Hard Time Ends With Issue 7
If you’ve seen the latest Previews, you already know Hard Time: Season 2 has been cancelled.
Mary and I are currently finishing work on issues 6 and 7.
I’ll have a lot more to say on the subject in the next couple of days, but I want to make one thing absolutely clear right now: I do not in any way blame DC for the book’s failure, and neither should you. In fact, shortly after getting the unhappy news, I called both Paul Levitz and Dan DiDio to thank them for supporting the series as long as they did. They were proud of the book and wanted it to succeed.
More to follow in a day or two, as we wind up the final scripts.
March 21st, 2006 at 5:21 AM
Sorry to hear your latest series got the ax–I’ve always admired your work. I’d like to make one comment on the marketing strategy. In my opinion, the TITLE of the series was a a major obstacle to its success. By labeling it “Season 2” you’re discouraging every potential reader who didn’t read “Season 1”. Since I assume sales of the first series were modest, the loyalty of previous readers probably isn’t enough to keep the series alive. The sequel label is a good marketing gimmick for mega-selling titles like Dark Knight or Secret Wars, but when your title is a modest seller without much name recognition to cash in on, it’s a bad idea. These days comics series get relaunched with a new #1 all the time, there’s no need to label it “Season 2”, “Volume 2,” or whatever. Without the sequel label, you’d have brought back all the loyal readers who already knew about the series, and possibly brought in some new readers who gave it a try without knowing it was a sequel. The reaction of many potential new readers who see the “Season 2” label will be: “I missed Season 1, and I don’t want to start in the middle of things, so I’ll buy something else” or possibly: “Looks interesting, but I’ll try to find the back issues of Season 1 before I try Season 2” I’m sure there are also people who don’t care if it’s a sequel as long as it’s a good story, but I suspect there is a significant number of readers, myself included, who will avoid a sequel if they missed the prequel, and if your book is struggling to find an audience, those are readers that you can’t afford to lose.
April 3rd, 2006 at 10:26 AM
Thanks for one of my favorites!
My copy of Season 1 part 1 just came in last week and I loved it! Now with all the support I’m seeing from DC’s offfices I’m going to have to work on finding all the monthlies.
So this is it then?
Can we send cans of sardines to Dan DiDio’s office? Or letters even?