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Chris Mautner on L&R Going With a Spine
posted August 16, 2008
 

"I still don't think that enough people have stopped to consider what a massive vote of non-confidence in traditional comic books, serial comics, took place when the Hernandez Brothers moved Love and Rockets to a book with a spine."

Wasn't it more about reaching potential new bookstore-type readers, and thus enlarging their audience, rather than the traditional readers abandoning the pamphlet format? L&R is still technically being serialized after all, just in a slightly different shape and with more pages.

*****

Tom Spurgeon Responds: I'm not sure you can say it was more about this or more about that the way I constructed that line of thinking, Chris. I'm not speaking to their intent. I'm speaking to the implication for traditional comics forms. I grant you that this might be more of a blow to a specific format than a serial comics approach, although I'm hearing that there wasn't a plurality of serial comics in this new edition, but it was mostly done-in-ones.