January 8, 2008
Shhh! Two New Comic Strips Are Out!
This week marks the launch of both Signe Wilkinson's
Family Tree and Piers Baker's
Ollie and Quentin; there may be another or two new offerings of which I'm unaware. The January launch point is an important one for comic strip syndicates for several reasons, including a tendency to see some turnover at the end of the year -- TK Ryan's
Tumbleweeds became a ghost town on December 29.
It's a sign of the great disconnect between comic strips and comic books that I know more about a random alt-comics book coming out Wednesday than I do about new, mainstream offerings that are going to have tens of thousand if not hundreds of thousands of readers on a daily basis right out of the gate. Part of this is the way comic strips are sold: they're sold to newspaper editors who buy them after hearing from a sales force. Because the key measurable isn't unit sales but editorial satisfaction buttressed by the direct support of readers within that market, many feel -- or act in way that indicates a certain set of priorities -- that there's little to no need to launch a national campaign that only indirectly has an impact on these individual markets. My really liking
Arctic Circle isn't going to keep it from being dropped in Goshen, Indiana if the local readers don't take to it.
Still, it feels like a missed opportunity to me that I was able to tell readers and potential local strip advocates how much I enjoyed, say,
Franklin Fibbs, but I had a hard time directing people to a site where they could see a bunch of it.
Baker has that taken care of, and Wilkinson's status
has driven a lot of coverage, but it feels like something that needs to be fixed in the years ahead. Comic books have aped movie and book release advance publicity in a way that's proved fruitful even though comic books and graphic novels are rarely released in a manner that's similar to movies. Comic strips, on the other hand, really are national campaigns; I long for the day when they start acting that way.
posted 9:30 am PST |
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