Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows ended its run as a newspaper comic strip on Dec. 30, 2001, but is continuing its run in comic book form. The Liberty Meadows Wedding Album is reaching comic stores Wednesday, January 16 with the complete story of Brandy's wedding. All through December, Cho was running the comic shop locator number in his newspaper strip, and many retailers have reported receiving numerous calls concerning the availability of the Liberty Meadows comic book. When the Liberty Meadows Wedding Album does arrive in stores, it should provide retailers with an excellent outreach tool. If the Liberty Meadows comic strip ran in your local paper, it certainly makes sense to put the book in the window of your store (or in the most prominent location possible) in order to let fans of the comic strip know that the book is available.
Cho's reasons for ending the newspaper strip version of Liberty Meadows include his growing aversion to the tyranny of daily newspaper deadlines, but they also include his desire to escape the constraints of censorship imposed by various newspaper editors who are determined to keep newspaper comics suitable for 5-year olds. Liberty Meadows contains characters and situations that have created a number of censorship hassles for Cho, who is forgoing the steady (and often considerable) income of a popular newspaper comic strip for the much more financially uncertain world of comic book publishing. The big winners here could be pop culture retailers, who now have the only 'fix' for readers with a Liberty Meadows jones. In addition to displaying the Wedding Album as prominently as possible, savvy retailers will also search their stores for additional material that might appeal to fans of Liberty Meadows. Remember that for every fan who actually calls your store, there could twenty or more who might want to continue reading the Liberty Meadows story, if they had the opportunity. The cliffhanger ending of the newspaper comic should provide plenty of impetus for readers to grab the comic, and the considerable support that Cho received in his various battles with newspaper editors who wanted to change or get rid of his strip testifies to the fact that this is a comic that has a devoted following.
