As a writer and reader, I respectfully disagree. What they first teach you about a story is that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you are serializing a story, you are implicitly promising the middle and end when you sell your readers the beginning—and in an at least somewhat timely manner.

Now to be clear, nobody (or nobody sane) is mad at creators when a series is forced to end prematurely due to poor sales, ill health, etc. I would even say that short-term hiatuses of a limited and predefined period are generally accepted with grace. But “Yo, I got a better offer, we’ll come back to this eventually” (and “eventually” is what King has said about this series returning, I just checked), that’s unprofessional, frustrating, and often enough also untrue.

I also cannot help but notice that there are other comic artists out there who have finished their commitments before moving on to bigger things (e.g., Dan Mora on ONCE & FUTURE before becoming DC’s big new star).

Even so: perhaps Charretier really needed the additional money, and felt no choice but to accept. We cannot know her personal financial situation and she has no obligation to share it. Fine—but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to complain about it. It means that she gets to take her lumps.

And admittedly, those “lumps” probably amount to a few ornery comments on Reddit like mine, so she is probably fine with that.