Sha: The Final Countdown

And why I'm glad I'm not fulfilling the orders!

SHA, our first kickstarter, has been a great success and we’re so appreciative of everyone’s support – thank you so much! Each day we get new pledges and the process is highly addictive. Lisa is endlessly checking her Kickstarter app and excitedly telling me – ‘Hey! We’ve just had three new backers.’

As she often gives me hourly updates – even in the middle of watching our current favourite TV series, The Americans – I get a strong sense of déjà vu and I realize, even though this is our first crowdfunder, I’ve actually been this way before.

It was when I created 2000AD.

The Saturday that 2000AD first hit the newsstands, I duly went to W. H. Smiths shortly after the shop had opened. There was a mega pile of 2000ADs on sale –standing at least three feet tall. How that pile diminished would determine whether the comic was a success or a flop – as so many British comics were at that time.

I went back to Smith's a couple of hours later to check again. There was a significant drop in the pile – but not enough to call 2000AD a success.

Yet.

Mid-afternoon I checked again, there was a further drop, but now – just like Lisa is today – I was absolutely addicted to the sales process; I simply had to go back and check again.

So I went back just before closing time.

The huge pile had vanished.

2000AD was a massive hit.

Even dealing with my managing editor, Jack Le Grand, who was part of the old regime and regularly rained on my parade, didn’t change the thrill of watching sales that week and subsequent weeks. Yes, I went back to W.H.Smiths to watch similar piles of Prog 2 and Prog 3 also shrink to nothing. I just couldn’t tear myself away.

Despite this, Jack would call me into his office and tell me, with miserable relish, that 2000AD sales were falling and the future did not look good for my comic. He was talking absolute bollocks. From a starting point of 200,000-plus copies per week – an all-time record – it had dropped maybe two or three thousand a week each subsequent week. This is quite normal and, in fact, such a low drop is exceptional. But Jack was desperately hoping 2000AD would fail so that he could get his redundancy and leave. Sadly for him, sales leveled somewhere in the 190,000s and remained there for many weeks, if not months, so the comic was safe, its future secured, and I could eventually leave it in the capable hands of my successors.

It’s not just with sales that the Sha Kickstarter reminds me of the past. It’s also the ‘rewards’ and ‘add-ons’ that act as incentives to pledges. On 2000AD, we had the free gifts. The space spinner was okay as a free gift, but I was much more excited – and so were the readers – about the biotronic stickers that I dreamed up. Readers loved them and I recall chuckling unsympathetically when the odd mum wrote in to complain that the stickers wouldn’t come off easily and her little Johnny cried when she tore it off like an elastoplast. Well, he was meant to be a Biotronic Man, FFS.

The Invasion decoder was also cool, but what I really wanted as a third gift was a ‘Brain Bag’, with two horrible eye sockets– like the Mars Attacks aliens – that readers put over their heads. The chap in charge of free gifts, Peter Lewis, thought it was really offensive. I certainly hoped so. One of the joys of childhood is to be offensive to adults. It wasn’t the first time we had clashed. On Battle, he had objected to my idea to have a free gift of German iron crosses, which I told Peter would appeal to wannabe bikers. A military cross holder himself, Peter said we don’t want to attract ‘those kinds of readers’. He threatened to resign if I got my way.

So with the Sha Kickstarter I like to think that we have equally appealing extras – like the signed prints by Olivier Ledroit of Sha characters. Still available at this time!

Set ‘C’ Art prints. Available as an add-on in our Kickstarter

Copies of my original scripts, and one-to-one story consultations. That last extra sold out within minutes of our launch!

And Sha itself is very much a story that would not be out of place in the 2000AD Golden Age, so it is stepping back in time there, too.

But there is one aspect of the Kickstarter that you’ll be VERY relieved to know I have absolutely nothing to do with!

And that is the fulfilment.

The postage and packaging, which is the domain of the very experienced and capable 77 Publishing, who will ensure your copy of Sha and any attendant extras arrives at your door in absolutely mint condition.

But it’s not an area I should ever be involved in.

You see, once upon a time, when I was fifteen, I was a ‘Post Boy’ and that was my job. A job I was absolutely useless at.

The reason being that my Catholic backers had stopped paying my expensive college fees. They warned me that if I didn’t go to the dubious junior seminary (Cotton) they had lined up for me, I would be kicked out of school. Back then, just like today, I don’t back down to bullies, so they threw me out of college.

You’d think I’d be free, at least, from the Catholics, but, unfortunately, I wasn’t. I’d completely underestimated them. One thing about Catholics is they never give up and they really, really hate to lose. Especially to a defiant fifteen-year-old who they were trying to break. Seriously. So they set up my first humble job as a kind of punishment for defying them and in the hope my ‘humiliating’ work at R & W Paul would bring me to my senses.

The previous ‘Post Boy’ showed me the ropes. He had gone to an even more expensive private school than me and he also seemed to have left his education under rather strange circumstances. He shot me a pitying glance as he worked out his week’s notice and hurriedly left. I remember being a bit surprised that he was a posh grammar school kid, too. Must be pure coincidence, I reassured myself.

Defining ‘Post Boy’ in this context would take too long and it’s a little off-topic, so I won’t go into all the grimy details here. I stuck out the job for a year. I was riding a trade bike along the same route all my old schoolmates used to go to college, wrapping up parcels and packages; and collecting letters to take to the post office; picking up humongous sacks of mail; opening the contents up; sorting out the cheques, the grain samples, the invoices, then hand delivering other letters around the town. There were two old guys ‘above me’ who were infinitely better than I was at these simple tasks.

A post boy in the 1960s. He looks a lot happier than I was!

But to give you just a brief glimpse of the darker side of the place I worked at, R & W Paul was the location, just one year later, for the dissection of a rent boy of similar age to me. His body was found in two suitcases in a village close-by – the shocking Tattingstone Suitcases Murder. It’s all online, and the cold-case cops who contacted me about it some three years ago, for my recollections, know who did it (two notorious paedophile doctors, long dead) but they haven’t put the whole story together. Officially it’s still a mystery. It may appear to be a one-off murder – appear I stress – but, let’s put it like this, I had a lucky escape. Very lucky. I don’t believe the murder was a one-off, but I can’t prove it, dammit.

Anyway, my heart wasn’t in my job so I got extremely bored hand delivering letters round the town, especially as they all required a signature. The letters started building up and up as I spent more time hanging out in cool coffee bars than in my supposed job as a ‘Post Boy’. I just shoved the letters in the voluminous pockets of my mod parka and forgot about them. Soon it was getting out of control. There was a huge backlog of letters that would have taken me days, if not weeks, to deliver!

So what to do?

I did the right thing, of course.

I posted them all down a drain.

And left Paul’s. It was what they deserved. And more. A lot more.

So as I was saying – you will be very pleased to know that I am not involved in any way in posting your precious copy of Sha to you. Special thanks to the excellent 77 Publishing for taking that task off my hands. It’s not a job I could ever go back to.

So now we’re on the Final Countdown of our Kickstarter with just a few days left to go! It ends on Friday 8th December. And Lisa is about to let me know the very latest figures. It’s so exciting it really is like stepping back in time to the start of 2000AD. If you haven’t pledged already, make her day by pledging for a copy of Sha!

All our generous paying subscribers on Iconoblast will receive a digital copy of the standard edition of Sha, as a small thank you for your support.

The cover of the standard edition