Big Sunny D, in a repost of a conversation he had with a fellow comix fan, inadvertently but correctly notes that the maddeningly infrequent output of most alt-comix titans makes the alternative/indy scene a lousy candidate for “saving the medium/industry” despite its inarguable superiority content-wise. How often does Black Hole or Eightball or Acme Novelty Library or Weasel come out these days? Twice a year at the absolute most often. People like Crumb and Spiegelman publish actual comics even less often. And even though I happen to dig the cartoony low-key Highwater/Fort Thunder/used-to-do-minicomics style (into which, I suppose, one could lump Kochalka and Hart and various other 3rd Wave luminaries), most of them lack the financial security, the grand ambition, or (in some cases) the talent to regularly publish the kinds of comix that take the biz by storm.
Instead, the alt-comix world revolves around one-time-only “event” books like Blankets or Diary of a Teenage Girl or Safe Area Gorazde or Persepolis which, by definition, cannot come out with any sort of regularity, or on “event” collections like Jimmy Corrigan or David Boring or Boulevard of Broken Dreams which are wholly dependent on the completion of the infrequently published series from which they draw.
As an alternative to this feast-or-famine publishing model (one which nearly bankrupted Fantagraphics due to their inability to accurately predict which one it’d be), alt-publishers might try the Japanese manga model: publish big fat compendia of work by all their top creators for cheap, so that people can get a wide sampling of what’s available, then go seek out the individual issues or collections of the creators they most enjoy. The problem here might be the wide variety of formats and sizes that alt-comix folks work in. It’d be pretty damn difficult to figure out how to publish a book that contained a full issue of both Eightball and Acme Novelty Library.