This meant that the stories would be serialized in the comic book in twenty-page installments, but with little regard for the per-issue reading experience—sometimes an issue would end mid-scene.
[7] Many fans started waiting for the collected volumes to be released, abandoning the monthly series—a phenomenon that came to be known as "The Cerebus Effect".
In retaliation, Diamond Comic Distributors in 1987 chose to drop Puma Blues, which was being published by Sim's Aardvark One International.
To extract themselves from the dispute, the book's creators, Michael Zulli and Stephen Murphy, moved publication of Puma Blues to Mirage Studios.
This presented a dilemma to creators, particularly if they relied on the income from the series to support themselves until they could publish enough material for a collection.
This hurt the serialized reading experience and further convinced many readers to wait for the collections, to the detriment of the periodical comic sales.
At one time, Sim talked about publishing high-quality, oversized editions of Jaka's Story,[14] but soon scrapped it as a cash-grab.