Consistency is the foundation of good work. This is true in creative pursuits as much as any other kind of undertaking. A painter that creates a Rembrandt one day and cubism the next doesn’t look like much of an artist as they don’t look like they have a grasp on their style and technique. They cannot consistently show the audience something. An author who never finishes a story but has great prose isn’t much fun to read. One reason I’ve never jelled with American comics is the constantly changing creative teams. The wild swings in tone, art and writing really grates on me and reduces my investment in the characters and stories.

At the same time, as a creator myself, I understand how draining it can be to focus on a single set of characters and developing new story lines for them while maintaining consistency. Audiences also have a maximum tolerance for kinds of stories. They don’t want to consume the same thing over and over again, they do want to see some variation on themes and new characters to add intrigue and new perspectives. On the other hand, they don’t want things to depart too far from what they know and love. It’s a delicate balancing act. However in my experience proving consistency and baseline competence is the foundation on which variation and personal flair is built. This is true in building your narratives and your rapport with the audience.

There’s lots of talk about how to build consistency in narrative. For good reason. That’s the foundation of storytelling after all. However if you cannot find a sizable enough rapport with your audience then the consistency of your story isn’t that important as no one is listening to it. So today I wanted to examine the question of how to build that rapport with your audience. We’re going to do that through the lens of some comic companies I’ve been following for a few months or years but before diving into what these up and comers are doing we need a little context.

While I’m not an expert on the American comic book industry – as noted above there are aspects to the major company’s approaches to storytelling I don’t like – I have noticed it seems to run on a cycle. Every twenty to thirty years, call it once a generation, it collapses and a handful of companies carry on the legacy. Both Marvel and DC Comics are amalgams of characters and stories acquired from other, failed companies over the years. These companies have come and gone since comics first came around but the two major powerhouses have done the hard work of preserving and sustaining the best pieces of those competitors for future generations.

Unfortunately, these Frankenstein patchworks aren’t very consistent. DC manages things through a series of reboots that are intended to reset characters and make it easier to get into the swing of things but rarely succeed in that goal. Marvel just retcons details. Tony Stark, for example, became Iron Man when he was kidnapped by opposing forces in an overseas war. Over time that war has been Korea, Vietnam and a handful of places in the Middle East, although the organization known as the Ten Rings was always involved in some way. Regardless, keeping the mess straight can be difficult.

The consistency the two big companies does have is a consistency of release. They put out new books every week and ongoing titles (the comic term for a long running series focused on a particular character or group) come out once a month, barring special promotional runs. This means fans do get a consistent story they can look forward to. Or they can about 60% of the time, when the industry is in the middle of one of its periodic contractions most of these titles get canceled without warning and then your favorite title is… less consistent.

Right now the big two are on the verge of one of those periodic contractions, if they aren’t in it already. Many titles get canceled after only a few issues. The stores that make their entire business selling these comics to the public are closing wholesale and predictions are there will be half as many comic stores in 2025 as there were in 2015. That’s not good.

While the future of mainstream comics and the stores that cater to them is bleak there’s plenty of opportunity for outsiders to step in and try to stake out a place for their own work.

One such person is Eric July, who’s Rippaverse publishing imprint has so far released three titles and reports a total intake of about $7 million. Financially that’s an impressive achievement. It’s hard to pin down exactly why July’s comic initiative did so well when most independent comics haven’t. The obvious possibility is that July had a huge following interested in comics already. He cut his teeth doing a daily podcast on comics and pop culture. As of this writing his YouTube channel, YoungRippa59, has 511 thousand subscribers, a considerable audience already interested in the kind of product he would eventually market to them. I have no doubt that was an initial portion of what attracted his audience. However, on his first outing he drew three and a half million of the seven million dollars his company boasts, much more than well established comic creators with equally sizable social media audiences. Clearly the existing audience doesn’t explain all of it. What I suspect has just as much to do with it is the Rippaverse Code, a series of promises from July to his audience. Among these promises is a pledge to avoid reboots and multiverses. In the eyes of the general comic audience, and Eric July in particular, these are two of the major sources of the inconsistencies and breakdowns in narrative that plague mainstream comics. On top of that, it promises not to pass superhero mantels from one character to the next. At first glance that looks like a silly pledge to make but this constant transferring of a superhero identity to different people is a bit like the painter who switches from ultra realism to cubism. It makes the characters very inconsistent.

I think it’s this pledge, targeted at the things many fans feel ruin the consistency of their stories, that drove a lot of the interest in July’s story. Since then the Rippaverse has had some growing pains. The interest in the company’s first outing far outstripped their infrastructure and an oversight in checking trademarks has embroiled the company in some potentially costly litigation. Still, the company is largely back on track with roughly quarterly releases. July continues to serve as the face of the company, which gives the audience a reliable touchstone although does create some PR liabilities.

For example, I didn’t know much about July before checking out his comic. I find his personality as presented to the public fairly abrasive and I wouldn’t go out of my way to spend a lot of time around him. Also, his marketing relies heavily on flash and doesn’t say much about the stories themselves. On the other hand, this would be fine if the stories were good and the marketing just needed to perk enough interest in them to draw you in. Unfortunately, while July is a musician he isn’t a well trained storyteller. His stories so far haven’t been very clear, well paced or engaging.

There’s telling signs that the inconsistency between story quality and marketing is taking its toll. His audience is shrinking in terms of both how much money they invest in the product and in terms of absolute numbers. It’s not just a case of people buying fewer shirts and collectibles with their comic order. Fewer people overall are buying comics. Again, based on my understanding of the industry, this is pretty common in startup comic companies. If July follows the general pattern of a company like Image Comics, his imprint will probably shrink to about half its starting size over the next two years and then begin slowly growing year over year from there. Assuming it survives, which is not a guarantee in any industry.

Still, the surprising outpouring of interest and money that first greeted the Rippaverse bears some testimony to the effect of promising consistency. Again, there were other factors that also played a role in July’s outstanding initial success. But those factors existed in many other cases and only July managed to find the level of response he did so I believe the added factor of consistency, or a pledge thereof, is important.

Another sign of the importance of consistency is the Kamen America franchise, written by Mark Pellegrini and illustrated by Timothy Lim. This franchise is distributed by the company Iconic Comics, a company that focuses on warehousing and fulfilling orders for a select group of independent comic makers. While the Iconic creators are comfortable collaborating they are ultimately in charge of their own brands. There are yearly crossover events but they do no hijack the plot of ongoing titles. The entire scope of Iconic Comics is hard to compress into this summary, nor is it particularly important, so I’m going to leave the summary at that. Right now I want to emphasize the approach Lim and Pellegrini have taken.

This creative team puts out one book every quarter, much like Eric July. However, the Kamen team has been at it for a good four years and boasts a much more extensive backlog. While the artistic direction is a little more cartoony than that in July’s titles and the genre is closer to Power Rangers than Superman, Lim and Pellegrini have pushed out a huge number of titles that their audience enjoys. The continuity is consistent and the character work is charming.

What’s most impressive is that the Kamen audience has grown, rather than shrunk. It’s hard to get comprehensive numbers as the title is available through three different platforms, two crowdfunding sites and the Iconic Comics web store. Unfortunately there are no sales figures for the Iconic store but we do have the crowdfunding stats. There may be some customer overlap between the two platforms but they’re fairly consistent over time.

Kamen America Volume One netted approximately 2,600 sales on initial offering and the most recent release, Volume Eight, netted about 3,300 sales. (For those wondering, the seven other titles Lim and Pellegrini released in the past four years were crossovers or part of another franchise. The numbers are generally lower than the Kamen franchise. The growth in sales of Black Hops, the other franchise, and crossovers is roughly proportionate to Kamen America, just lower in absolute value.)

There was a bit of a drop in the beginning, as Lim and Pellegrini tried various things, but they’ve shown slow but constant growth over time. Only steady, consistent work has made that growth possible. While we don’t know the full scope of that work, as the Iconic store is quite opaque, I have seen personal accounts of people who discovered the series through the Iconic store. Lim and Pellegrini haven’t made a big pledge like July did but they now have enough of a track record to assure us they’re going to do their best to turn out satisfying, dependable work that will entertain and delight readers. They tend to keep a fairly low profile now but they did have some high profile feuds early on. Consistent work eventually drowned that out, which may be some comfort to July.

Either way, consistent work clearly pays big dividends to creators who promise it and put in the work to bring it to fruition. Not huge returns in a short period of time. But enough to be worthwhile to those who can make that promise to their audience. That’s something I’ve tried my best to bring to the table on this blog and I’ve seen those small returns over the years. As July, Lim and Pellegrini prove, I’m not alone in that and hopefully you won’t be, either.