Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

Comics: how long is a decent chance?

12:14 / 10.12.02

Slightly spinning off the debate on Alias 17...

When trying out a new comic in an ongoing series how many issues do you try before you decide you aren't enjoying it and stop buying?

What effects your decision?

Personally I give comics i'm interested in just a sigle issue to impress me - if i don't feel i got my money's worth from that issue i stop - This worked well for me in the past - kane, berlin, stray bullets, the xstatix all passed this test with flying colors - but the invisibles failed it twice before the firsat issue of the last volume grabbed me.

should more allowence be given for longer works - or should all comics for sale be immediately acessible/enjoyable serialised stories or not? what do you think?

12:21 / 10.12.02

Tough one... I guess if I choose to pick up a new title, I usually stick with it for a while. But then again I don't pick up new titles very often... Ultimate X-men I tried for maybe 10 issues before I decided it was shit. Preacher I stayed with for again about 10-12 issues before dropping it. And oh I tried Sandman for five-six issues, hated it, then tried it again and realized I was wrong. Rambling sorry

Matthew Fluxington

12:21 / 10.12.02

Well, there's the old saying "every issue is someone's first issue" - I think it is pretty fair to say that if you read something that was just horrible, you can probably expect that the rest of it will be terrible too.

12:36 / 10.12.02

[COMIC BOOK GEEK]Usually I give something about 2 issues, depending on whether the first issue is vaguely promising or not. Like that crucial second album, a second issue is where a series really gets going, after the 'setting out the stall' nature of the first.
Sometimes my comic sense is thrown off by delicious art, like in 'The Ultimates', or some kind of weird brand loyalty, like the recent disastrous relaunch of 'The New Warriors'. Worst relaunch ever![/COMIC BOOK GEEK]

Our Lady of The Two Towers

14:13 / 10.12.02

Varies, depending on the title. I'm not completely sold on 'Automatic Kafka' yet after 5 issues, so I'm giving it a year. But there's a few titles I dropped after two issues which seemed irredeemable.

14:30 / 10.12.02

it all depends on whether the title is a limited series or on-going. I very rarely dip into an on-going series anymore and those limited series I do pick up are work of people I already like or feature characters I already know or, on at least one occasion, brought due to the hype around the title (never again though, got burnt on Aria and the artist's "photo-realistic" art, only for the swine to disappear half-way through the second issue).

An interesting side question to sleaze's original, how long do you give a title before you drop it. Are there any title's you're still reading for the sole reason that you've got this far and you'll be damned if you're going to stop. You know the true fan-boy: "Got to have the whole series".

I felt it in the dying months of Transmet and now again with the title Bone by Jeff Smith. Mind you the latter doesn't help itself by the lenght of time inbetween issues coming out.

And finally a slight thread rot, but is there one title that you always have a look at in the shop but never buy?

14:50 / 10.12.02

Depends on the concept I think.

eg,

The Establishment - didn't like the concept, but comments here made it sound pretty cool - bought one issue, instantly repelled by it, thus never bought again.

Outlaw Nation - loved the concept to bits, but greatly frustrated with the way it was handled .. bought about 12 issues none the less..

Matthew Fluxington

14:53 / 10.12.02

Hmm. It would seem that a crucial x factor in this would be how much money a person may have to spending on comics that they don't get much enjoyment from. It seems incomprehensible to me to be buying a year's worth of a comic that yr not sure that you even like unless you've got some money to burn.

Why not just read it in the shop? That's what I do with the comics I'm interested in but can't justify paying for.

14:54 / 10.12.02

For me, one issue’s my limit. As Flux rightly says, each issue IS someone’s first, and if there’s not something in there that grabs me enough to make me come back, then I’m out. For money and time reasons, really – don’t care to spend either on something that’s not grabbing me.
And at the risk of sounding harsh, I don’t give much leeway on the basis of whether something’s part of a longer work or whatever – a duff chapter in a book is often enough to make me put it down, and the same holds for ‘chapters’ of comic works. Watchmen or Maus, for example – the chapters are part of a whole, but each contains at least one thing to make me want to come back for more (and that thing isn’t necessarily me understanding who everyone is, or what their aims are or whatever – sometimes the confusion can be the interesting thing, like my first issue of Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol).

DBC

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:56 / 10.12.02

I'm gradually learning to be a lot harsher with miniseries, because those are often the ones where I find myself thinking "oh well, got three issues of this, may as well buy the rest" - which is nonsense. Generally I have a quick flick through everything I buy before I buy it unless I'm already sold on the series, which is probably responsible for me *not* buying things I otherwise would... But I figure it's better to be doing it that way round.

16:36 / 10.12.02

I used to be a lot more lenient - I stuck with Transmet out of inertia even though it realistically only had 12 decent issues in the whole five years, and those all front-loaded. Stuck with Hellblazer for the same reason, and I hadn't enjoyed any of that series since Ellis took over. I'm much more ruthless now - you've got one issue to impress me or I'm gone. Which means I'd never have gotten into New X-Men if I'd picked, say, the Genosha memorial issue or one of the crap Fantomex ones, but them's the breaks.

And I never buy miniseries anymore - I've even dropped The Filth. No spine, no interest. I can live with missing the occasional gem. I'll sometimes dive into an ongoing series to check it out (I've never understood the anti-continuity cops on this score, because comics were all like that when we got into them. I love feeling lost in a bigger tapestry when checking out a book), but the one-issue rule still applies.

The only comics that interest me as comics - that is, as floppy booklets - tend to be indie stuff these days, where the comic medium itself becomes part of the draw. I prefer indie floppies to indie spines, but it's the other way round for mainstream stuff. I don't know why.

Imaginary Mongoose Solutions

16:37 / 10.12.02

If the book shows ANY promise at all, and I can afford it, I'll try the first storyline. This pays off, usually, like in the case of STORMWATCH: TEAM ACHILLIES which had an okay first issue but a fantastic first storyline as a whole. Sometime this backfires, like with the ESTABLISHMENT where I followed the first story on the strength of the lead character and hated the book once the "team" was introduced.

However, usually I can tell if a book holds any intrest for me from the first issue. For example the 9-cent Fantastic Four was enought to let me know that Waid's FF was going to be like anti-matter to my soul.

Murray Hamhandler

22:00 / 10.12.02

Amen on the Waid FF. First time I've ever torn up a comic out of pure disgust...

I usually give a series the chance of a few issues or its first complete story, whichever comes first. Which, w/a series like the new Captain America, really works out well for the publisher (last issue of the six-issue story out tomorrow, almost a year after it started!). I give some series far more time than I should. Like the new Doom Patrol, which I was excited about when I found out it would be referencing the old series. I knew it wasn't going to be that great, but good christ. Fucking awful. And it just stayed bad. And now I have, like, ten issues of that dogshit series that I'll never be able to get rid of...

With most of the stuff that I buy regularly, I usually give a new issue a quick cursory reading and then set it aside until I get around to reading a run of the issues more closely. I find that this is usually a better way for me to judge a series. I wasn't too hot on the single issues of Lucifer when I first started buying it, but once I sat down and read a run of the issues, it became one of my favorite current series. This seems to back up my thought that very few comics are well-suited to monthly serialization anymore...

22:13 / 10.12.02

I read a thread on another message board that nearly drove me mad. The posters were listing which comics they would like to see cancelled. Now, they were either you're voting for something you've never read and therefore can't ahve much of an informed opinion on, or, even worse, and in the majority of posts, they were mentioning titles which they are still picking up. And the absolute worst of the bunch were those people, and there were alot of them, who listed which comics they wanted to see cancelled and ended their post with "I'm giving it another three issues to get good, and that's that." Man, I wish I had that kind of cash.

For me, it's one issue. There's so many good comics out there that I don't feel the need to wait around on something. Luckily, almost all my purchases are made from the bargain bin, so I'm only ever spending a buck tops to try something out.

And the exception to the above would be Strangers in Paradise. Enjoyed the first few issues when it was a semi-believable romantic comedy and before it was a soap opera. Kept picking it up because I had friends who liked it and I was glad they were getting into comics. One day I realized that this was pretty damn stupid, and I stopped purchasing it. My friends were pissed, but not pissed enough to pick it up on their own.

Murray Hamhandler

22:14 / 10.12.02

Yeah...I just sold several years worth of SIP not too long ago. Why it took me several years to realize that it was cack, I'll never know...

Matthew Fluxington

22:44 / 10.12.02

I think part of the problem with many publishers is the trend for creators to draw out their stories too much into overlong storyarcs rather than tight single issues. There's too many comics now in which very little happens in an individual issue, and that's just stupid and wasteful. If your comic is only coming once a month, if that, I think the creators should give enough story to make that month wait worthwhile.

Out of curiosity, since I haven't seen it myself, what exactly makes Mark Waid's Fantastic Four so bad? I can have a guess, not being a fan of Waid, but the reactions I've read have been very harsh.

23:03 / 10.12.02

SiP was quite fun and I think Terry Moore is a great artist, but the series as a whole has been spun out far too long.

I guess I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to comics and I would say that a good 99% of what's on the shelves is cack IMHO. But I'm always willing to give anything a go and I'm always willing to check something out if it gets a mention on this humble messageboard or I see an interesting review.

Murray Hamhandler

00:29 / 11.12.02

Cannot describe Waid's FF properly, having only read it once. But seeing as how the issue I read (the 9-center) was meant to be a cheap introduction, I thought that he'd have gone to the trouble to make it seem worthwhile to keep collecting the series. He apparently had other ideas, like making a really shitty comic. Maybe all soup-ar-eero books are this bad or worse nowadays. I dunno. I don't read that many anymore.

Do yourself a favor and pick up that 9-cent issue. Then you'll see what I'm talking about. It's only 9-cents, so you won't feel bad about using it for arse-wipe.

00:46 / 11.12.02

I haven't seen any copies of the 9-center, surprisingly. The thing of it is, I like some of Waid's work, and he seemed like a good fit for the FF. Too bad it didn't pan out.

08:57 / 11.12.02

It's very kitsch. I quite liked it...

09:57 / 11.12.02

This is why I stopped buying single issues. I'd screwed over and over again by crappy writing, so I just started doing something similar to what I had to do with movies. With movies I follow Directors (Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, Kubrick god rest his soul) and with comics I follow writers (Morrison, Moore, Miller). Now I buy mostly trades I only buy four titles regularly (New X-Men, The Filth, X-Statix and Savage Dragon).

No star here laces

23:28 / 11.12.02

There are very few comics that have come out recently that I haven't bought and then wished I had. (I think The Authority and Planetary) were the last ones. On the other hand there are shitloads that I've bought and never re-read. And I only give 'em one issue. So clearly even one issue is too generous for most of the dross out there. Actually, I'm kind of interested as to people's recent one-issue-and-never-again purchases - I wonder if I'm the only one who gets suckered by pieces of crap such as:

Pubo - Leland Purvis (Dark Horse)
One Plus One - Neal Shaffer, Daniel Krall (Oni)
Rex Mantooth, kung fu gorilla/Codflesh - Funk-O-Tron Double take
Paradigm - Matthew Cashel, Jeremy Haun (Two Irish Guys Press) actually, this one was okay...
Bunny Town - Will Allison (Radio Comix)
Courtney and the night things - Ted Naifeh (Oni)
Billy Boy - Frank Forte (Asylum) this is totally unforgiveable.
Forlorn Funnies - Paul Hornschemeier (Absence of Ink)

02:26 / 12.12.02

Forlorn Funnies - Paul Hornschemeier (Absence of Ink)

Heh. I would actually list this as one of the recent comics that's mde me go "Wow! Comics rule!!!" Which just proves that it does take different strokes to rule the world.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

02:34 / 12.12.02

I hate to say it, but anyone who says "I need a few issues to get my feet under me" is wasting my money. You have one issue. One story. One chance.

If you can't put together a story so that each issue gets me interested enough to finish the issue, and curious enough to read the next, you are not doing your job as a creator. I flip away from TV shows after less than 5 minutes...movies the same, books a few pages...

Too little time, too much crap.

I wish everyone working in comics today woudl simply think to themselves, "Every issue is someone's first and could be their last." and write that way.

Murray Hamhandler

03:56 / 12.12.02

Example: I'm reminded today, after reading the new Hunter, of my thought that Dylan Horrocks should really start writing Hunter GN's, because the series most definitely does not work in single issue bites and would definitely fail the "one story, one chance" test. He's too into the v. few panels per page thing (or one panel per page in the case of Atlas...which I understand and appreciate after reading his TCJ interview) to really make any single issue worthwhile on its own. But I still think it's a good book nonetheless. And it'll probably never be completed in TPB's, so single issues are probably the only way to go if you want the whole story.

There are many facets to this beast...

05:52 / 12.12.02

For me it depends if I trust the writer or not. If I don't know the writer I will drop it after the first issue, if however it is a writer that has done brilliant work in the past I will stick with it although sometimes this doesn't pay off (Zero Girl 2 anyone?)