Highway 62

PeterDavid.net: Claypool problems

My reply as follows:

Okay...now we're just into silly territory. I mean, are people SO locked into monthly comics that they're literally *incapable* of making trade collections available when the content is most likely a previously sunk cost and provides a better return per unit than the singles? (This assuming that 1/3 of the audience would exist for a book that returns 5x as much).

I just don't get this. When I was a kid, comics cost bupkis. They were disposable and almost always offered massive story bang for the buck. Now comics cost a ton of money and try to pass themselves off as eternal objects with ISBNs, yet don't have spines and don't take to bookshelving real well. Gee, why is it that manga collections have taken over bookstore shelves with their fat spines that has artwork and numbering on them? What's up with that? Why is it that monthly comics are largely written as chapbooks and creators get all agitated when we want more story and in fact wish to wait for all of the story at a single sitting and want a more permanent object that we can come back to?

So, what's the current paradigm? Not only must trades not be available, but you must whine incessantly when readers don't rush out every Wednesday to pick up the latest chunk of an ongoing story? Monthlies or nothing. I mean, that's what's being said here. Here's a company that's teetering on the brink, and yet refuses to change the way they do things to possibly expand their audience or present themselves to an entirely new audience, but if you can't put out the monthlies like you always did, you're not interested. Being readily available in any format isn't sufficient. They have to be readily available in a saddle-stitched format. Why? To keep doing things as they've always been done?

if it means that much to you, refuse to adapt to a changing marketplace and get left behind.

And should Mr. David read this, please know that I enjoyed your run on The Hulk all those years ago, and that the above is probably more spiteful than necessary, but some things need to be said.

As for the "waiting on the Spanish hand-binding." Please. You want us to pay the per copy price that's unreasonably high in many cases, and then pay twenty bucks a volume on top of that (or significantly more) to bind them? Don't let's be silly now. If there's a change in your customer base and its desires, then perhaps it'd be more constructive to respond to those instead of whining about how things were better in the old days.

Comics have an extremely limited market/audience when written exclusive as habitual serial fiction. Not everyone wants to go to a comic store (even a cool one) every Wednesday to pick up the latest chapter of a story that started six months ago or more. Sometimes they'd like to have it all at a single go. By and large, people don't buy chapters of novels as they go. If you want to deliver novel/movie scale entertainment, then you have to follow some rules. The laws of the universe dictate that you can't put 120 story minute equivalents into 22 pages, and if you do it in 22 page chunks, then you sacrifice a lot in terms of pacing. If you want readers to come back to the next chapter out of desire to get more of the story and not out of habitual attachment to the franchise character, then make the single chapters satisfying on their own. It can be done, but it's not the norm in this business. Not by a long shot.

Find a new way to do things, because the old way ain't gonna work forever. Hell, it might even already be not working so great unless you've got sixty years of characters to lean on.