Godzilla crushes 75 comic stores

In addition to having a dream team of Eric Powell, Tracy March, and Phil Hester on our GODZILLA: KINGDOM OF MONSTERS series — plus Alex Ross on an issue 1 cover, too — We did a promotion with retailers that was pretty unique among anything we’ve ever done. And it worked on a scale none of us expected.

The idea came from Chris Mowry, who works in production at IDW, writes some comics for us, and is (pardon the pun) a monster Godzilla fan.

For any retailer who ordered at least 500 copies of issue 1, we would crush their store on a cover. Artist Matt Frank, a regular contributor to G-Fan magazine and who’s doing variant covers for upcoming issues, drew up the big G’s foot, and then Matt and a team of artists did a custom cover showing the participating retailer’s shop getting crushed under foot. We set our sights on a couple dozen retailers taking part, so when all was said and done and the tally was over 70 participating retailers, we knew this was going to be something special.

(Also something grueling, for Matt Frank, and editor Bobby Curnow and Mowry, among the team of people involved in creating all these covers, since we had barely two weeks to complete all 75 covers once the orders were finalized. So those gents put in a lot of sleepless nights, but we got them all done and the book was approved to print this past week, for an in-store date of March 30.)

We’re also doing a series of IDW employee covers we’ll offer at Comic-Con this summer, and one of those (featuring, from L-R, Bobby, me, GODZILLA Assistant Editor Carlos Guzman, and Mowry in the G-slippers) is pictured above. There will also be an exclusive cover for Wonder Con in early April (that one featuring all-new art from Matt Frank, not just the con drawn under the existing foot).

And as for all the retailer covers? Rich Johnston has run every single one of ’em over at Bleeding Cool, in addition to the Wonder Con image and the impressive regular cover images by Powell (one of them a gatefold) and Ross.

Inside issue 1, we’ll picture every single one of these covers, too, along with the name and contact info for the retailer, for collectors who might want to track any of them down.

All of this has led to the biggest single issue we’ve ever done, an entirely appropriate way to launch a book about a giant monster. It never would’ve worked without the amazing support from so many retailers, as well as the extreme labors from IDW Retail Marketing Director Dirk Wood and all the folks listed above.

And underneath all of this, the biggest point is that the issue itself is a helluva lot of fun. And getting that issue into so many peoples’ hands is the whole goal here, so hopefully anyone who could possibly want to check the issue out will be able to find it. And please support your local participating retailer for being bold enough to take part in this, too.