Is it impossible for you to go traditional in publishing if your series here isn’t popular?

Actually... it's not necessarily the case.

Being popular online and being well-suited to print aren't the same thing. In fact, among my friends, I know plenty of professionals who have a huge following online but have never been all that successful in print media, and also plenty who are very successful and well-established print creators whose webcomic following is nothing special.

The key thing you need to look for are "comp titles". A "comp title" (Comparison title) is:

• A work in the same medium as what you want to make (print comic, webcomic, TV series, light novel etc.)
• Aimed at the same rough demographic as what you want to make (ie. Kids 3-6, Kids 7-11, Kids 11-14, Young Adult etc.)
• It MUST be from about the last 10 years and have been at least reasonably successful in the same market as your work (so if it was huge in Japan 20 years ago and never really made much impact in the US where you plan to sell your story that probably won't fly).
• It needs to have a similar "vibe" / "tone" / "look" / "feel" or premise/genre so it feels similar to your work.

Ideally, you should have at least three titles like this you can name.

For example, if I was going to make a print comic, I wouldn't make my webcomic, Errant, I'd make a children's graphic novel and pitch it to Scholastic and similar, because I can name plenty of comp titles similar to the kind of vibe of children's comic I'd make, like Witch Boy, Lumberjanes, Stone Keeper etc. So I can be fairly confident about pitching something like that in print.
As a webcomic though, Errant has a solid foundation for me to be confident about building a moderate readership on Tapas because there are comp titles for an LGBTQ+ themed and character-focused Action-Adventure with bold art, like Hard Lacquer, Pandora's Devils, Magical Boy, The Flying Ship etc.

So really, it's about looking for the best place to sell what you want to sell. If you're already in the best possible place for your product, but it's still not getting readers, it may be a matter of just needing time to build your experience, skill and audience and refining your presentation quality and marketing.

With the way time & money is imperative in the publishing world, unless publishers are floored/wowed by your comic(art/story/concept) and they are beyond 100% convinced that your project will generate tons of revenue for them, then the odds are not in your favor. That is why a lot of creators stress building your audience; you cant rely on publishers taking a look at your project if the interest isn't already there.

Viz Media is not a traditional publisher. They are a distributor who partners with Japanese publications. You would have to publish through the Japanese companies and have Viz decide to pick it for North American distribution. Not really worth the hassle IMO.

Like @RedLenai said, you at least need to be 5 years(or more) into your comic...at least with that amount of time, publishers can take a look at the body of work and determine something...less than that, and publishers are iffy about the longevity, impact, and resonance of a comic coz there isnt enough history to go on.

They also want to know that there is a full story- beginning, middle, & end; I see a lot of creators that start out with a thing and lose interest in their comic, or realize that they've outgrown that concept/idea and want to do something else, or they're creating on the fly and write themselves into a situation that they can't recover the comic from.

That's where we're at now days in traditional comic and graphic novel publishing...creator owned material is not going to be published unless they are all of certain the idea/concept is a guaranteed money maker, and the creator already has a sizeable audience that they've built themselves; anything more is too much of a time/money waste on their part.

D’aaaw, no worries!

You REALLY don't need a publisher. All a publisher does for you is slap their name onto the book and handle advertising and distribution for you. The internet nowadays allows you to publish on your own. Find a good printing company (I suggest Mixam Printing, they're great), and open your own shop.

Are you trying to publish a book or a comic? AFAIK (I'm in the process of pitching a comic to publishers) publishers would rather publish something completely new rather than republish an already-existing work. In the world of novels you are completely shooting yourself in the foot if you self-publish it, basically no publisher will ever touch it, because they can't buy the exclusive rights anymore (unless you are extremely successful on your own - but then you wouldn't need them). In indie comics I think they're a bit more flexible, but what they'd be looking for is whether they think the idea can make them money if they apply their own marketing to it. They may want to change large portions of your comic to make it more marketable, so having a "pre-made" comic may not be to your advantage since you could end up spending a lot of time re-drawing it (this isn't a bad thing, by the way... a good publisher would know way more about the market than you, and will only be recommending changes that they expect would add to your mutual success).

Read through the submission guidelines for the publishers you're interested in to double-check. But having seen what VIZ has put out, I wouldn't be surprised if they specified that they weren't interested in previously published work.

Okay - just for background, I've been published by Pocket Books and Osborne/McGraw-Hill, and I've run my own small publishing company since 2007. So, I've got a good idea of what's going on from both sides of the proverbial aisle.

The thing you need to realize is that when you sell a book to a publisher, what you are selling is the publication rights to that book. What any publisher wants is the first print and electronic publication rights, meaning that it has never been published anywhere before. These are the most valuable rights, and the ones that a publisher is willing to shell out money for. If a book has been published anywhere, now you're talking about reprint rights - unless the book was a huge success or significant in some way, the publishers won't touch them (there's just no way to get a reasonable return on investment for them).

Another thing is that genre matters, and not in the way you might think. If it's fantasy or science fiction, you could be looking at response times that are measured in months rather than years. This is what killed my fiction career back in the early 2000s, and I was an agented author at the time (when you reach the point where you're wondering how many decades you're going to need to wait for a reply, it's time to do something new). So, in those genres, you're probably much better served in those genres by self-publication or going through a small, independent publisher.

Self publishing is a huge topic, so if you decide to go that route, you might want to contact me through DM, and when I have a moment I'll try to run you through some of the things you need to keep in mind.

It really depends.

Putting on my publisher hat, here's the thing. Let's say that you're pitching me a book. The first question on my mind is "how many copies can I sell?" If you can tell me "I've got this series and every time I put out a new chapter, I get 500 views and 100 likes, and I've got 250 subscribers," then I now know that you've developed a following. So, if they'll follow you on this journey, there's a good chance that they'll follow you on the next one. And if they like your work, then there's a good chance that others will too. So, I've now got a good reason to put in the time and resources needed to develop your next book (which, for a fully publicized release, can be thousands of dollars). The odds of a good return on investment are high.

On the other hand, if you come to me with this argument and say "Would you like to publish the serial I'm releasing right now," my answer is almost certainly going to be "no." First, all of these people are getting to read this for free, so the only way that I'm going to be able to sell books to your existing readers is if there's enough value added in the print and e-book editions that they think it's worth their time to read it (aka, new content). Second, since any new readers will be able to find your serial online, I'll only get a fraction of those readers too. Now, if you could say, "I self published, and here are the numbers of books I moved in comparison to views," then it's a different discussion, but that's not something you're likely to have as an option.

Now, since I am actually going to be selling copies of my serial, some clarification is necessary. There is a big difference between taking a risk and doing something experimental with my own work, and taking a risk and running an experiment with somebody else's, particularly when I'm personally trying to build an audience and resurrect my fiction career in the long term (I found myself on the wrong side of the Lord of the Rings glut back in the early aughts). And, there are two more volumes of Re:Apotheosis stories coming - only one story from the second will be serialized, and the third probably won't be serialized at all. So, there's a long game that I can afford to play with my own work that I can't play with somebody else's.

But, that's the decision making process from the publisher's point of view.

Thank you for taking the time to really delve into the subject. It makes a lot of sense that "it depends". After all, publishers are still human beings with their own way of doing things.