Comic AG to end with issue 110

In about a month, you will be holding the last issue of Comic AG in your hands.

All things considered, it was a good run, eh?

Yes, we will be ending our magazine with issue 110.  There is a multitude of reasons behind this decision, the biggest of which being merely happenstance, fate that all the various factors should come together in a single point in time.  But this was also inevitable… Comic AG has, in my view, lost purpose by doing what it was supposed to do: it got our foot in the door of the comic industry.  Publishing porn manga at the time we started, amid lower sales and the explosion of interest in the internet (and the Pandora’s box that unleashed), was very risky.  We needed a product that was a great deal for readers, with a format that comic shops were familiar with and could take a chance on, but also be different enough to stand out from the crowd, and Comic AG was it.  We wanted it to be an exceptional value, so it was priced to break even.  That’s all it ever did; when we changed to a more economic printer, we passed those savings onto readers by upping the page count from 64 to 80 while still keeping the $4.99 price point.  That’s how much faith I had in the magazine, how much I wanted to get this stuff out to fans, how much I wanted it to work.  And it did… that we’ve hit triple digit issue number is proof.

Comic AG is still breaking even, but that doesn’t mean it is without cost… it takes time and energy to put out issue after issue.  So it was still a drain on our resources, if not financial, then spiritual.  With each release, we were slowly marching toward an event horizon, a place of no return, where we’d have to ask ourselves the hard question: is this worth it?  The answer is “no.”  The answer was always “no.”  The variable was when we’d reach this conclusion, not if.

As much as I still consider Comic AG a personal success, by being a comic, it had built-in limitations.  For the most part, it wasn’t sold outside of comic shops… essentially all the energy we placed into it were going into one market.  Now, this market is unlike any other, and it provided opportunities that no other can provide.  Of those shops that do support us, they seem to do pretty well with Comic AG.  But most shop don’t, or can’t support us.  We’ve long plateaued in terms of how much further we could grow in the direct market, how many more new stores would pick up Comic AG.  Sales had long reached stasis, and that’s not a good place to be, especially when the primary distributor of that market is slowly moving away from the bottom publishers, closing the doors on the format that defined the industry.  As has often been said online, this shift was not made in malice, it was just the natural ebb of business.  And with sincere apologies to those shops that have helped us throughout the years, we too must make business decisions.

We are a boutique book publisher.  Our “trades” are our bread and butter.  It is now the time for us to focus on them.

Despite the current hiccup in the release schedule, we *will* be releasing more trades in the future.  We will be speeding up our releases.  We already have enough licenses to last us well into 2011.  And even without Comic AG, the direct market will still be a major part of our business.  So I want to give a heart-felt thanks to all the retailers and readers who have made Comic AG possible, who have supported us from the beginning.  The last two issues are fantastic, and I hope you’d remind your local comic shop that you definitely want them.  We will still provide a cheap (or free) option for fans in the form of Comic AG Digital, which we will be making available via torrents and direct downloads, and perhaps even other formats too soon for me to discuss.  We do not forget our friends.

When we published issue 100, we did so quietly, anonymously, without fanfare from either fandom to which we are affiliated.  Perhaps in the distant utopia where everything is free and the printed paper is but a relic, a scholar may come across an old issue of Comic AG, and marvel, for the briefness of sparks from a match, that an unknown indie publisher was able to release so many comics in the time it did.

That would be pretty sweet.