Green Wake, Last of the Greats and the Risks of Trade Waiting
Not everybody buy single issue comics, for a variety of reasons. Some people like waiting for a book because it’s bound nicely and a lot sturdier than a floppier comic. For others, it might just be that books are much more easily shelved than individual issues, which tend to need boxes and even bags and boards for safe storage instead of a simple horizontal surface. Digital comics have some of these similar storage benefits. Sometimes, collections even have wonderful packaging, design or bonus features that make them worthwhile.
Of course, I’m guessing the biggest reason for waiting for a trade paperback collection instead of buying single issues is simple: it’s a way to get comics you don’t “need” to read right away for less money than buying the individual issues would cost. And that’s a completely valid, appropriate reason that is based on sound budgeting principles. We only have so much money and we can’t all always afford to triple-dip on books we like because as much as that shows that we love a book and helps the publishers (and creators, for creator-owned books), it doesn’t make the strictest financial sense to own three different copies of Casanova or Morning Glories.
Unfortunately, this weekend brought a reminder of why single issue sales are important for creators - especially independent ones - in a way that trade paperbacks might not be. On Saturday, Kurtis J. Wiebe (who Brandon interviewed last year), announced that Green Wake, his 5-issue miniseries that got bumped up to ongoing status, would be ending early with the tenth issue. Wiebe‘s answer was simple:
Sales.
Indie books live and die by numbers and while we received universally stellar reviews, it didn’t translate into sales. While we wanted to continue on, we simply couldn’t afford to do it anymore. We had to come to a very tough decision and this was the ultimate result. I truly hope you understand.
This is my message: if you like a series, tell everyone. If they won’t buy it for themselves, buy the first issue for them. Give comics as gifts, get your friends and coworkers on board.
Later that day, Joshua Hale Fialkov announced on Twitter that his creator-owned series Last of the Greats will be going on a hiatus after its fifth issue. He tweeted:
To be clear, Last of the Greats is going on hiatus after issue 5. We’re going to see how the trade does and then decide what to do. I’ve got plans for the first two years of Greats stories, and we all want to continue, but, we need to be turning a profit to do so.
What these announcements draw into stark attention is that there is sometimes a disparity between what’s good for a creator & their book and what’s good for fans. I’ll admit, sometimes when I “trade wait” it’s code for “I’m behind on reading this and at least this way back-issues won’t take up read on my to-read piles.” Sometimes, like with Stumptown, I trade waited because I missed the first few issues and wanted to get the whole story. But with Green Wake? I was just lazy.
I heard about the series, and Brandon had been pretty vocal in the shop and in his various online communicatiospheres that this was a pretty awesome book that I and many others should check out, but I hesitated. I figured, I have enough to read, I will read this in the trade paperback. And look! It’s an ongoing now, so I don’t need to worry about it going away.
You guys, I am pretty embarrassed. And a little angry at myself. I made a very reasoned, rational choice but forgot one simple rule: in comics, you have to support what you love.
I would love to blame Brandon, because everybody loves a scapegoat and hey, I have made a pretty decent Twitter reputation based on baselessly aggressing against him. He didn’t put it in my file, after all. But you know what? He told me about it. More than once. He wrote more than one reputation on this very site and I read them all! Back when we responded to Eric Powell‘s video regarding creator-owned comics, I made a simple challenge to myself: to be better at curating my own comics pull list and supporting creator-owned projects. Generally, I have improved. More of my reading than ever is comprised of creator-owned books and I try to be as vocal as possible about ones I love. But I let Green Wake slip through the cracks and now it is gone and frankly, I feel a little bit stupid. I’m not stupid, I know that the handful of dollars I should have spent on Green Wake wouldn’t have made the difference between the book surviving or not. I know I made what was at the time a fairly rational choice. However, I could have supported the book and encouraged others to do so. That’s all I was responsible for. I look back now, and I think I made a mistake.
If you are a trade waiter, I don’t think you are doing a bad thing. There are a wealth of quite good reasons to buy a trade paperback instead of single issues. However, when it comes to books that don’t have the inertia and staying power of the X-Men, Spider-Man or Batman, they are a lot more vulnerable and every single issue sale helps. That needs to be a part of the single-vs-trade decision matrix as much as immediacy, cost and storage. After all, if buying single issues is necessary to create collections in the first place, it starts to look more and more like the thing to do even though my wallet is angry at me. At the very least, it’s a factor that should be weighted pretty heavily.
All I can do is support and evangelize the things I love in the most effective way possible, as well as suggest that you do, too. My failure to do so with Green Wake isn’t something I’ll forget any time soon. I do not like this feeling.
Share all the love you have. Share it in the most meaningful way you can and help the people who make it possible continue to do so. Let’s make a better industry, one sale at a time.
- Check out Wiebe‘s series Peter Panzerfaust, with artist Tyler Jenkins! It’s Peter Pan all smushed up with World War II! Advance review here, previews here and here. Make sure to get your shop to order it by January 23rd or pick it up on February 15th!
- Green Wake arist Riley Rossimo has a badass new horror series called Rebel Blood coming out that he’s co-writing with Alex Link! Check out a preview here. It arrives on March 26th.
While I appreciate creators impressing the need for sales to start high and continue high from day 1 of their book hitting the stands, I would hope that it would also be of top priority these days to wait until the trade comes out and then look at the sales before assuming a title is a lost cause and cancelling it. I am more often than not a trade waiter, and it has nothing to do with being cheap, or being lazy.
One reason is I simply like to read comics in heftier chunks. I often feel unsatisfied with a 22 page chunk, and I would rather read it as a graphic novel and choose my own pace.
A second reason is a trade looks nice on my bookshelf, and is stored easier on my bookshelf, and as an adult with a girlfriend and a child, flimsy comics i have no interest in bagging and boarding would likely be devoured, dragged into the darkest corners of our home, and never be seen again.
Third, my girlfriend takes an active interest in comics, and I find a graphic novel something much easier to sell to her and get her to look at.
Green wake being cancelled is like a punch to the gut, and it is actually a book I caved on singles with after Kurtis appealed to me on the cbr boards how trade waiting can make it so much more difficult for a book to stay afloat. For a book like GW which I simply loved and will miss a ton that was an exception, but (harsh as it sounds) otherwise its not my fault the industry structures itself the way it does and on a more general basis (that means not including GW), I would rather cast my vote by trade waiting and hoping those sales after the main market show books will be bought by the same amount of readers and simply in different ways. Better ways. Ways these companies are desperate for them to tell via amazon, barnes and noble etc. Also, maybe it would give creators an option to switch their series to a series of graphic novels oppose to straight out cancelling them (I would LOVE the industry to switch to a more OGN -orientated business model). Bit of a rant here, but I’ve had this on my mind lately. While I know this article wasn’t doing it, I sometimes feel like the industry accuses us of failing our own favourite books for not buying it in the exact method they want me to (why didn’t you buy 5 and give them to your friends?? why didn’t you buy singles, trades and digital copies?!). Like I said, I will do that for books I LOVE like GW, I can’t, won’t and don’t want to do that for every book. I am very pro trade, but also, extremely sad to see GW go. Thats my piece.
I’m a “trade waiter” for similar reasons Jamie mentions above. I like to buy a book and read a full story, I like to get a good chunk of time from my comic purchases.
Getting one chapter a month (at best) is really not an enjoyable experience.
Yea, Masked Dave also reminds me that you don’t even necessarily get that 22 pages a month. I totally appreciate why, and will defend creators to the death that they need to do what makes them money first before doing the creator owned stuff, be that mainstream gigs, or a day job, but when a book lags it can make for much better reading if you just wait to get that readable chunk. An example I can think of off the bat is the infinite vacation.