Sam Hobart of MacGuffun, who, previously, anticipated the release of twenty-five cent issues of Fables #1. Those sampler issues have been in his store for a while now (along with a recolored printing of Sandman #1) and he’s seeing solid results:

We’ve been giving both of these out to just about every adult who has come into the shop over the past month (whether they buy something or not) and they are paying huge dividends already. Selling a single volume of either Fables or Sandman covers the cost of giving away almost fifty copies of these promotional issues and we’ve more than covered the costs of what we’ve given away already. I would love to see more of these first issue reprints, especially for Vertigo series like Y: The Last Man, The Losers or the soon to be reformatted Transmetropolitan.

There really is nothing like giving away the first part of a story for free to get a customer to come back for more. As successful as it is to give away Free Comic Book Day titles and #0 preview issues, you can’t beat promoting a proven commodity with a free giveaway, especially when we’re talking about titles with up to 10 volumes worth of material to follow them up.

Meanwhile, Johanna, writes about judging a series based only on the first issue:

…if I’m still not excited to read the next volume, then I say that’s the fault of the creators who haven’t created that anticipation in me. The decision to break the story where it did and package it this way was damaging to its presentation. I can’t evaluate a book based on what might happen next month or in the future; if I did, I’d rightly be criticized for trying to write the book myself.

The reader has every right to judge whatever they were sold. The story doesn’t end at the conclusion of book one, but the reader needs to achieve some satisfaction with what they’ve read. If they didn’t like it, or they didn’t like it enough, then the publisher (or supporter) can’t assume that they’ll come back to see the eventual redemption.

I partly wanted to put excerpts from these two psots together because they’re both about how people react to reading only a portion of a series, with different reactions. Fables offers a first issue that, for the most part, leaves readers eager for more while Johanna’s first taste of Mail Order Ninja left her uninterested in finishing the story.

Or, to put it another way, Fables and Sandman does something right that Mail Order Ninja doesn’t.

Johanna also mentions how much more competitive comics have become — there are so many choices now available that sticking with a series simply out of the hope that the creators’ improves over time means not having the time to sample a better title. I very much relate to that sentiment. I’m much quicker to give up on a series nowadays simply because there’s another title I’d rather read first. I’m way behind series I enjoyed like Hikaru No Go and Iron Wok Jan because there’s something more pressing. If I can’t find the time to keep up with series where I’ve enjoyed every moment, I don’t have the time to continue following series that initially strikes me as just “good enough”.