So if I were to tell you that there was a preview of Issue #4 of “Future’s Guardian”, what would you expect to see?
Would you expect to see a few pages of the issue? Probably.
How about the cover of the issue? Yeah, that would help too.
Well what if I were to tell you there was a preview available and you checked it out and you discover that half of the “preview” is filler?
A certain mainstream publisher (yes one of the “BIG TWO”) has been doing that with their previews of late.
I won’t say this is how PRECISELY they do it, but this is how I would do it if I was trying to be like them and wanted to promise a six-page preview without delivering six actual pages…
So you start with the cover…
(Yes this is the actual cover to “Future’s Guardian” #4)
Then you take the underlying image and run it through either Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or GIMP to convert it to grayscale and blur it a little bit. Then add that to the normal cover “nicknacks” like the title and the logos…
Presto! A special “rough draft” cover showing the “sketch” and “ink lines”.
You could even do that one more time and come up with yet another “rough draft” cover, or come up with an alternate cover.
Now you have three images out of six. All you need is now is three pages from the issue and you have your “six-page preview”.
But you know what? As a comic book reader myself, I’d feel a bit cheated. If I’m told there is a “six-page preview”, I expect to read six pages, not three with filler.
Soooooo… WILL I do that?
Check in here around the Memorial Day weekend to see what I’ll have in store for you.
“Future’s Guardian” #4 will be online on June 1st.
Battlerock Comics 
A while back (2007!) when I naively thought I could actually produce one or more comics or a regular basis, I had actually planned to release a first issue of a series, followed by the second, followed by a “Directors Cut” of the first again, cover variant and all! The original version of it was probably only a third of the story but would have contained a massive spoiler for the ending of the second issue so it was the only way to do it, but I’d have been equally guilty of what you describe above David despite my “it’s for the good of the narrative” justification…