SotA Anthology 2015-16

ENGL362 8house: successfully shifting aesthetics over several issues. © Image Comics 2015 One concern that arises from involving a wide variety of art styles within one series is the possibility of losing individual readers if their artistic preferences are particularly limited in scope. Two recent Image series serve as examples of how to market around this issue, however. The first is 8house (2015-ongoing), which spends one or two issues setting up a story with one writer/artist team, then switches to another, and then another. Each story has a wildly different art style, cover, and subtitle, the only recognisable link for potential new readers is the title 8house. It is marketed as “a shared fantasy universe” (Image Comics, 2015) rather than an anthology, but the uncertainty of what content to expect each month, plus the very loosely defined narrative links between issues, is a potential barrier to wider readership. The second example is Island (2015-ongoing), an anthology clearly defined as such, marketed as an “ongoing comics magazine” featuring “chapters of new work from around the globe” (Image Comics, 2015). The comic is oversized, adheres to one title, and though the art differs greatly from cover to cover and page to page, the interior features a contents page that clearly paginates each story. The series is incredibly navigable, no matter which issue is picked up. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is not an anthology, but the adaptation faces the same challenge of keeping a comic-reading audience, hyperaware of their artistic likes and dislikes interested in a monthly series that alters art style roughly once per issue. Hopefully, keeping the same artist, the same style for the second-person segments, stylistically linking the covers, and having the narrative, though splintered, clearly progressing forward in each issue, will keep my comic from stumbling too far into obscurity. Island: illustrated contents page © Image Comics 2015 63

SotA Anthology 2015-16 | Page 63