So, when you've finally completed the back-breaking workload that goes into a 120-page comic book series, doing all the writing, drawing, lettering, and colouring by yourself, pouring three years or so of your life--evenings and weekends, mostly--into a largely very goofy labour of love, two things will follow the final pages rolling off of the presses almost immediately.
1) You will feel a near-euphoric sense of completion and closure.
2) People will start asking you, "When are you putting out the trade paperback?".
In these days of trade-waiters and hardcover-lovers, this is a natural question to ask. However, I've paid to have the single issues printed myself--and, to be able to charge a (hopefully) fair price for them, I had to order
a lot of each of the single issues. Enough that I'll likely be selling them off for years to come (unless AMC options SLAM-A-RAMA for a TV series, in which case those suckers are headed straight for eBay!). In any case, I'd like to have at least a few months to try and sell as many of the singles as I can, seeing as how a collected edition would probably kill the sales of said issues stone dead.
Still, I understand people's desire for a complete set of a finite series, and it's always nice to get a financial break when you're buying 'em all in one shot. With that in mind, I've taken the advice of two of my closest confidants--my former roomie and sometime collaborator
Mike Holmes, and SLAM-A-RAMA logo designer and all-around visual consigliere
James White--and created SLAM-A-RAMA: THE CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION! It was Mike who suggested that I print up some kind of band to tie all five issues of the series into a bundle, and it was James who came up with the name. Charging only fifteen bucks for it--a savings of a dollar an issue--that was all me.
I'll be debuting THE CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION at this weekend's
Maine Comics Arts Festival, and then I'll likely have copies for sale here and at
Strange Adventures, and with a little luck, at a few other indie-friendly locations. Check back here for updates. Oh yeah, and about that collected edition--sometime in 2013 seems likely. But, y'know, the more single issues and CHAMPIONSHIP EDITIONS I sell, the quicker it'll happen. Paradoxical on some levels, I know, but that's the biz we're in.
