Category: Comics

On the arrival of the long-awaited Seven Soldiers #1, and shorly after the announcement that the second issue of Wildcats will come out at least four months after the first, a look at some of the problems with late comics.

Generally speaking, I don’t really care. If a book is good, I don’t care if it comes out weekly or semi-annually. I keep reading Queen & Counry because it’s an awesome book even though it seems to be on the strict schedule of “Whenever We Get Around To It.” There’s no way I could not buy Seven Soldiers today, because it’s Grant Morrison and J.H.Williams III concluding the best comic event of the past couple years. Art takes the time it needs, and I’d rather have a good comic than a monthly one.

But of course, not every comic is Queen & Country. I can’t wait for my favourite books to come out, but I have to because there’s simply no substitute. But if it’s merely a book that I like, then delays can bump it down to forgotten. Habit is the worst enemy of the comic fan, and one of the best friends to superhero publishers: Fans like their books every month like clockwork, and the ongoing storylines attempt to string each issue to the next. If that book is showing up monthly, a reader can get into the habit of buying it, and that habit might outlast the quality of the book. When your book is there every month, it’s less of an effort to remember that you want to buy it; when it’s shipping two to three months apart, it has to be much better to stick in your mind. This is particularly important for the impressionable fan: I can remember buying most of Image’s early books, only to forget about them during the many months between issues. I was young and stupid enough to actually want these books, and I probably would have kept buying them if they’d actually come out.

Aside from the habit of buying the book, there’s also the more important (to me, anyway) habit of making regular trips to the comic store. When Seven Soldiers was running on a tight schedule early on, I was at the store at least once every two weeks. This was not something I could put off – I wanted, nay, needed, to see what happened next. And the more time I spend at the store, the more I’m likely to buy. If I go in, say, once a month, I’m going to look for the books I want and then leave with my pile. But if I’m there for just two, I’m more likely to pick up something else to round out the pile; sometimes I feel silly buying only one or two books. If you can keep me coming back to the store, I’m probably going to buy more books, and some of them might be yours.

Beyond the psychological impact, though, one has to consider the business side of things: It seems fundamentally wrong to be promising your customers a product on a certain date only to yank it away, sometimes only a week or two before the scheduled release. In many industries, that’s a decent basis for a lawsuit, or at least shifting to a different supplier. The latter isn’t really an option in the comics indsutry, but one wonders if some retailers will upgrade from complaints to action at some point.

The one thing that continually baffles me is how does this keep happening? What sort of planning (or lack thereof, obviously) results in the first issue of the flagship book of your line-wide relaunch being more than a month late? How does the second issue of a bi-monthly issue still ship four months late? How, after several years of experience, can publishers, editors, and yes, artists, not know how long it takes Jim Lee, Bryan Hitch, or John Cassaday to draw an issue of a monthly comic? There will always be exceptions due to illness or family family situations, but massive delays seem to keep happening. Publishers seem unable to get things done ahead of time or schedule things on bimonthly or otherwise interrupted schedules. They often compound things further: Sometimes (I’m thinking of Ex Machina and Walking Dead recently books will ship twice in one month after several months of delays; one might think it would be a good idea to spread things out a little and keep a bit of padding in the schedule. Obviously the goal is to get the books out and collect the accompanying revenue as quickly as possible, but surely there are ways to do this while putting books on schedules that have at least some loose ties to reality.

Comics are at an interesting crossroads: The focus is increasingly shifting from the monthly serials to bookshelf-friendly collections. Fans are demanding hyper-realistic and detail-heavy art on their monthly books, even though few of the artists employing that style can produce on a monthly basis. The market is fiercely competitive, and Marvel & DC trade off the top spot every month with star and event driven books. Everyone wants to get ahead, and the prevailing philosophy seems to involve building the hype, getting the advance orders in, and then worrying about actually publishing the book later. It’s a disturbingly short-term view, particularly if the big publishers continue to rely on the monthly publishing model. Not ever late book is Seven Soldiers, or even Civil War, and one of these days the lack of planning and scrambling for the quick buck is going to cost them.

The first three issues of Guardian probably ranked the series in the lower half of Seven Soldiers. It was good, full of old fashioned Morrison fun – subway pirates and A Small World run amok – but I wasn’t quite feeling it. That all changed with #4, when the title character took a back seat to a story of the Newsboy Army and a glimpse of the Sheeda’s history on Earth. It built in to the ongoing story of Jake Jordan, who finally shed the “reluctant hero” badge and embraced his destiny, resulting in one of the most kickass and inspiring finales of the year. After I finished reading it, I wanted Seven Soldiers #1 immediately because by jove, that’s how you build suspense in a superhero comic. I wanted to stand up and cheer and shout “Fuck Yeah!”

The final issue of Guardian is one of my favourite single issues of the past few years, largely due to the below page, and tomorrow, finally, we get to see where it leads. (Unless you’re serviced by Memphis, anyway)

It’s tough to enforce justice in the West with a single, solitary Penis Gun.

Zatanna never entirely clicked for me. I thought it was going to a couple times, but it was one of those books where Morrison brought in a new idea for nearly every issue, linked only by a vague theme. And unfortunately, this was the book where the scheduling started to go off the rails: After the first couple months went by like clockwork, both #3 and #4 were quite late, an unfortunate harbinger of the very-late Frankenstein final issue and the really-quite-terribly-late finale to the entire event.

But by god, Zatanna had some nifty ideas and some absolutely gorgeous visuals (which is probably unsurprising since the title character walks around in fishnets most of the time):

From Shining Knight #4: A gangster with machine guns riding a flying horse to fight alien/fairy bad guys.

God, how I love Grant Morrison.

From Zatanna #2, one of the great throwaway gags of the series: Zatanna asks her friend if she’s seen the Phantom Stranger lately, and she’s told “The last time he was here, I asked him to pick me up a loaf of bread from the corner deli. That was two years ago. He certainly loves to wander.” And then, at the end of the book, he returns:

(Sadly, he doesn’t actually do anything in the next issue. Mind you, I’m not entirely sure what he does anyway, though he does do it with a certain amount of flair. I don’t know why, but the Phantom Stranger is just cool, and I’m strongly considering picking up the DC Showcase: Phantom Stranger volume this week.)

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on in this book, but I think I like it.

From what I gather, the Omega Men have been around for a while. My familiarity with them much begins and ends with Andy Diggle’s Adam Strange mini, though I’ve also read a couple of Alan Moore backups that don’t actually include the Omega Men themselves. But they seem cool enough – I have a weakness for intergalactic rogues, and the team doesn’t seem to be built around standard superheroics.

It’s possible that if I were familiar with the team, this book would move up from “good” to “great”, but the lack of any meaningful attempt to explain exactly who these people are hamstrings the book. (Yes, I realize I seem to be making that complaint a lot lately, but if you’re going to put out a book starring c-list characters it’s fairly stupid to assume everyone knows who they are and all the details of their backstory)

There’s a bit of opening exposition, but it’s mostly devoted to setting up the plot: A new religion is sweeping across the universe, devoted to The Lady, and it’s both powerful and sinister. The Omega Men don’t like it much, as they show up to blow up a church and kill a bunch of priests. They’re looking for something because the guy who looks like the human torch and might be a prince had a dream about it. Or something.

The Omega Men themselves are almost backup characters in their own book, as more attention is given over to Vril Dox and his L.E.G.I.O.N. as he tries to figure out what the Omega Men are up to. It’s possible that Dox is being set up as the exposition guy following the enigmatic Omega Men, and that after a brief fight their misunderstanding will be cleared up and he’ll tag along with the team, not unlike his role in Adam Strange. But for now, the book is treading a very fine line between being mysterious and simply unclear.

There’s something to be said for jumping right into the story, though, and Anderson Gabrych makes the most of it: There’s plenty of action and cool aliens, including a a swarm of spider aliens attacking a city. The story certainly seems to be structured well: Gabrych seems to know what’s going on with the plot, even if he’s not sharing quite enough with the audience.

Henry Flint makes up for the weaknesses in the story, and is the major reason why I’ll probably come back for the second issue. He’s perfect for the creepy, alien characters and has a good flair for action. He reminds me mostly of Howard Chaykin and Doug Mahnke’s work on Frankenstein, which is a pretty decent place to be. The spider aliens are genuinely scary, both in singular and when descending up on a city in a massive swarm.

It’s nice to see DC getting their Outer Space francise back in order, and while Omega Men isn’t a triumph, it’s a nice bit of experimentation with some lesser known characters an a plot with some potential. If Gabrych starts explaining what’s going on and gets into the main characters’ personalities a bit more, this could be a very nice little series.

Frankenstein, like Klarion was a book I had very few expectations for. And just like Klarion, it emerged as on of my favourites: Frankenstein was pure crazy over-the-top Grant Morrison, and nothing quite sums it up like this page:

Continuing our countdown to Seven Soldiers #1…

One of the unexpected highlights of the event was Klarion the Witchboy, a book I had few expectations regarding. But Morrison’s reinterpretation of the character, along with some gorgeous art by Frazer Irving, made this one of my favourite series. On display here, a brief snapshot of why the book was so awesome:

Grant Morrison is very good.

He’s one of my favourite writers and, along with Alan Moore, is in the very exclusive “Try Anything He Writes” club. He’s not always great, but he’s almost always interesting. He tries a lot of different things, and while he always brings that certain Morrison something, no two books are exactly alike. To demonstrate his talent, we’ve got two books that are a) very different and b) unlikely to attract me if written by nearly anyone else.

Wildcats used to be big. Really big. I remember when the first issue came out, and how it seemed like one of the most important things in the world because it was drawn by the biggest comic artist in the universe. I have no idea what it was about, and I’m not entirely sure it made sense then. Since then, the title has waxed and waned, I’ve read very little of it, and Jim Lee no longer impresses me very much. Now Lee is back, and his baby is serving as the flagship title to Wildstorm’s much-needed revamp, even if it is more than a month late.

The first issue of the relaunch suffers from one of the major flaws of Wetworks: There seems to be an assumption that the audience knows who everyone is and what they’re supposed to be doing. There’s a brief bit of exposition on the history of superheroes in the Wildstorm Universe, but after that it switches over to Spartan reassembling a superteam and scoping out old bad guys. He also has sex with Voodoo. Essentially, it reads like Volume 2 (or 3, 4, or whatever the franchise may be up to) which is supposed to immediately follow the previous volume – there’s a bit of catching up with the characters but not a whole lot of explaining. But Wildcats hasn’t had this much of a publicity push in nearly a decade, and it hasn’t had such a high profile creative team in at least a few years. All that seems to say “explain what the hell is going on a bit more clearly,” but Morrison only gives a general sense of the cast and setting.

Of course, a lack of focus on character also means you can jump straight into the action… But Morrison doesn’t really do that, either. Grifter beats up a few alien thugs, but that’s about it. The story basically treads water, updating the status quo of the characters without effectively reintroducing them or having them do anything.

The crux of the book is clearly the conversation between Spartan and Voodoo, where the former lays out the mission statement for the book: “All the widescreen battles and public displays of stupidity: It’s vulgar and frightening. Adolescent. How would truly adult superheroes behave?”

And then they have sex and we see a couple badass imposing villains who are probably significant but aren’t really explained. Morrison and Spartan talk a mean game, but haven’t put much on the table here. It feels like Morrison concentrated too much on resurrecting Lee’s prize franchise, and not enough on bringing his own vision to a title that’s stumbled about for an identity almost since its inception.

The Authority, on the other hand, is clearly where Morrison brought his Idea Hat. It’s not what one would expect from either the Authority or Morrison, but it’s still a tremendous first issue.

The Authority was kind of cool when Warren Ellis wrote it, but since then it’s been all about ultraviolent, in-your-face superheroics. It’s called “taking the concept and beating it into the ground,” and while that might be fine for X-Men, it’d be nice if Authority was ahead of the field in concept and execution instead of merely getting off to a good start and then being overtaken. So here, then, Morrison unleashes hs new approach: Superheroes in the real world.

Or, in the case of this issue, just the real world: The story here is given over to a mishap on a submarine. There are reports of violence, an explosion, and then the sub goes quiet. A rescue/recovery team is sent to investigate and retrieve what it can, though that means pulling the lead officer away from his rapidly crumbling marriage. When they reach the sub’s resting place, they find a disturbing lack of bodies and a large, unexpected mass that isn’t entirely natural.

And that’s it. There’s no Authority to be found here; the focus is entirely on the sub operator, his wife, and his mission. It’s a slow, deliberate pace intended to ground the story in the “real world,” complete with CNN reading recent headlines like “Pope offends muslims.” It’s an interesting tactic by Morrison, whose plots usually come at the reader like a charging rhino on steroids, and usually exist in a hyperactive reality full of wonder and absurdity.

Its success is largely due to the stellar work by Gene Ha, who’s always been good but shoots himself up into the elite with his work here. The obvious point of reference is probably John Cassaday’s more grounded work like I Am Legion – it’s stunningly authentic without being bogged down by needless details. Most important is the dull, ominous mood he brings to the book. The “real world” itself feels grey and drab, and the undersea expedition is dark and imposing. The final reveal of what caused the sub accident is impressive for what it doesn’t show, as well as what it does: A huge, imposing thing sitting at the bottom of the ocean, flitting in and out of darkness. Jim Lee might be the artistic star of Wildstorm’s relauch, but Ha is clearly the master.

Naturally, it’s not what Authority readers might expect: Not only is there no brain-splitting violence, there’s not even any Authority. But since I don’t really care about the team, I don’t have any problem with that. What is potentially problematic is the pacing: As much as this issue is a tremendous slow-burn that builds mood and tension, it might be too slow for a book that’s already bi-monthly. Slowing down the story can be an effective tactic, but it can be problematic if the plot advances only incrementally each month. This might make for a fantastic graphic novel, but a somewhat frustrating periodical.

Still, it’s a gorgeous, impressive, and daring book that doesn’t do much of anything you expect it to (aside from look really good). This is the first Wildstorm relaunch I’ve read that actually feels like it’s trying to do something new (indeed, at the expense of pissing off old readers), which is the sort of thing Authority used to be known for.