The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

As Bob Dylan put it, the times they are a changing; websites and blogs also change as new ideas occur and new options become feasible and ours is no exception. In the last couple of years alone we’ve made major changes to our sites, culminating in a new design lasy year. We started the FPI blog, which has, I hope, grown up a bit more, changed and has expanded; we’ve even started podcasting. But nothing stays static and we’ve been thinking about new functions we could introduce in the future that would make the website and blog more enjoyable and more useful to our readers and that means we want people to be involved in it. Here’s Kenny with some of the ideas he’s been thinking about:

Now that January is almost over and we have packed away the madness of the Christmas period for another year we wanted to give you some idea of new things coming to our website and blogs in the coming year and to ask you for any ideas for further features you may have. The Blog has developed into the public voice for FPI this past year and we have had many compliments from those in and outside the trade, we hope to keep bringing you the wide coverage, with a focus on comics, that we are still trying to get right. And improve.

We are in the progress of writing a programme which will allow you to help us make a creators database. This will build, we hope, into listings of all people connected with the comics and illustration fields and the great thing is you can help us write it. Whilst all entries will need approval before going live the ‘Creators Encyclopedia’ (we will come up with a better name for it in due course – or perhaps one of you can) will be something that you the fans and readers help build. It will be a templated data entry screen into which you insert information that will then go on to generate a page in the Encyclopedia – we have mocked up entries for Dan Clowes and Brian Chippendale (borrowing heavily from other sources for now) to give you an idea of how it might well look. Essentially this feature will be an expansion of the wonderful Comiclopedia that is produced by Amsterdam store Lambiek combined with the greater depth of profile you can find on the excellent ‘Read yourself Raw‘ site (from which we cribbed some of the Clowes info for this example). We hope as this is written by many hands that we will quickly be able to build a mass of entries and that people’s shared knowledge will help to make this the most complete creators database anywhere – hey, perhaps some creators themselves may take advantage of the ‘Update’ facility to improve entries that are already in place. Each entry will have a recommended reading list for that creator, pointing to their works in all languages, and, we hope, full page examples of their work attached. We hope to have this launched by June – although it may be sooner.

We are also working on including chat room facilities into our site. Not just so you can all sit and chat to each other about comics – we imagine there are enough of them already – but so we can do online ‘Live’ interviews with creators. We hope this will be able to give you a chance to ask questions of some of the bigger names in the field in a direct contact live chat room environment. Each person will need to register with us in advance so as we can attach a real name to their online name when we later transcribe these interviews and present them on the Blog.

On a similar note we are planning to introduce an online reading group. This will be a place where for a short time a Graphic Novel or Novel can be discussed at length with other interested parties. For the 6 weeks prior to the discussion we will be offering the book at a very special price to encourage you to purchase and join in and if you have it already, can borrow from a library well and good. We haven’t quite decided if this will be a live discussion or a static one where people can add their comments – or it may be both. Joe who runs our blog is a veteran of organising and contributing to book groups (he runs two in his (adopted) home town of Edinburgh) so we will be bringing his experience to bear in trying to create something we think a number of you will find fun.

We are working on improving the product info for our Graphic Novel listings – we hope to be able in future to be able to attach a couple of interior pages to each entry to make your buying decision easier. This feature is being used by many other retailers already so there will be nothing new here but it is something we have been regularly asked for by customers who like things like Amazon’s “Look inside” feature.

And, at last, there will be forums. Many of you have asked us for them and until now we have been wary as we don’t believe they should be open to people using them for abusive purpose so we need to administrate them. Anyhow, so many have asked that we intend to introduce one soon.

There are some other developments in the early stages – but nothing we can talk about yet – if any of you have any other suggestions we would be very happy to try and incorporate them so please let us know.