Jim Henley spent the weekend at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda. I went to this in 2002, back when I was teaching comics in my writing classes at American University, but haven't been in recent years. Sounds like it's still going strong, although Jim did what I likely would have done: visited with friends, didn't go to panels, and ran through the dealer's room looking for new stuff.

What I most appreciated, though, was his post about Carla Speed McNeil and her comic Finder, a worthy addition to any one's library. McNeil, as reported by Henley, is planning to cancel the single-issue publication of her comic and go to a new model where she posts pages on the Web regularly and then collects those pages into graphic novels for sale. As someone who quit buying single-issues over ten years ago in favor of buying only collections, I tend to think this as brilliant marketing, even though I'm not sure I'll follow the story on the Web. While comics have traditionally been a serial medium (the superhero soap opera has held dominance over the market since the 60s), the economy of leisure has changed enough that this model is in crises--a single issue of a comic costs nearly half the price of a movie ticket, whereas in the past it was a fifth or less--and the rise of the collection (or graphic novel) promises to be the answer. McNeil, who has built enough of a fan base for her tales, can go this Web-to-print route, quite similar to how Aimee Mann, who has enough of a fan base, was able to forego the major publishers for her recent albums and publish them herself. Neither woman is expecting the kind of bestseller that major publishers demand and that is responsible for a kind of "chew-em-up-and-spit-em-out" reality of today's market, but instead are happy to simply settle for a make-a-living profit from their work--something that might grow in time as they continue to create quality work that brings in more and more readers and listeners.