§ Okay, okay: Joe Casey clears up that whole Butcher Baker controversy we told you about last week. It seems there WILL be a collection, and the series really was meant to stop at issue 8 (which just appeared after a long gap.) It was Casey’s plan to give readers a jolt by leading them to believe this was going to go on a while and then KA-BLAM!

Yeah, it was always meant to be eight issues and done.  It’s one story. Actually, I kinda felt like readers might’ve been keying into the fact that it might not be an ongoing, infinite series simply because, even at issue #5 or #6, I still wasn’t giving them any kind of temporary closure moments, as you tend to do on a monthly book. You’ll build in those minor end points every two, three or four issues. It’s part of the accepted macro-structure of a series that’s meant to deliver “continuing adventures” or however you might want to frame it. “Butcher Baker,” in its execution from month to month, was much more novelistic in its shape.

But it all comes down to the way stories are delivered. When you’ve got an audience that’s as savvy as most audiences have become, it’s tough to shake them out of their complacency and really take them on a ride. Even movie audiences are now “trained” to have an inherent sense of a movie’s shape.  They know it’s going to be roughly two hours long, a lot of them even have a sense of the Hollywood three act structure, so most of the fun of being told a story is already significantly affected by all of that “pre-knowledge.” Well, I wanted to see if I could mitigate some of that. Shit, I hope it worked…