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.

DFC Superhero Supersavers

Vampanda says "Save the DFC!" why not send us your own drawing of a superhero supersaver to save the amazing DFC. The more the merrier. I'll try and figure out a neat gallery later today

send them here ... or post them to flickr with the keyword "savetheDFC" [this finally appears to work, flickr just takes a little while to display them...]

Shout about it

Obviously the more people we can get to hear about this the better so thanks to everyone who is linking to this page, traffic is starting to grow.

If anyone has friends with media contacts it would great if we could get something in the uk press.. am curious to see what is in tomorrow's guardian comic DFC-wise.

...speaking to Random

Have signed a confidentiality agreement to find out how big a mountain we have to climb to do this... it won't be until Monday that I will get any proper response, but in the mean time...

Please get the word out about this page to all you can over the next few days... and if anyone has any ideas about how to reach subscribers...

Pledglings....

its a first step, and its a bit low tech, but ...

I have added a little strip of 'pledglings' to the side of the page [moved from the bottom to make them easier to find].

If you would like to take part in a subscriber buyout of the DFC please use these to contact me to indicate how much you would be able to pledge.

even if its just a few quid, or you just won the lottery and want to do something worthwhile with all that cash... go pledge

.. and how can the DFC be saved?

Random House are looking to sell the title, and whilst the idea of a single wealthy benefactor coming to the rescue sounds great, it also sounds improbable in the current climate.... although with interest rates close to zero and the stock market tanking, you never know...

In any case, it seems unlikely that Random House is actively seeking a buyer.

A great alternative might be to galvanise the subscriber base of the DFC to get as many people as possible to know about it and, if they are interested, get them to pledge a small sum towards an eventual 'subscriber buy-out'.

I am not sure of the exact methodology of doing this but have seen it successfully used in other contexts.

So why should we save it?

Kids LOVE comics, but have you ever tried buying a kids comic?

They are all full of junk... short, usually insipid, stories sandwiched between

merchandising, advertising, licensing and other trash.

But not the DFC.

Pure, unADULTerated bliss.

A really idiosyncratic mix of things, too.

It set out to be completely supported by its subscribers but with limited resources for marketing, it has been reliant on word of mouth to build a reader base.... and in these credit crunchy days it hasn't grown fast enough for its backers.

But it is passionately adored by its readers and with a bit of love and care and a lot of evangelism it could build a much bigger subscriber base, perhaps not existing solely as a wonderfully printed artefact in the uk but reaching out over the interweb to small comic lovers everywhere.

Kids love comics and if you love your kids, they will love you for saving the DFC.

So what is the DFC?

The DFC is, without a doubt, the best thing to have happened in British children's publishing.

Ever.

It is a weekly comic for kids with NO ADVERTISING.

Drawn, written, edited and produced by a really great team, printed on good paper, posted in a cool stripy envelope, it arrives every Friday and is devoured by those kids lucky enough to have a subscription.

My boys fell in love with it when the Guardian started to produce an insert in the middle of the family section of the Saturday supplement about a year and a half ago and we noticed a cryptic little credit "... brought to you by the DFC ..."

Googling 'the DFC' brought no joy for months, but then a holding page appeared and this quirky little secret was revealed.

It has been on the go for 41 issues so far but the most recent issue announced its imminent demise.

Random House announced this in a press release at the start of March, indicating that unless a buyer could be found, the DFC will end at issue 43.