Heck and Crater XV have now been released as collected editions in print and digital, which is your favourite format for each book and why? What do you think each respective format offers the reader?

Z: My favorite format is the hardcover book, and not because I’m a Luddite (although I do like that you only need eyeball technology to read it). There is something very finite about the physical object of a book, and the fact that these books are complete stories by themselves matches that. Picking up the book, sensing its weight, and seeing my progress as I move my way through it gives me a series of satisfying but hard-to-quantify feelings as a reader. It’s very easy to list the pluses of digital: convenience, weight (or lack thereof), availability, etc., but I feel like I was always wanting that hardcover in my hands.

K: I’m also a nut for physical books, as anyone who has ever seen my living room can attest. But there’s no denying that Double Barrel is perfectly suited for digital. After print projects in the past where we’ve agonized over printer specs and ink saturation, it’s incredibly freeing to be able to create straight-to-digital work. Zander and I began Double Barrel believing — and we still believe — that the future of print will be a world of low-cost disposable digital products like Double Barrel and high quality short-run physical books like Heck and Crater XV, so it’s nice to have our fingers in both ends of the pie.

How do you think the Double Barrel publishing model has worked out so far? Will readers who have read Double Barrel still be clamouring to pick up your books in this new edition? Or do you think they will have been satisfied with reading it in instalments?

Z: We designed Double Barrel to maximize the enjoyment of reading things in relatively small chunks, such as the Jin comics, the intro comics, the How-To Essays, and so forth, as well as the cliffhanger aspects of the two main serials. But I think we both feel that Heck and Crater XV were meant to be read all at once, and those books will really be much easier to enjoy when you have it all in your head. And if you decide to buy them in hardcover, they both look beautiful on shelves.

As far as the publishing model is concerned, I think we are heading into an era where we are both transitioning into digital for a lot of a certain kind of content, and we are transitioning out of serialization for a lot of others. There is so much material out there that whetting a reader’s appetite with a little bit of a story is no longer as profitable as it once was. There are new full graphic novels being released every week to compete for readers’ dollars and attention, so any serialized work, I think, needs to start being more comprehensive and more complete. Waiting for the trade is what everyone will do unless there is a very real and very compelling reason to pick up the periodical version. We intend to address this with our material in future installments of Double Barrel.