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Posted by:

alexgrecian

Date:

June 18th, 2007 1:10 PM

Header:

Waiting for the Trade...

Bulletin:

“Waiting for the trade” makes sense for readers who are merely curious about a miniseries or a specific arc in an ongoing series, and in those cases the practice makes sense for creators and publishers, too. Sometimes a miniseries is put out as a stop-gap measure on the way to the trade collection. The series serves as advance publicity for the inevitable trade and acts as a sort of loss-leader.

But it’s harder than ever to launch a new ongoing book.

I’ll use my own series, Proof, as an example. (Proof will be launched as an ongoing monthly from Image Comics in October 2007. End of blatant plug.) If my collaborator, Riley Rossmo, and I had set out to tell a quick story about Bigfoot, working for the CIA to track down a monster, we might be looking ahead at the trade. We might expect the individual issues to sell poorly, but then to do well enough when collected to help us sell our next project.

Instead, we want to stick with Proof. We have a timeline, an overarching story we want to tell in which Special Agent John “Proof” Prufrock grows and changes. Each story arc is designed to take Proof down a path that will ultimately lead to… well, we hope you’ll get to see what it leads to.

We envisioned this story as roughly 60 issues, or about five years. We drew up a plan for Proof, figuring out where he’d be at the start and end of each arc. It’s not a “monster of the month” book. There’s a point to it all.

Which was really stupid of us.

By committing ourselves to the long haul, Riley and I (not to mention our publisher) are taking a big risk. If no one buys the issues, if everyone waits for the trade, then the book won’t sell well enough for there to even be a trade.

And of course we hope for trade collections, so people can read the whole story in a single sitting, so libraries can carry it and introduce new readers to Proof, so casual bookstore browsers can get acquainted with our Sasquatch. Of course we’ll be delighted if people care enough a year from now to pick up a collection and read about Proof for the first time or the 20th time.

But we hope there will be enough support from the beginning that we’ll be able to keep going and tell the whole story.

To that end, we’re planning to cram as much Proof-related material as we can in every issue. We’ll run essays, letters, behind-the-scenes material, character sketches, recreations of 19th century newspaper articles about Bigfoot, pin-ups, whatever we can think of that will add value to the comic book. We have no plans to reprint those things in the trades.

We just hope we get to stick around long enough to see a trade.

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