Comic Book Resources

Maybe we should all get together and slit our wrists together. I heard Ultimates 2 is getting an even more delayed 13th isntallment! Why live?

Live for one thing, and one thing alone. The trade paperback of Ultimate FF Volume 5, which now officially holds the title of Awesomest Thing Ever.

Marvel Zombieverse. F’ing brilliant.

(You can tell I just read it for the first time tonight, right?)

Instead of making us wait for upwards of 4 months for a chapter, I’d settle for a wait of a year of more and by the whole package ala Greg’s column a few Friday’s ago.

/Dite!

Y’know why Hitch is late on Ultimates.

Because he’s jealous of Byrne.

If you people just bought this stuff in trades, you really wouldn’t have this problem. You’d just pick up your paperback and have a cheaper, higher-quality reading experience with less whining and angst.

Okay, I’m laughing now but, god help me, that read just like the shit I’ve read on various other message boards, John Byrne’s included. People like that are the reason I hate going into comic shops. In fact the guy I buy comics from was, just today, on an anti Warren Ellis tear calling him a hack because he can’t meet a monthly schedule. On the other hand, I’d probably be pissed off all the time if I were managing a comic shop in my forties. Whatever. Funny thread.

The trades of Ultimates wouldn’t come out all that often either, of course — they’d be something like annual graphic novels, each telling half of one of the book’s “seasons.”

Of course, I’m not the guy to ask about this — I find the book technically well-executed but anywhere from inadvertantly dull to actively annoying.

Millar and Hitch are unimpeachably talented at producing a pseudo-political action blockbuster, and the audience in almost all media tend to go ape for that sort of stuff. The novels that sell are like that, the nonfiction that sells is like that, and the movies and TV shows that sell are like that.

Me, I’m a snotty elitist, and I don’t need a comic that wants so badly to look and sound like a slick action film. That’s what slick action films are for. Nor do I need more hamfisted versions of postmodernism which rather miss the point of postmodernism — the freeing up of joy, not the payoff of a vindictive punshfest interspersed with easy Leno-monologue jokes about boobies, France, and cannibalism. And that’s despite my — to steal a line from Paul-O’Brien — broadly agreeing with Millar’s politics (or at least Ultimate Thor’s politics, assuming he’s one of the more apparent mouthpiece characters).

It doesn’t hep that I tend to find Millar’s efforts at politicking in almost all of his comics to be somewhere between shallow posturing and a deeply wrongheaded cynicism. But then, I’m an elitist when it comes to politicized art, and I think such stuff needs to be a damn sight smarter than The Ultimates and its tired game of critiquing the celebritaization of politics while participating in the same.

Well, that bomb dropped, I generally agree that books like the Ultimates need to go to TPB release on a book schedule, rather than single-issue release on a magazine schedule.

Ellis, though…he really writes stories that work as trade chapters and as single issues. Planetary and Fell, for instance, can be read in trade as serials or as something almost like an anthology or collection of one-offs. Well, except his Ultinate Marvel work, which was definitely “for the trade” writing.

Releaseing Ultimates in only Trade form would be disastrous to Marvel’s sales, paying Hitch a huge page rate while only collecting in a year and a half.

John: Is the UFF trade really Marvel Zombieverse? Fuckin Brilliant.

The trades of Ultimates wouldn’t come out all that often either, of course — they’d be something like annual graphic novels, each telling half of one of the book’s “seasons.”

Sure, but compare that to how often actual, y’know, books come out. Comic book nerds are whiney.

Releaseing Ultimates in only Trade form would be disastrous to Marvel’s sales

Did I say it should be released only in trade form? No, I said that those who were bitching about the terrible, terrible delays between issues – Brian Hitch’s “crimes against humanity” as those “rational comic book fans” in that thread called them – wouldn’t have such an issue if they just bought it in trades. Buying it in trades lowers your expectations as far as timeliness is concerned, and it holds up as a better, more cost-effective format anyway.

Honestly, I really am sick of comic fans whining so goddamn much about late comics. If what you’re buying is really worth it, then it’s worth it. If it isn’t, then don’t buy the damn comic. That’ll actually give Marvel and DC an incentive to put their books out on time. But as long as you’re buying the comic, you’re proving why lateness doesn’t really matter. If you buy it even when it’s three months late, you obviously value the content of the book itself more than the timeliness of its release.

I’ve said here and there that a lot of comics really should move from a magazine publishing schedule to a book publishing schedule. Others shouldn’t.

Ultimates is, in my experience, a title that uses the between-issues gaps to build suspense and set up payoffs. There’s a strong case for dual-format publishing there, and as some have said, the sales seem to back that up.

But there are also books that have been clearly hurt by delays — Warren Ellis’ abortive Iron Man relaunch at Marvel, for example, bled readers like mad and wound up selling far less than it should’ve (especially given what were clearly higher production costs because of Granov’s artwork). That was a comic that cried out for delayed, book-schedule style release.

The problem is not just publisher cashflow models built upon the DM, and it’s not just price-point difficulties with widening distribution — it’s what appears to be a basic failure on the part of publishers and a fair number of readers-cum-critics (I’m not referring to anyone on here) to understand that different formats are necessary to different types of stories.

A short story in prose isn’t stretched to novel-length; a novel in prose, in these post-Victorian times, isn’t generally sliced into bits and published piecemeal. Neither mode of writing would survive artistically or commercially outside its best-suited format.

But comics? Comics don’t seem to know quite how to run format, since they still aspire to one mass-producible, universalized format for all stories. Depressingly, this happens even in trade form, which usually implies a narrow range of length, usually 6-8 issues’ worth instead of the more open-ended length idea that prose publishing uses.

“Did I say it should be released only in trade form? No, I said that those who were bitching about the terrible, terrible delays between issues”

Which really doesn’t alleviate what those people are complaining about at all, actually. They’ll just have to wait longer until they can get the trade.

You’re suggesting that they wait a year between 6 and 7, instead of six months between 10 and 11.

Like I said, a trade shifts expectations away from timeliness and focuses it on content, which is better packaged and cheaper in paperback anyway. So yes, I am in fact suggesting that they wait a year to get the next six issues instead of waiting six months to get one. The payoff-to-wait ratio with a trade is much, much bigger than it is with a pamphlet.

Here’s a brilliant idea: Remember when some comics used to be published bimonthly (i.e., scheduled to come out every two months)? Why not just reinstate that for slow-producing creators?

It would be ideal if every comic’s format were based on what was appropriate to the story, including extra-long trades for complete stories that need it, serial pamphlets for true serial fiction, etc. But at the moment (mainstream American) comics publishers are trying to run two models for the same stories – the (typically) monthly pamphlet and the TPB – and generally letting the demands of the latter (which comes out later) dictate the presentation of the former, which to me and many others still feels like the primary format. It’s not a very happy situation.

For a comparison, imagine if the writers of a serial TV program like “Lost” wrote not with the weekly audience in mind, but rather for the eventual DVD collection, and single episodes that were supposed to come out weekly instead came out sporadically. I think you’d lose a lot of your audience pretty fast – and maybe that DVD collection would never be issued. (Yes, the weekly programming of TV shows is sometimes interrupted – but almost always with some kind of advance announcement, which is rarely the case with comics.)