent

Tom Hodgkinson wrote a great little piece in Saturday's Telegraph which doesn't yet seem to have appeared on telegraph.co.uk... I will upload a scan of it later today.

There is a quiet massacre of quality media for kids happening at the moment, largely in the name of cost-cutting during the credit crunch. The fightback starts here....

Super Comics Adventure Squad

An interesting email from Garen Ewing this morning announcing another noble endeavour...
"Today, Friday 27 March 2009 (GMT), sees the last issue of David Fickling's innovative weekly comic - The DFC - at least in its current form.
The comic creators, writers and artists who were brought together by this exciting project have gathered together for a new venture - the Super Comics Adventure Squad!
Here's the website:http://supercomicsadventuresquad.blogspot.com
If you are able to help spread the word about this new endeavour, I'd be most grateful."

A brilliant idea.

Next Steps

I spoke to Random House yesterday about the sale, this blog and the potential for a subscriber/supporter buy out of the DFC.
There is a lot to be done but it seems that there is some real scope to make this work.
There are three main tasks:

1. spreading the word about the DFC and this campaign


2. securing sufficient capital to support the DFC for a further year or more of operation


3. creating a 'vehicle' for the purchase and continued existence of the DFC

The response to this blog has been very encouraging and the generosity of the pledglings, young and not so young is astonishing. Keep it up everyone.... you never know, we might actually end up saving something that actually deserves saving.