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.