I’d rather see OGNs every few months than monthly issues every week. But Marvel and DC and every other monthly publisher out there isn’t going to give up the 2.99 and up newsstand price, or all of the juicy ad space that a monthly issue brings. To me, paying between 9.99 and 29.99 for a GN in Borders or Barnes & Noble is more reasonable because I get more content and a complete (sometimes) story in one go.

If Cloonan can’t “f***ing” keep to a schedule that’s his problem. Someone’s paying him to, so he must have some bucks to hire an assistant. Or he should just give up his indie cred, go mainstream and draw (insert crap superhero monthly comic title here) on a monthly basis. That’ll really break his spirit.

“If Cloonan can’t “f***ing” keep to a schedule that’s his problem. Someone’s paying him to, so he must have some bucks to hire an assistant.”

It’s Lewis, not Cloonan. But just how much do you think he’s being paid that he would be able to afford an assistant (and still eat)?

Cloonan is simply wrong about the format in a way that markedly decreases my respect for her.
The “series in big chunks” strategy works for Books, works for Movies and works for Movies done for TV. OGN’s are demonstrably cheaper overall, resulting in a better deal for everyone.

It’s hard to know exactly what Cloonan’s and Lewis’ problem is because both offer such a generic rant, but from what can be discerened:
Artistically, the delay of gratification may be too much for some people, they need to see their work in print more often, they might be uncomfortable with staking a years worth of production on a single book, they might have trouble keeping focussed for such long time spans. All fine and valid, but it doesn’t mean the format is wrong in any way. Just that that persons work style, work ethic doesn’t fit that format. Only thing to hope is that these complaints are not due to simply having forgotten the downsides of monthly/weekly production, first and formost the constant deadline pressure. But if it’s not just the other person’s grass, sure different folks & strokes.

Financially, it’s easier to work from a steady monthly income, and right now OGNs may pay too poorly relative to monthly DC and Marvel gigs on account of the relatively cheap competition from Japan. Part of that will work itself out over time, part of that depends on _getting a Marvel or DC gig_ because Archaia Studios doesn’t pay the nice monthly rates they do. Again, this has nothing to do with the format and everything to do with the market as it is. It generally needs to grow and perhaps there’s too much of a burden on these young creators to grow it but there’s no alternative.

If I try hard, I can imagine some kind of interaction where the still-too-small market interacts with the format in a way that somehow makes the format inferior. Perhaps because it being more of a bookstore item it requires a sufficiently broad customer base to make enough even for less than excellent work, something like that. But the same is even more true of the monthly market, I have no idea where these people are seing indy, creator owned stuff regularly making lots of money in a smaller format. So, again, it isn’t the format, it’s the size of the audience.

Finally, the audience for post-manga is in bookstores. If someone wants to sell that kind of comic but not in a bookstore-friendly format perhaps they ought to get a different job, no? The sense of entitlement included in the original complaint kind of boggles the mind.

French graphic novels are thinner (although the large format more than makes up for it), so the artist only has to draw 44 (big, usually very detailed) pages or so to have one published.

Recently Humanoids has started an original manga line. They decided to create a fat manga anthology to publish their series before the TPB releases, so that the artists might have a small income and work in a less frantic pace.

There is at least an american artist involved on it. Check out his site:
http://limemanga.livejournal.com/

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

You know when you start a job somewhere, on salary or hourly, and it generally takes two weeks of work before that first check arrives? And if you’re low on cash, that two week wait can be rough.

Now imagine working full-time on a comic book, like Becky and Corey do, but instead of having to wait two weeks for your first check, you have to wait six months, or more.

I know there are creative reasons as well as financial ones playing into Becky and Corey’s comments, but the financial one always strikes me as the most crucial. People have to have, eat, pay their bills.

b

Mr. Wood, surely you can do better. Please spare us the strawman of payment intervalls without considering the size of these payments as well.
IF the OGN is a worse deal on a total dollar per time/page basis compared to _the same material_ published in the DM (where else would you sell monthly books?) sure, then it’s a financial question. I’d be interested in hearing any evidence for that, I can’t think of any.

IF on the other hand, it’s a matter of people having difficulty stretching a larger amount over a longer time it’s their poor finance managment, not the format. IF it’s a matter of life being rough as a non-superstar, again that’s a problem of the size of the audience, not the format.

Also, please spare us meaningless generalities like “people have to eat”. It’s a bit insulting to assume your audience doesn’t know that.

I fully agree with that, each format has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, that means you ought to critisize Cloonan and Lewis who fail to distinguish “not right for them (because of features XYZ)” from “not right”.
Plus, once more all three of you kind of ignore the choice of material and suject matter. With very few exceptions the monthly market is the Marvel and DC superhero market. Unless you either want and can WFH for them or are both supertalented and superlucky to get one of the rare Vertigo-like spots (also often coming with a certain prefered style) monthly/weekly simply isn’t an option in the North-American marketplace. Unfortunately, but there it is.
It’s nothing to do with format.

“However, that means you ought to critisize Cloonan and Lewis who fail to distinguish “not right for them (because of features XYZ)” from “not right”.”

I took that to be implied. They didn’t need to qualify every point they made – it was a conversational blog post spoken from their points-of-view, both of them, and I knew exactly what they meant.

And its true that the indie world can’t support any and all monthly books, but does support an awful lot, including Local and Wasteland (put out by Corey’s publisher) and any number of titles at Image. Demo did pretty well in the end. Supermarket did superbly. I have no doubts that Becky and Corey couldn’t make a go at it, and I suspect one of them will prove that shortly.

b

Markus and Pulse768 are really missing the point here. The real problem Lewis and Cloonan are describing is one of exposure, not monetary compensation. When books, especially books in an ongoing series (like Cloonan’s “East Coast Rising” and Lewis’ “Shark Knife”) are a year or more between volumes, people forget about them. They lose interest in the series and they often don’t even notice when a new volume has been released.

I work at a bookstore and used to work at a comic store and have seen this phenomenon firsthand. And as a writer of an OGN series from Tokyopop (“Mail Order Ninja”), I’ve felt the effects as well. My series is marketed towards kids and they want their fix immediately (and adult comic fans weaned on monthly series are no better). It’s why manga volumes come out every 3 months like clockwork and in the book publishing world, popular series like “The Warriors” or the Dungeons & Dragons novels come out every 3-4 months as well.

My books are 80 pages long rather 150+ and that helps with the frequency, but even so I fear that having books that come out every six months is still too long a time between volumes. My audience will either forget the books exist or even worse, outgrow them.

And having such a large lag time between releases means that I have to spend a great deal of time and effort re-promoting the book to the audience I’ve already sold the book to rather than focusing my efforts on finding new readers.

Another angle to this is that a lack of exposure in the marketplace means a lack of exposure to editors and publishers as well as consumers. Not being in the public eye can definitely damage your career.

right Josh, Harry Potter suffered horribly from coming out on a less than yearly schedule.
In seriousness, your point is very good, but I don’t believe you can get “serial purchase behaviour” on anything slower than a monthly schedule. Manga, as has been pointed out, is mostly weekly, or biweekly and the D&D novels are oddities in that they’re niche and rarely share the same characters. So you’re back to every installment having to be good enough on its own that people will come back for the next one two years later. Hard, but no harder than the default in book publishing.
Plus, it certainly seems to work for Scott Pilgrim, and with me it even worked on the smaller scale of Elk’s Run. I dunno, but personally I believe you’re kind of wishing for the zombie buying behaviour Marvel and DC get on their biggest sellers, which is just incredibly unlikely for any single creator. Outside of that, even with the Drone Market, very few works seems to have sufficient “adhesion” to keep people coming back after a couple of weak/rushed issues.

The studio method would of course be awesome, but catch 22 the market isn’t big enough yet. I hoped DC would use if after 52, but instead they’ve been patting themselves on the back for reinventing the poduction process almost every manga and every TV show and dimestore novel series uses.

Isn’t part of the problem also that Lewis keeps taking on other projects at the same time and that ends up eating into the time it takes to complete the OGN?

I mean I’d like to see Sharknife definitely, but ya know what?

If you needed all this time, then why did you take on Rival Schools? There are those of us now sitting on our hands waiting for that one too.

If you really want to know the economics of it …
don’t bother with that article. It’s not only out of date, the numbers are so nonsensical it’s not even funny anymore.
To take just the biggest plunders: (1) the costs of seperate print runs are wholly ignored; it becomes more of an issue with smaller print runs and less with larger.
(2) no creator owned indy sells 30k in the DM. Brian Wood’s DMZ is around 16k IIRC. See (1).
(3) singles sales drop, meaning e.g. six print-run-size gambles instead of one. Plus, Diamond cutoffs
(4) Next to no creator owned indy sells for $3, few colour-OGNs sell for $13. The reason why indies can compete with Marvel/DC TPBs, see (1).
(5) no smart person would in all seriousness suggest that a retailer is likely to have the same number of leftover copies regardless of the total number of items ordered/sold and their price. That’s just too stupid for words. Seriously, if I said busts for $300 are bad because a retailer will end up with 5 leftovers just like the five issues of Flash #8 he couldn’t sell and the former puts him $1500 in the hole you would rightly call me a retard. Doubly so because the leftover busts are “only” capital tied up, whereas the singles are much more likely to not sell at all.