Archaia: Don't Call It A Comeback

According to a recent press release, Archaia Studios Press will resume their publishing schedule in June, this after rounds of restructuring and talk of buyouts, confusing and sometimes contradictory communications scattered across various web venues, and then long periods of... silence. The release quickly clarifies that “we are no longer called Archaia Studios Press or ASP. Please refer to us as simply Archaia or Archaia Comics from now on.” That's all fine and dandy, but it sure would have been nice to see a coordinated marketing push, something like, I don't know, a web-site revamp that simultaneously incorporated all of these changes to the naming convention, and a crystal clear list of which books would continue, and how they'd be published (some continuing with single issues, and some jumping right to collected editions, some changing publishers altogether), and ya' know, when they'd be published - right there on the publisher's own web-site. The press release offers very limited awareness of the name change, and if you're hoping to educate and shift the audience toward adoption of a new name, you need sustained consistency on all fronts, with an identifiable new public face. This piece meal stuff rarely works in marketing. At this point, I really just want to see the final two issues of Jacamon & Matz's The Killer, with a second hardcover. Okko and Artesia are also fairly interesting, but I just never warmed to any of the other titles. That revised logo sure looks spiffy though.