I should preface this by saying that I honestly don’t care about Civil War for any story or artistic reasons. I’ve got no passion for superhero event comics, having burnt myself out trying to follow a small portion of the mess that was Infinite Crisis. On top of that, I generally find Mark Millar pretty dull: He’s got a nice flair for action and some style, but lacks any sense of subtlety and tends to pile on political commentary that some people seem to find incisive or controversial. (He’s kind of the comic book equivalent of the Wachowski Brothers)
But I find the whole delay debacle quite fascinating from a logistical standpoint. Namely: How do you fuck up something so big so badly?
No one can deny it: Civil War has been insanely successful. Three or four hundred thousand copies sold? Mainstream coverage of Spider-Man’s unmasking? I don’t think it’s a huge understatement to suggest that this is the biggest monthly comics event of the past decade.
Of course, it’s not a monthly comic any more, which is the problem. Or not. Tom Brevoort, who seems to be quite a clever and friendly guy, had this to say:
The whole infrastructure of comic book retailing is changing, and I think what you’re starting to see is the beginning of the movement away from a monthly magazine publishing model over to something more akin to a book publishing model. This is very distressing to a lot of people who’ve grown up with the monthly model as a bedrock concept. But ever since we retreated almost wholly to the Direct Market in terms of the basic comic book product, there’s no compelling reason for the monthly release schedule outside of the need for retailers to have a predictable cash-flow that allows them to keep their doors open.
He’s right, of course. Just because superhero comics have been traditionally monthly doesn’t mean they always have to be. Some can be, but not all; many of the detailed and pseudo-realistic artists that are so popular nowadays are simply not capable of producing 12 issues a year. So you can either have a monthly comic with fill-ins, or a more sporadic one by the same artist. Both models are workable – Lucifer managed quite nicely with Peter Gross as the main artist and Dean Ormston and others covering the standalone issues – but it’s pretty clear which model fans prefer.
And hey, Marvel kind of gets it: They decided it was more important to have seven not-quite-monthly issues of Civil War drawn by Steve McNiven than five or six drawn by McNiven and a couple by someone else. I question the use of the phrase “artistic integrity” used in service of a company-wide crossover that diverges into a couple dozen other books, but whatever; they have the foundation of a good idea.
But that’s not really the problem. If Marvel or DC say that a book is bi-monthly and it ships bi-monthly, then people have no right to complain; I wish that Desolation Jones and Optic Nerve could come out monthly, but it ain’t gonna happen, at least not with the quality that makes me love them so much. No, the problem, as retailer Brian Hibbs points out succinctly, is that a solicitation is a promise that a book is going to be out on a certain date.
This, of course, is where everything falls apart. As Mark Millar says,
Steve had virtually no lead-time on Civil War and a title with a million characters has proven much tougher than he expected. He and I both assumed a fill-in would be on the cards at some point…
So perhaps it wasn’t always about artistic integrity. And Brevoort, at the same link as above, says
I’ve got a writer with a chronic condition, and a penciler who’s never had to handle a story of this magnitude before, with this many unfamiliar characters and situations (not to mention this much spotlight pressure.) Plus, it’s just a hard book to do. And we did get something of a late start, though that might have been surmountable if this was an easier sort of project
So. This project, which is going to alter the status quo for virtually the entire Marvel Universe and cross over with multiple other titles, is already suffering from:
- a writer with a serious, chronic health problem;
- an artist who’s never drawn anything of this calibre before;
- a late start and little lead time for said artist.
Which brings us back to Brevoort’s first point: This series was probably unlikely to ship monthly. Which, as Brevoort says, is fine. But that leads us back to Hibbs’ main point: Why are you soliciting and advertising release dates you don’t expect you’ll be able to meet? Why not wait an extra month or two to allow McNiven to work ahead, and then go monthly? Or state right off the bat that it’ll ship bi-monthly, or every six weeks, or whatever rate you’re comfortable with?
All too often, Marvel (and sometimes DC) seems to base their publishing schedules around the best-case scenario. They assume that everything will go well, that writers with other, more profitable commitments, will turn in scripts punctually, or that artists will suddenly become faster without sacrificing any detail or quality. The strategy seems to be to get the first issue on the stands as quickly as possible, and then ship the rest of the series whenever they get around to it. Moving comics away from the monthly format is a perfectly sensible idea. Soliciting them and then shipping them whenever you get around to it is not.
It’s not a question of timeliness vs. quality, or art vs. commerce. It’s about planning, pure and simple. It’s about promising retailers – many of whom are trying to run a small business with low profit margins and little margin for error – a product on a certain date and not delivering. It’s about telling the whole world about this awesome, “socially relevant” comic that reveals Spider-Man’s secret identity and then delaying not just the main book, but virtually every book the story crosses over into.
Joe Quesada offers a defence, but, like Brevoort, misses the point:
There are so many factors that go into all of this stuff but the biggest factor is that at the core of it there are human beings at all ends of the creative and business spectrums of what we do. We go in with the best of intentions and stuff just happens. To even suggest indifference is really insulting.
If it happened once or twice, then yes, it might be mean-spirited to suggest that Marvel isn’t doing everything they can to ship books on time. But it’s an ever-increasing phenomenon. By this point in the game, why aren’t publishers aware that writers with Hollywood commitments are usually going to put their comics work second? Why does Marvel seem to have no idea how long it takes Bryan Hitch to pencil an issue of Ultimates? Who on Earth thought Adi Granov could handle a monthly Iron Man book? How is the second issue of a brand-new, high-profile series like Wonder Woman late? How do you unexpectedly delay the biggest series in a very long time, along with half your titles, when you knew several months earlier that there might be a problem? Maybe they’re not indifferent, maybe they really are doing their best, but they seem utterly incapable of learning from their mistakes.
And finally, since I’m touching all the bases: Everyone at Marvel needs to stop bringing up Watchmen and Dark Knight as examples of late books. Attention Marvel: Civil War is not Watchmen or Dark Knight. Comparing your book to widely acknowledged and revered classics of the medium is at best immodest, and at worst ridiculous. I suppose it’s
possible that collections of Civil War will still be appearing on best-seller lists a decade from now, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. On top of that, if you’re going to talk about how a good-looking TPB is what’s really important, why not go straight to graphic novel format?
Quesada also brings up the very first issue of Daredevil, pointing out that Marvel wanted Bill Everett to do the whole issue so badly that they missed the print deadline by several months, which was quite a big deal then. He also mentioned that tidbit in an earlier interview; curiously, now he neglects to mention that the first issue had three different inkers (Everett himself, as well as Sal Brodsky and Jack Kirby), that the first page was just a reproduction of Kirby’s cover, or that Everett never drew another issue of Daredevil again. Not exactly the embodiment of the “art takes the time it needs” philosophy.
(And, as a really final word: I would pay good money to read a Joe Friday interview conducted by Brian Hibbs.)