I’ve been a fan and collector of the British 2000 A.D. magazine since Eagle comics started running Judge Dredd reprints from it in the early 1980s. For Americans, this series is a real oddity: a weekly anthology that’s been running continuously since the late 1970s, and has to date racked up something like 1500 issues and counting. It’s been the launching ground of everything from Judge Dredd (and the whole Dredd universe) to Strontium Dog, Zenith, The A.B.C. Warriors, Rogue Trooper, and countless others. Issues of the series are still cheap on the back issue market, particularly over in Great Britain, and I managed to score large runs of it several times over the years from stateside collectors.
Unfortunately, storing large numbers of these comics is a real pain due to their incredibly odd (by American standards) paper size. The series has changed dimensions over the years, and the earlier ones are both wider and taller than U.S. magazine sizes (although far shorter than Treasury size). So far as I can tell, there’s no stock storage box of suitable dimensions available from any U.S. box maker, and only one manufacturer of 2000 A.D. boxes (Collectorline, over in Britain). Unfortunately, shipping big hunks of oversized cardboard from Great Britain to California is costly in the extreme—we’d likely have to fork out $20–30/box in shipping charges alone (and we need about 30 of them!)
Does anyone out there know of a U.S. supplier for 2000 A.D. boxes? (such a box would also fit comics like Deadline, Toxic! and Eagle).
If not, there’s always the alternative of designing a custom box ourselves. This would involve having our box maker create a custom die: a startup expense that runs several hundred dollars at least—although we could conceivably make it less of a hit if other folks were also in need of such boxes.
Any ideas or suggestions? If not, does anyone else have interest in 2000 A.D. boxes if we were forced to enter the box manufacturing business ourselves?
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