McNeil's Finder Goes Online
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Oct. 4, 2005
By Douglas Wolk -- Publishers Weekly, 10/4/2005
Acclaimed indie cartoonist Carla Speed McNeil announced at last month's Small Press Expo that she's replacing her award-winning comic book Finder with Web serialization, in an attempt to find new readers using a different publishing model. Her company, Lightspeed Press, will still publish a new print graphic novel every summer, but they'll initially appear on lightspeedpress.com, a few pages every week, instead of as bimonthly-ish pamphlets. Beginning later this month, the online incarnation of Finder will appear twice a week, serializing the next book, Five Crazy Women.
McNeil created the Lightspeed Press imprint to publish Finder in 1996. Since then, the "aboriginal SF" series has won a pile of awards (including the last two years' Ignatz Awards for outstanding series), and been collected in seven volumes to date, most recently The Rescuers. The periodical issues, though, have been stagnant in sales for a few years now. "The periodical was always intended to be advertising," McNeil says. "It's not reaching new people; it's time to do something different. And I, the complete Luddite, still managed to get it through my head that the Web was one way of doing this."
Sales of the Finder trade paperbacks, on the other hand, have kept growing since McNeil published the first one. "That's been my avenue of success. If I hadn't done that first trade paperback, I'd have sunk without a ripple years ago," she says. "I've always come out with them in time to take advantage of the big conventions, with the exception of APE, which is a little too early for me to be able to manage my print bill." Beyond the first book, which sold through its first printing of 3,000 copies and went back to press for 4000 copies, The Rescuers and Talismanare neck-and-neck as the bestselling Finder volume. McNeil notes that her 7000-copy first printing of Talisman will probably be gone within a year. "Talisman is probably my most accessible book," she says. "It's about being a book nerd—-- —anybody who doesn't know what that means probably isn't going to be reading this."
McNeil also raised her fan profile recently by doing the artwork for a volume of Oni Press's popular spy-thriller series Queen & Country, Operation: Storm Front, written by Greg Rucka. "It's drawn in a lot of intelligent, erudite readers who still want to buy pages of carnage," she says. "They think a lot about what they read, and they talk about how clever the character interactions are, and how complex the plotline is. Yet when it comes time to buy a page of original art to go over their mantelpiece, they just want a picture of somebody getting run over or shot or their head smashed open or an exploding helicopter. I love these people."
As a bonus for Finder's Web readers, McNeil is considering posting sketchbook material or pencilled pages online. "I am the aforementioned Luddite, and I'm not doing the programming on this thing," she says. "My programmers basically work for food. But it will happen in October, or they won't get any banana pudding."
