JaegerMatters
I’ve been a fan of Carla Speed McNeil’s anthropological SF comic, Finder, for a couple of years now, so the biggest delight of SPX for me was the chance to pick up the collected edition of the latest story, The Rescuers (my review forthcoming), and talk to her about her plans for the future. There are some big, big changes in the offing for a series that ranks as a favorite of many discerning critics. The following comes straight from the mouth of LightSpeed Press’ proprietor and onlye begettor of Jaeger the Sin-Eater.
Issue 38, the first chapter of Five Crazy Women, should be “in stores” next week. It will be the last paper single issue of the series. It will by no means be the end of Finder.
“Hopefully by October,” Speed McNeil will begin putting new material on the LightSpeed Press website at a planned rate of about three pages a week. It will be free.
“Every July like clockwork” she will collect the latest complete story into book form and sell it.
Why the change? The collections sell “like crazycakes.” [Note: Yes, that's a quote!] The singles don’t. Speed McNeil says single-issue sales are stagnant, and while she’s not losing money on them, she doesn’t consider them a cost-effective way of building an audience. “Bless the dozen stores that order them,” she says, but in a lot of cases “they’re just going in subscribers’ boxes and not on the shelf.”
I asked her what esthetic changes she anticipated from the changed business model. Would she feel compelled to provide a mini-cliffhanger with each new page, for instance? She responded that she already has been thinking more and more of each page as a compositional unit, but that the biggest change would be the end of the pressure to provide some kind of issue-ending bang every 24 pages. “Give the story a chance to breathe” as she puts it.
I’m intrigued by the change, myself. Publishing five issues in two years (the length of time it took Speed McNeil to bring out all five chapters of the Rescuers story), stagnant as opposed to declining single-issue sales count as a minor miracle. (And testimony to the dedication Finder inspires in its fans.) Now we’ll get a regular fix of new material, and every summer that material will appear in its most appropriate format.
Will there be any reason to pay for the books when the pages have been on the web? Several. Pages aren’t guaranteed to remain on the web – there are space considerations. A book is forever. There’s cover art and end notes and convenient binding and likely better reproduction than you can get printing it off at your desktop.
What we’re seeing with Speed McNeil’s new business model is another way creators use their web presence as loss leaders for their meatspace business, and another phase in the gradual death of the single-issue comic book as a medium.
UPDATE: Glen Engel-Cox compares Carla Speed McNeil to Aimee Mann.
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September 25, 2005 @ 12:05 pm
The Slow Death of the Single-Issue Comic, Continued
Finder, the periodical comic, comes to an end. Finder, the acclaimed anthropological SF series, lives on….
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September 25, 2005 @ 8:33 pm
Finding a New Model
Jim Henley spent the weekend at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda. I went to this in 2002, back when I was teaching comics in my writing classes at American University, but haven’t been in recent years. Sounds like it’s…
Comment by Doug M. —
September 26, 2005 @ 2:37 am
Phil Foglio went this route with his Girl Genius comic, starting back in April of this year.
At the time, I thought it was because Phil had somehow managed to screw the pooch with the floppy version of GG. (Phil is notorious for missing deadlines, and the “bimonthly” Girl Genius managed to produce just 13 issues in four years.) So I was expecting that the three-pages-a-week-online model would last until Phil ran out of prewritten stuff, then crash and burn.
However, it’s been five months now, and he hasn’t missed a day. You might want to give it a dekko, over at girlgeniusonline.com. I would say the quality has dipped very slightly from the monthly books — the lack of an editor is gradually making itself noticeable — but it’s still pretty good, if you like that sort of thing. (Which I admit I do.)
Phil is also going the “new trade every year or so” route. I suppose it’ll be a few years before we see if this is viable. It might could be, though. Chris Onstad over at achewood.com is making a living selling books and t-shirts based on his (very good) webcomic, and Rich Burlew, author of of The Order of the Stick (www.giantitp.com) just quit his day job.
There’s /definitely/ a tendency towards making each page a standalone mini-episode, complete with last-panel cliffhanger. Note, though, that this is just an intensification of a pre-existing characteristic; good writers have always done this.
There’s also a tendency towards looseness in the storyline, now that it’s no longer constrained into units of 20-some pages. This may not be altogether a good thing. The story may be able to breath, or it may be able to sprawl, bloat, and flop around bonelessly. I see both tendencies at work with Girl Genius. YMMV, but isn’t it interesting watching a new medium evolve before our wondering eyes?
Doug M.
Comment by Doug M. —
September 26, 2005 @ 2:39 am
Just noticed the title of this post. D’oh.
Doug M.
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September 27, 2005 @ 7:01 am
[...] 5 What If They Gave a Scoop and Nobody Came? Near as I can tell, this very blog was the first place on all the internets you could learn of Carla Speed McNeil’s dec [...]