The death of Yen Plus

Scheez. You head out of town to attend a nerdy conference and ignore your feed reader for a couple of days, and this is what you miss.

In case this is the only comic-related blog you read (which I hope is not the case, for your sake), you’ve probably heard that Yen Press has announced that the July 2010 issue of Yen Plus (to be published in June) will be the last issue in print. After that, Yen Plus will switch to being some sort of digital online-only entity - details are still vague at the moment (what does a “dedicated browser” mean?).

Some may protest the title of this post, then. Surely that doesn’t mean Yen Plus is dead, right? It is only changing form. Well, if you’ve been reading this site for a while, you know I’ve made it no secret how disinterested I am in reading comics on a computer screen. Even if that’s the only way in which Yen Plus changes… Well, it’s like NewsRadio after Phil Hartman died. Technically, that was the only thing that changed, but when you watched the final season you knew it wasn’t and could never be the same.

(Yes, I’m well aware that 90% of this site’s readership has no idea what I’m talking about.)

So maybe Yen Plus won’t technically be dead, but it’ll be dead to me and many other readers who dislike reading comics on a computer screen, judging by comments on Yen Press’s post and elsewhere around the web. Payment for remaining subscription issues will be refunded somehow. Apparently the new digital form will be subscription-based as well, though the price is still unknown. However, even if it were free, there’s still little chance I’ll have any interest in it. Why? Because there are already several places online where one can read print comics for free, both legit and otherwise, and I don’t make any use of those sites either. (Web comics which were originally designed to be read on a screen instead of in print, and therefore work with the screen format’s benefits and limitations, are excepted.)

I’m bummed, but I’m not surprised. Given the amount of content Yen Plus had compared to its price tag, and the fact that there has been very little in the way of third-party advertising (that is, ads hawking wares from companies other than Yen Press and its sister companies), I’m willing to bet that Yen Press never made a direct profit from Yen Plus, and may have in fact been rather expensive for the company to produce and publish - an expense that was viewed as partially-subsudized advertising, as Yen Press viewed Yen Plus as a way to hawk and ultimately sell their print collections. I guess that, somewhere, a bean counter counted beans and felt that the value proposition wasn’t worth it anymore.

Unfortunately, in a digital form, the value proposition is greatly reduced for Yen Plus readers as well.

So where does that leave us - those of us who want trees cut down, pulped, pressed flat, trimmed, sprayed with ink, bound with glue, and shipped to our mailboxes once a month? Well, Shonen Jump is still IN YA FACE, if that appeals to you. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I guess I’m out of luck - as far as I can tell, that’s the only such anthology left in the US market (please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong). Bummer.

I hope that perhaps some other company can step in and fill its place - a good monthly telephone book of comics with a wide variety of appeal at a great price. And as long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.