The Dharma Punks

The cover of the 2014 collected edition by Earth's End Publishing

Collected Edition:

* Earth’s End Publishing (2014)
* Conundrum Press (2015)
* Presque Lune (2015)

Set in Auckland, 1994, ***The Dharma Punks*** by Ant Sang is a metaphysical meditation on life, love, friendship, punk rock and blowing things up.

Originally published in 2001 as a DIY, self-published, eight-issue comic book series, *The Dharma Punks* quickly became a cult classic. Outselling big titles like *X-Men*, at local comic shops, *The Dharma Punks* soon sold out and was unavailable for years.

More than a decade later Ant teamed up with Earth’s End Publishing to reprint *The Dharma Punks* as a collected edition, for the first time. It was released on the 31st of October 2014, with a launch party at Heroes for Sale on the 23rd of October 2014. Since then it has been published in the US, UK, Canada, and France to critical acclaim.

## Publications

### Original run (2001-2003)

* *The Dharma Punks #1* (Self-published, reprint 2002, first printed 2001)
* *The Dharma Punks #2* (Self-published, reprint 2003, first printed 2001)
* *The Dharma Punks #3* (Self-published, sometime 2001-2002)
* *The Dharma Punks #4* (Self-published, sometime 2001-2002)
* *The Dharma Punks #5* (Self-published, sometime 2001-2002)
* *The Dharma Punks #6 (*Self-published, 2002)
* *The Dharma Punks #7* (Self-published, November 2002)
* *The Dharma Punks #8* (Self-published, 2003)

### Collected Edition

* *The Dharma Punks* (Earth's End Publishing, 31st of October 2014)

## PROMOTION SPIN HYPE ADVERTISING THE GOOD OIL

Drawing your cartoons or comix is only half the battle, you've got to get them 'out there' . Ant Sang gives us an insight into his efforts to promote... The Dharma Punks I've been working on that for The Dharma Punks - making a big effort to appeal to the 'non-comic fans' as it were. Getting distribution through a distributor is definitely good, though it'll be a few weeks yet before I know how many comics were sold at the book/magazine/newsagents through the distributor. I'm with Independent Magazine Distributors, and they've been bloody friendly, helpful, and keen (especially seeing as it's comics we're dealing with===). They're based in Auckland, so I don't know how that affects you, being in Wellington and all. Doing the media rounds is also good. I got myself on Space (TV2), and despite the criticisms about the show, it did do it's job of interesting folk enough into tracking down and buying copies. Did an interview on BFM as well. Pavement ran an article, as did The Fix (Auckland's The Package), and The Herald ran a small plug for it too. Oh yeah, and Kerry did a nice review for The Package just the other week. Shane from Graphic emailed me the other day and said that lots of people had been coming in after The Package review and were asking about the comic, and Alan from Comics Compulsion said people they've never seen before have been coming in and looking for copies, so yeah, publicity definitely works a treat. Before doing all of this, I'd read a lot of crass 'how to write press releases' -type books, and to be honest I haven't done any of it. I've just approached people in a low-key way, sent out stuff. People have been interested because comics is something they don't see very often. The obscurity of local comics has worked in its own favour, in that people see it as novel, new, quirky, different etc etc. I also held an exhibition at a gallery in K'Rd (which is very much a 'bohemian/fringe' area of Auckland). I'd definitely recommend it. It got good interest from folk who don't usually venture into comic shops, and it was fun as well. So anyway that's been my gameplan so far. It's all been a bit of an experiment so far, just to see what kind of response I can get out of the masses, and the experiment is an on-going thing as you might well guess.

1. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20061004065351/http://www.comics.org.nz/wiki/index.php/The\_Dharma\_Punks