Found on Matt Webb’s blog, the difficulties with our comic SVK, which was sold direct by his company to readers:
It reminds me a shipping snafu with SVK, the amazing comic book by Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker, that we published at BERG, from Jack Schulze’s original concept, way back in 2011.
Here are the blog posts about SVK.
The macguffin in the story is a device that make people’s thoughts visible – as words floating about their heads. Thought bubbles, of course, in the outer reality of the reader.
And the comic shipped with an ultraviolet flashlight.
The comic was printed with an extra, invisible UV ink. (Which I seem to remember had some particular security around it because they don’t want it used for counterfeiting?) So you had this double layer.
ANYWAY.
Shipping.
The flashlights were flat, credit card-sized, push to activate. So they slipped easily into the shipping envelope.
You can see where this is going.
When the comics were packaged, and then when the packages were boxed, and then when the ones at the ends were squeezed, some of the flashlights would activate inside the envelopes and the batteries would run done, and comics with dead UV flashlights went through many letterboxes.
You wouldn’t believe how much prep and risk mitigation we’d done up-front.
Yet I remember tracking the percentage failure rate. Oof.
We shipped a lot of replacements.
The second printing had the flashlights in an extra bubblewrap pouch.
The thing was difficult enough to write. I can’t imagine what it was like to deal with production and shipping. I will always love that little book, though. Matt Brooker did an astonishing job with it, and I got to make it with my friends.