Broken Frontier

The highly acclaimed sci-fi comic, Runners, takes an interesting approach to gaining new readers before launching its second volume.

Runners, a sci-fi/outer-space adventure comic, has made the move from print to web in preparation for the launch of a second volume. And this time it’s setting a course that’s sure to bring more readers onboard.

When creator Sean Wang published the first volume of his creator owned series, Runners: Bad Goods, a 5 issue series from 2002 to 2005 with a collected trade that final year, he didn’t have very much trouble garnering praise from critics or finding a loyal following, including a fan-made Runners movie made as a student project.  However, even with this attention, he still found it difficult to get even the trade paperback into retailer shops.

It was for this reason that Sean looked for a new approach for the second volume, Runners: The Big Snow Job.

The first thought was to have the series published by an outside company. He signed with Archaia Studios Press, a small company but one that had a good reputation and was getting fairly well known. They planned to put the series out in early 2008, and both ASP and Sean began making a marketing push for the first issue.

However, shortly after this push, ASP went on a publishing hiatus in order to restructure the company and their contracts, leaving Runners in limbo.

It was during this time that Sean had an “epiphany”. As he put it,
 
“I just felt that ANY small publisher is going to have a lot to trouble getting their books into stores in any significant quantity, especially these days. So for me, the best way to expose as many people as possible to Runners was going to be online.”

Sean decided against publishing individual issues for the new series. Instead he opted to take Runners online and concentrate on building a much larger audience. In fact, he began with the first volume. RunnersUniverse launch in March of 2009 with the first page of the first volume. It would then update a page a day for 5 days a week, unveiling the series for people to read online completely for free.

Sean explains,

“I’m still a fan of print comics so the second series will still be collected into graphic novel format after it finishes posting online. But I hope to use the free webcomic to build the audience as large as possible in the meantime. I firmly believe that many who read the series online at www.runnersuniverse.com will still want to purchase the printed volumes. Hopefully, with a larger audience that is familiar with the series, comic stores can then order the books with more confidence that they aren't ‘taking a chance’ on an unknown small press book. So everyone wins!”

This is an especially smart approach now that print comic distributors no longer list back stock, working against the long shelf life a trade paperback is supposed to have. Putting the back pages online keeps the material relevant and in people’s minds, not to mention continually working to attract new readers.

Sean gives another advantage of the site, saying,

“I'll be adding notes, trivia, and behind-the-scenes info to most pages I post, so even long-time readers will get something new out of the webcomic. And there's also a shiny, new forum for all you Runners fans, both new and old, to get your geek on!”

 Once the first series has been completely posted, around September 2009, Sean will begin posting the second, yet unprinted, volume, Runners: The Big Snow Job. He will post this series in its entirety and then go to print with the trade.

If all goes according to plan, Sean will continue in this manner for several more volumes of Runners, building towards his vision of a large scale, epic space adventure akin to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.

And if he manages to do this, then the idea of selling a printed trade paperback from pages that were posted for free seems all the more likely. After all, a story that grand deserves its place on a book shelf. And who can read all those pages online anyway?

For now, we can all see the Runners series progress from the beginning at www.runnersuniverse.com.