It's got a pretty good cover.
Is this their first project?
Yeah, very quirky.
Richard and Jordan are trying to sell their comic book in forge a career in the industry,
making it depends on how ladies and gentlemen are received by the public.
It's not my cup of tea.
The first comic book is thought to have been created in the 1930s
with a magazine publication of selected newspaper cartoon strips.
Now the global comic book industry is worth £5 billion
and, like any other city in the UK, Leeds has its own comic book scene.
It's here that Richard and Jordan met and began on their adventure.
We started off working with Script, so Rich would come up with a story.
He'd run it by me. I'd give him my thumb up approval.
Yeah, you're welcome.
We'd get together and do thumbnails, which is the most fun part.
The premise to issue one is that there's a series of murders occurring in Old London Town.
Is it Jad the Ripper? No, it's not.
The issue one's called The Curse of the We're Hyena,
so it kind of gives away what the mystery murders are.
We'd sum it up as adventure, mystery, romance and monocles.
Strapped for cash, Jordan and Richard had to fundraise hundreds of pounds
to get their story to print.
We used Indiegogo, an online fundraising platform.
We got enough money to cover all of our costs, basically, from the beginning.
A lot of it was donations from friends in Fabula.
That was sort of the start-up, and now we're hoping to run it on its own, Steve.
Ladies and gentlemen, can now be found on all the shelves of every comic book store in Leeds.
I'll put it on the shelf, and then you're like, don't put it there, put it with the new releases.
So we were literally on the same shelf as the Marvel and DC comics.
In the scene, it was like, I felt like I was looking at it, and I was like, oh,
that just looks like somebody's placed a random comic on that shelf that shouldn't be there.
It's like this guilt that I'm just such a fraud who's been sneaking into shops
and putting his product on the shelf so people will buy him, nobody knows.
At a local comic fair, retailers gave their opinion on issue one.
I like the Victorian elements, highwayman style.
I do actually like this. It's good.
I like the quirkiness of this, and the alternate history that they're trying to portray,
which is always something that I love anyway.
I'm not crazy about things that set in the Victorian era, but saying that,
I really like the Victorian genre, so I'm open minded.
It's nicely laid out. The print's good.
I mean, the guy's artwork is really good, so like I say, if they want some promotion,
I'm quite happy taking flyers or copies of the comic around to different fairs.
It's good artwork, looks well written, what I've seen of it.
I'm quite happy promoting it.
Richard goes to some of the stockists of Ladies and Gentlemen to see how it's been selling.
Ladies and Gents has been in a trial like that for a week now. How's it sold?
Very well, to be honest with you.
Yeah, I think it's this issue we have on the counter, and one more, and I think that's it.
Now there's a little proper fly up before the weekend.
Ladies and gentlemen, please be enlarged to there.
Okay, come on, it's pretty spectacular.
Oh, thank you very much.
How's it sold this morning?
It's done alright. I mean, we've had a lot of people through the door,
and usually we sell like one or two over a month of small press stuff.
I think we sold two copies in the last half hour, so that's pretty good.
Yeah, we expect it to do really well.
However, Richard and Jordan need to reach a wider audience to increase their fan base.
We're probably going to be releasing sort of one-page exclusive pages online on our blog.
In the meantime, between the issues that tell ladies and gentlemen short stories,
just to kind of fill in the gaps.
They won't necessarily be related, but, you know, just something to keep it going.
This involves a lot of working on Blogger and Twitter and just Facebook
and just spamming people's pay.
Internet is a great tool for promotions,
but could online digital comic releases damage the market for printed comics?
There's been instances recently of people reading comics online and then coming in here to buy it
because they want the comic and, you know, sort of expressing a preference for the actual paper,
so it's the threat there, but it doesn't seem that real at the moment, but who knows.
Matt Miller, who's like the guy who makes kick-ass and did a big Marvel event called Civil War,
he wrote a thing saying that there's always a place to print because digital comics
don't have that same feel as comics.
I get really annoyed about this constant digital's the future, it's fantastic, it's brilliant,
but what they're failing to understand is the house of cards, the comic industry is the house of cards.
If you kill the resellers and you kill the paper producers,
you actually will lose your ready-made market for digital comics as well.
For now, the threat from digital seems distant
and evidence suggests that the market for print is in fact growing.
Since 2001, the graphic novel industry alone has increased five-fold,
now taking in excess of $375 million annually.
We've extended the whole sort of indie section, it's huge compared to what it used to be,
so it's really gone from nothing to just so much, it's like a big success story.
I think now is a good time to break into comics as a reader
because there's a lot more diversity that's visible.
Now that's not to say there wasn't diversity before, certainly there was,
but what we're seeing now is greater uptake of that diversity
and also greater visibility in outlets that wouldn't necessarily be limited to
what you might call comic readers.
If comics are to survive in the longer term,
they have to also expand out of that market into things like bookshops
and perhaps other media retailers.
So it's actually very good to see retailers like Waterstones, HMV,
places like that selling comics.
So, with so much competition on the shelves,
will comic books be the future for Richard and Jordan?
Will they get a second issue to press?
It's produced to a really high standard, it's a good format as well.
It's full-colour cover, which a lot of them don't have.
It sits on the shelves really well with a lot of the professional stuff.
I reckon it would get to the point where people would be actively asking
when the second issue's in.
As far as first-time business ventures go,
the release of Ladies and Gentlemen issue one has been nothing short of a success.
Richard and Jordan are no doubt pleased and broken even
and having secured a place on the shelves for issue two,
they now have prospects for serious profits in the future.
For me, the money thing has always been about making enough money to go to issue two
and then I want issue two to be, I could have money to go to issue three.
Well, we got, I guess it's kind of business advice from going to conventions.
There's always a break into comics.
Yes, that's a good point.
But they always give you the same advice, we just go and make comics.
Because you think, oh, we're going to learn some kind of esoteric knowledge
about how this pro became a pro.
And they always say, well, my way is different from his way
and his way is different from the next guy.
I think a lot of people strive to write something that people would want to read.
A lot of people have ideas that they think might be really good
but everybody else thinks it's a nonsense.
If you're publishing for yourself, then you write what you're happy with.
You draw what you're happy with.
If it sells, it sells.
But I don't think a lot of creators, especially small press creators,
are doing it for the sales.
They do it because they've got talent and they want to show it to people.
The end goal would be to be able to come up with a comics creator without being weird.
Like I've just made that.
It's like, you know what I'm saying?
I'd be a famous fan if you just picked up a new title.
It's not quite right or justified.
I think that's what I want to be.
People say, what's your job?
When they're playing, someone says, oh, what do you do?
Well, I'm a comic artist.
Instead of feeling like you're lying to them.
