Hi everybody.

It saddens me to report that the first volume of Jellaby will not remain in print. This means that it will becoming increasingly difficult to find copies of Jellaby in the more traditional retail outlets like book or comic stores.

However, there are alternatives. Online booksellers that specialize in out of print books seem to have some copies of Jellaby at the moment: sites like AbeBooks, Alibris and BookFinder have copies available in both new and used conditions, often at less-than cover prices. And if you’re in the Toronto area, I can definitely say that The Beguiling have a lot of copies of Jellaby in stock.

So if you’ve been looking for a copy of Jellaby for your school or library, or for your family or friends (or even yourself!), I would recommend that you pick up a copy sooner rather than later before the book completely vanishes.

This decision was wholly out of my hands. It was, I presume, a financial decision on the part of my publisher, Disney-Hyperion, even though the book has been a modest success by comic standards (more than 18,000 copies sold over the span of 21 months), and had been slowly picking up readers as time went on. Having Jellaby off the shelves does create an unfortunate situation, however — the second book, Jellaby: Monster in the City, is the conclusion of the story that runs through both books, and by removing the availability of the first book, Monster in the City is in danger of leading a shortened life as well, being a now- incomplete second half to a two-part story.

I know these are tough economic times we live in, but if you want to show your support (and haven’t already), I would urge you to buy a copy of Monster in the City, to attempt to prove to Disney-Hyperion that sales of Jellaby are still viable. If you do or already have picked up a copy in the past, I would love it if you dropped me an email (kean [at] keaner.net), if only so that I can thank each and every one of you personally. It’s the least I can do.

What this means for the future of Jellaby, at least in the short term: any plans for a third volume or a short story collection are on hold indefinitely until the rights issue is sorted out. I personally would love to sort things out and work on Jellaby again with the fine folk at Disney-Hyperion — my designer, Roberta Pressel, my former editor Calista Brill, and my current editor, Tamson Weston, have all been a joy to work with, and I wouldn’t hesitate at all for a chance to work with them again.

But for the moment, it’s on to newer and brighter things. I will still be drawing the occasional new Jellaby story for the Flight and Explorer anthologies, however (and perhaps even one or two new stories for this website, if inspiration strikes). I do love spending time with these characters, and there are still plenty of areas to explore with them — I don’t think I could bear to completely leave Jason, Portia and Jellaby behind just yet.

- Kean
January 2010

(of course, you sharp-eyed readers will have recognized the image above. Who says bad news can’t be fun?)