You may have noticed that Bakuba has not been updated last Sunday. We’ve decided to only update Bakuba once a week on Thursdays. Ironically this is due to time constraints caused by the impending release of the German Bakuba graphic novel next month. This is going to be the very first Zampano graphic novel to be published and therefore deserves some special attention, which in turn takes time. There is no word yet on an English version of Bakuba, or for that matter any other of our books. As you may know the American comic book market is pretty much in shambles and we decided to focus our print efforts on Europe, mainly Germany and France. Below you can see the final cover of the Bakuba print edition and please let us know if you would be interested to see this book to be published in the US and the UK.

Finally we’re able to announce which conventions we’re gonna attend this spring and summer. The definitive list of artists that will be signing and products that we’ll have for sale will be announced soon. Please email me, if you any question about any of the shows:

18. April: Comicbörse Vienna
2. Mai: Comicbörse Zürich
8. Mai: Free comic book day im Zappa Doing, Winterthur
9. Mai: Fumetto: Comicbörse, Lucern
3-6. Juni: Comic-Salon Erlangen

Design for the convention in Vienna by Mary Hildebrandt und David Boller

It’s the end of January again and that means that it’s time for the massive annual comic festival in Angouleme, France. The small sleepy town in the heart for France is again expecting 200′000 visitors that are gonna turn the small town in into the mecca of European comics for one week. After a creative break last year I will be attending the show again this year and for the first time with all the Zampano projects in tow. We won’t have any booth space this time, but we’re gonna try to figure out how to strategically plan our arrival in the pretty important French market. We’ll pobably have a much better idea of our situation after meeting some key people and movers and shakers. There seem to be quite a few possibilities on how to promote and place out graphic novels in this crowded but appreciative market. I also don’t want to exclude the possibility of entering the French market as a publisher ourself (being in Switzerland we’re certainly better suited for that than most other European countries), be it in cooperation with an other publisher/distributor or with some dear colleagues as partners. Definitely exciting prospects…

We are also bringing our cameras with us and you can expect full coverage in the week following the festival (hopefully a better one than the one we did about Munich…LOL). Please be aware that we will not be ablet to answer and emails and phone calls during that time period. If you’re gonna attend the festival and wanna hook up, feel free to contact me a the following email address info[at]zampano-online.com and I’ll send you my contact info.

While we’re at the show the Zampano system will be set to auto-update and all updates will be live at 01:00 European standart time. Let’s hope that it works.

We hope you all had an enjoyable few days and enjoyed our holiday cards. While the German Zampano site is going on hiatus for a week due to some internal upgrades, we’ll be updating the English version on a regular schedule. There is also a slew of blog posts in the pipeline. The internet was buzzing this holiday season and we’ve taken note. Among the topics of upcoming posts are:

- Report on the fallout at Keenspot including a death threat against Scott Kurtz. It’s not gonna get any more dramatic or silly than that…
- Kindle digital Books outsell regular books this holiday season.
- Apple prepares new tablet PC.
- Year-end review. What have we achieved in our first year and what’s to come next year…

Check back every day to continue reading the comics and blog entries.

The brand-new Zampano Mini-Mags Nr. 2 arrived from the printer today and we’re very impressed. They look awesome and the printer used a glossier paper for the inside section. The magazines are gonna be available at the convention this weekend and for those of you that live in Europe also in the Zampano Store. The issue is free with a sketch in the back of the magazine but we ask you to contribute to the shipping costs. The first issue is at this point out of print and the second one will also not be reprinted.