EXCLUSIVE: Amanda Meadows talks THE DEVASTATOR

While attending last year’s COMIKAZE Expo, I was able to sit down and speak with Amanda Meadows.

She’s one of the creative forces behind THE DEVASTATOR!

If you’re prepared than read on!

UTF: so for the readers that don’t know about The Devastator, why don’t you go ahead and tell them what it’s all about?

Amanda Meadows: Sure. Well, The Devastator is a comedy publication. We are a perfect-bound, full-color compendium of all the best cartoonists and artists with the top comedy voices today. We mix together comics and writing. It’s full of references from The Daily Show, The Onion, Adult Swim, Marvel, DC, Pantographics and Webcomics. It’s all of our favorite people and each issue is a different theme.

The most recent one was toys and games, which came with a fold-out, playable board game that’s a Clue parody, called Cluemates: The passive-aggressive roommate board game. So, yeah, every release is different, and we do all kinds of fun print tricks that you can only enjoy while reading a physical book.

UTF: Well, that sounds awesome. Where did the idea for The Devastator come from?

Amanda Meadows: Well, a lot of comics are really serious and a lot of them are genre-oriented. There’s an audience for that, and there’s also an audience for the kind of humor that you find on the internet. We wanted to do something that specifically works for the print reader.

We just wanted to have humor in print again.

That was really the impetus for putting it together. We really missed classic Mad, National Lampoon, and early Spy Magazine. There was just so much great stuff, The Onion  and that’s what we wanted to recreate, but for today’s 20- to 30-something geeky-adult audience.

UTF: Are you guys considering going digital?

Amanda Meadows: We’re pretty much, like 90%, strictly print. We do like digital, we like what it can do. We have versions of our issues available on our website, DRM-Free, and we’re also on the Comics Plus app by iVerse as well. So, we’re definitely doing digital, but you miss out.  It’s a cheaper experience, financially, but also in terms of quality reading, because you can’t do the decoder class that you can do in the Spy issue, or enjoy the hologram on our Crossovers issue, or play the full board game in person like with our Toys and Games release.

UTF: I just have one more question to ask you.

If you could say anything to any fanboys or fangirls to sell them on The Devastator, to get them to go out of their way so they start buying it, what would you say?

Amanda Meadows: Oh, my gosh. Go to devastatorquarterly.com and get them directly from us. Myself, Geoffrey [Golden] and our staff, we do it all by ourselves. We’re self-published, self-distributed, and we’re in 40 different stores across the U.S., U.K. and Canada, which is great, and so if you’re in a far-away place and you want to go to your store, go ahead, support your store too. But, subscribe on our website and we’ll mail the issues right to you.

I want to take the time to thank Ms. Amanda Meadows for the chat. I speak for the rest of the staff as I say: can’t wait to see the next issue of THE DEVASTATOR!

But what did you guys think of the interview? Sound off with your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below!