Finder heads to the web

According to Warren Ellis' BAD SIGNAL mailing list, Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series will stop publishing single print issues after #38, instead trying a new format: the Internet:

Here's a little bomblet: on the same weekend she got an Ignatz award for FINDER, Carla Speed McNeil announced that the print serial incarnation of FINDER will cease with #38. After that, FINDER chapters will appear exclusively on the web before being pushed to trade paperback.

FINDER has long been infamous as the best comics series from America that no-one actually buys. I know that whenever I've pointed people to the free issues already available at http://www.lightspeedpress.com, Speed's sold trade paperbacks.

With sales of the serial perennially in the low thousands, her profit margin must have been negligible at best. The money, as is so often true, is in the trades. Putting FINDER on the web won't earn her money on the singles, but, with bandwidth down to affordable costs now, it won't cost her as much as printing a few thousand copies of the singles, either. Theoretically,
with FINDER now available to more people in its serialised form, the TPB sales should go up.

Let's hope Ellis is right, as Finder is a worthy read.