and old comic collection. I went online on eBay and started to see
how much they were worth and then I decided I did not want to
part with them. But I started to see how much I could get for them,
so I bought job lots of other people’s own collections and then sold
them individually and made a profit. After we got married, it wasn’t
till 2011 that I started Cult Empire, which was an eBay store that
sold action figures and backlog comics. We quickly built our business and, in 2012, we created our own website, cultempire.com.
Looking back on it, at that time, I felt this was the right time for us
to do this. I had learned how to manufacture and, if I could add that
formula to creating our own brand of comics, then it would be the
way forward for Cult Empire as a company.
SP!: YOU BUILT YOUR BUSINESS ON EBAY DURING A REALLY
COMPETITIVE TIME. WERE THERE BUMPS IN THE ROAD THAT
ALMOST MADE YOU WANT TO QUIT? HOW DID YOU OVERCOME
THEM?
GL: When we first started, it was a lot easier to trade, but that
soon changed. We had a lot of subscribers who wanted golden
age, silver age comics from American comic shops, so we sourced
them, because they were difficult to find in the UK. But with the
recession, new tax laws, and the price to ship things over to the
UK, it became very difficult to make a margin. This was when we
moved into stocking all the new releases and started to trade with
Diamond Comics. Trading with Diamond really gave us an insight
on the inside of how the industry works and why it is difficult for
small press to grow. So with my manufacturing background and my
experience as a retailer, I felt it was very important for Cult Empire to
produce our own brand of comics and, if we are to survive against
the big boys, then we need comics that can compete.
SP!: ZOMBIES. SOME SAY SUCH WORK WOULD BE GRUESOME.
HOW DO YOU BALANCE STORY AND HORROR?
GL: One word: LIFE. My writing is always based on real life mixed
with my own personal creative madness. At school, I was always
very much interested in history, studying World War Two, American
History, Plains Indians, the Civil War, and the Vietnam War. In the
1980s, there were a lot of movies about the Vietnam War and I
always remember when I watching one of them and my grandfather came in and I said, “This is great.” His response was one from a
man who served in World War Two, which was, “Don’t believe what
you see in movies. War is not great.” That was something important for Vietnam Zombie Holocaust; when the American soldiers
came back from Nam, there was so much hostility towards them,
but we will never know what horror they experienced. When I was
doing a lot of research on the veterans from both sides of the war,
I felt this story had to be told, not by right or left wing views, but
by life experiences. The zombies themselves in the story are horror,
but the carnage that unfolds is real war and real life experiences.
It is funny how the audience or reader accepts gruesome horror
when it is zombies in a book or on TV, but when faced with a reallife tale about the reality of war, they will turn the page or switch
off their TV. When James read the script and we then had our first
meeting about VZH, we decided that if we do this book, not only
do we want a comic that can compete, but we want to tell this
story in all its gruesome glory, with VZH’s own, bizarre, macabre
style. It has been amazing working with James, as we come from
the same page, and we fed off each other, which made the story a
SELF PUBLISHER MAGAZINE 2014
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