Diamond Comics Gives Retailers First Look at New Release
Comic Shop Owners Get to See and Feel Zoom Suit Before Ordering
Palm Beach January 15, 2006 – Comic Shops will receive an advance copy of the comic book Zoom Suit with their February order pack. The “Team Zoom Edition”, limited to 4,000 copies, is identical to Zoom Suit #1 except for the “Team Zoom logos printed on the front cover. The inclusion of the actual comic with the order pack, a first by any publisher, allows retailers to see and feel the product as well as share it with customers before committing to purchase.
This February Diamond Comics distributors, the largest distributor of comic books in the world, will offer Zoom Suit to direct market comic retailers at an incredible 75% off the cover price. The move allows retailers to earn over 150% of their normal margins on new comic products.
In addition to the advance copy, and despite the large discount, Zoom Suit #1 features 36 story pages and a unique MetalFX process that
Zoom Suit, an eagerly anticipated limited series by writer director John Taddeo, is based upon an award winning animated short by the same name. In 2005 the short was accepted to over 50 film festivals and screened to over 250,000 theater attendees. It was an official selection of the San Diego Comic Con Film Festival and was broadcast into 10 Million homes on Adelphia Cable’s High Definition Channel.
The project also garnered a tremendous amount of media attention by Taddeo’s unique marketing strategy, “I wanted to create a waiting audience for the book. Of course I wanted to inform retailers about the project, but I didn’t want the workload on them. The best way to market to a comic shop owner is to get his customers asking for your products. Getting the animation in front of hundreds of thousands of people was a great launching pad for the comic book”
Retailers may revel in the economics of the project, but consumers will love the bang for the buck. The 40 page Zoom Suit offers comic fans 36 story pages – 60% more content than traditional 22 page comics. The last four pages harken to the “old skool” days of comics and include comical advertisements such as “X-Ray Specs” and 2 letters pages based upon fan comments about the animated short.
The covers and interior art teams read like a “Who’s Who” of comic legends and up and coming rock stars. Bob Layton, Gene Colan, Bart Sears, Jim Starlin, Bill Tucci, and on interiors, hot off DC’s Son of Vulcan Keron Grant.
On the packaging side, Zoom Suit features a heavy cardstock cover and a unique “Metal Effects” printing process which perfectly accentuates the look of the suit. The interior is in full color and printed on 50lb. glossy paper. The cost burdens of the better paper, special ink and production costs nearly double the average offering did not deter Taddeo from offering Zoom Suit at the largest retail discount ever.
In the early 1990’s, Taddeo was a marketing manager at Marvel and Fleer. Eventually landing at Big Entertainment as their Director of Marketing. Taddeo left the comic book industry in 1996 to open a chain of theme restaurants with partners Adam West and Lou Ferrigno named Cartoon Saloon. He reemerged in 2004 as a bidder for the assets in the Crossgen bankruptcy case eventually losing to Disney. In 2005, Taddeo made a successful attempt to acquire the Valiant assets of defunct Akklaim, but the deal fell through when the trustee learned he did not own a portion of the marks he had sold. Undeterred, Taddeo continued production on his own creations such as Zoom Suit and the web comic CO-ED Dorm which is slated for a animated TV series in the vein of SouthPark and Drawn Together.
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