Lumberjanes Special Twice the Price for Not That Many More Pages

Lumberjanes: Somewhere That's Green cover by Alexa Bosy

Boom! Studios has announced (and made available for order in the newest Previews catalog) a one-shot Lumberjanes special comic.

Lumberjanes: Somewhere That’s Green is written by Seanan McGuire with art by Alexa Bosy. In it,

the ‘Janes succumb to cabin fever and set out into the storm on a quest to reunite what look like lost kittens with their mother, and instead stumble upon a mysterious and fiercely guarded secret garden in the middle of the forest. Discover a new corner of the Lumberjanes universe you’ve never seen before, a green haven full of magical and wondrous plants that would be the perfect place for the Lumberjanes to earn their Cryptobotany badges… but only if the creatures they find there let them leave.

Lumberjanes: Somewhere That's Green cover by Alexa Bosy

Cover by Alexa Bosy

When Jo, April, Mal, Molly, and Ripley stumble upon several muddy, spiky, cactus kittens in the woods, they take on the sacred mission of bringing the kittens back to their home. However, when they reach the garden menageries and its Dryad tender, they find that there is a deeper problem at the heart of the garden — and the Roanokes are the only ones who can help!

The problem I have with it is that it’s being billed as an oversized one-shot. A regular issue of Lumberjanes is 32 pages (of which 22 are story) for $3.99. This special is being priced at $7.99, twice as much, for only 40 pages. And while the name recognition of the writer may justify a separate publication, she’s not even writing the whole thing.

In a separate new short story by Mariana Costa,

the Yetis are back! Only this time, they need help from Jo and the rest of the Lumberjanes when a storm knocks out the power to their treehouse and plunges the entire Camp into darkness. It’ll take brains, guts, and the power of teamwork to fix this problem, but the Lumberjanes have yet to meet a challenge they can’t handle together.

I’m glad there are so many Lumberjanes fans, and that the series is doing well enough to put out any number of spinoffs, including prose novels. They’re great characters with a wide-ranging concept that allows for a lot of different kinds of stories. But selling a jumped-up comic issue for double the usual price, which already strikes many people as too expensive, doesn’t seem particularly audience-friendly.

Lumberjanes: Somewhere That’s Green can be preordered from your local comic shop with Diamond code MAR19 1299 (MAR19 1300 for the variant cover below) and will be available on May 29.

Lumberjanes: Somewhere That's Green variant cover by Veronica Fish

Variant cover by Veronica Fish



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