Hello, hello, and welcome on board!

It’s taken us 18 months to get our website up, running and partially populated.

By “partially” I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with what you find right now: thousands of quality graphic novels to buy at the click of a button, and thousands of reviews for those same graphic novels culled from fifteen years of Page 45 Mailshots and printed Recommended Reading lists. I can’t tell you what a joy it is to see those reviews now used more than once, here on the website to be read and disdained for as long as we both shall live.

Page 45 has always been a passionate, fiercely independent comicbook retailer, and it’s always been a matter of pride to us that we don’t simply regurgitate the publishers’ hype, but assess the works we love for ourselves and be honest when we find creativity lacking. You won’t always agree with us which is why we’ve made room underneath each review for your own input, but I can hand-on-heart assure you that in over fifteen years we have never tried to flog a work we do not believe in because so much of our custom has depended on customers returning: on building a sense of trust so that someone comes back and says, “I loved the book that you just recommended, so where do I go from here?”

There’s been so little information that’s reliable or accessible to someone discovering this medium for the first time that we’ve always made ourselves available on the shop floor for an extemporised review or two targeted to each individual’s personal interests be they political, autobiographical, travel, humour, speculative fiction, crime or just plain crazy.

Here we’re hoping to replicate the shop-floor experience of visiting us in person as faithfully as possible. To that end you can browse by yourselves using the categories we’ve selected (more on that in a blog coming soon), or by using our search engine for creators and titles you may already be aware of and just want to explore. Or you can see where our own hearts lie by investigating what’s Always Recommended, or what we have chosen as the pinnacle of excellence each month as part of our Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month Club.

If, however, you want a more hands-on experience, the equivalent of asking us for personal recommendations on the shop floor is to use that panel on the front page, and indeed every page of the store, called Want A Recommendation? It’s beautifully illustrated like the rest of this website by one of our all-time favourite comicbook creators, Nabiel Kanan, and I can assure you that it won’t be answered by a robot, but by one of us.

I can also assure you that there is far more material to come.

I don’t mean that there’s far more material to be written – although I intend doing plenty of that too – but that I have dozens of files of extra Fun & Resources already waiting to be edited into shape just like the reviews. Stuff we’ve written before that could prove useful for new comicbook creators, vital for students writing their dissertations, and pure entertainment for those of you with a Charlie Brooker mean streak.

But there comes a point after 18 months when you just need to launch.

If you want to be kept up to date on that new material, then please sign up to these blogs. If you want to be kept up to date on creator signings and the latest comicbook news, please sign up to these blogs. If you simply want to appease my ego and read what you’ve all written to us, then please check into these blogs regularly or even subscribe to the Page 45 Blog Feed. One of the most popular features of our Page 45 Mailshots has always been its letter column in which I’m a wee bit naughty with an attitude entirely made up for entertainment purposes. It’ll be shifting to these blogs.

Hope you approve, let us know what you think.

Cheers,

– Stephen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 20th, 2010 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Various, Letters & Other News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.