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Underground > Comic Books >

CrossGen in trouble: the fallout

21:50 / 05.04.04

OK Today has seen not one, but two major resignations from the upper echelons of the comics publisher CrossGen. Details here.

This news comes hot on the heels of top flight writer, Ian Edginton's decision to quit writing CrossGen's biggest selling title which itself had been cancelled. Details here

It seems pretty clear that that the CrossGen boat is sinking. It is no longer clear if they will even be around to publish Chuck Dixon's contraversial upcoming comic

will see publication.

So what do people make of CrossGen and its troubles? Are people reading any the titles they are putting out? Do you think it will have ramifications? Or is it no big deal?

22:40 / 05.04.04

That's...really the cover?

Holy shit, dude.

22:55 / 05.04.04

Add to CGs Monday follies that in the wake of the above-mentioned resignations, the ludicrously-covered American Power has now been cancelled (details here). No, not a good day for CG at all, at all...

23:06 / 05.04.04

Rats. If Crossgen goes down, I feel like there goes the role model for other companies to branch out into other genres of storytelling. I can easily picture the haters going on about their lack of superhero stories and see what it leads to so don't experiment.

Ben Christensen

04:23 / 06.04.04

Just three more months... let them at least have three more months. Then Negation War will be over (it's only 4 issues, right?).

Anyway, let them at least finish that storyline and then crumble like the deck of cards they have become if that's what's going to happen.

It hurts me to think that, but I have little choice.

-Ben

Matthew Fluxington

15:32 / 06.04.04

The fallout: the mediocre creators who worked on CrossGen's mediocre comics will go back to Marvel and DC to make more mediocre comics.

15:49 / 06.04.04

Flux - what do you think about the new working practices CrossGen employed? Or the alternative formats they pushed? Or indeed the alleged different demographic they reached through alternative markets?

15:58 / 06.04.04

I was just reading about that particular title.

If anyone has any scans from it, I'd love to see them. Wow.

Matthew Fluxington

16:11 / 06.04.04

Well, I think it's great that CrossGen treated its employees as if they were, you know, actual workers as in any other business. And I do respect that they made some attempt to do something other than superheroes. But it all would have been better if they made, you know, good comics. That's the key. Everything CrossGen did was so generic - if they had been more imaginative, it could have been a much better thing.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

16:41 / 06.04.04

I didn't have a problem with the kind of stories that CrossGen told, and I liked how they worked toward trade paperbacks, but what killed them was what tends to kill most new "big companies".

Too many comics, all inter-related, released all at once. They launched with 8 series and were planning on more? They hired a bunch of hack writers and decent artists (Ron Marz, Barbara Kessel and Chuck Dixon as your main writers?, name one decent concept ANY of them came up with before going to CrossGen) and dumped a LOT of product on the market.

Also, for a company that was going to go for all new concepts, most of their comics were just bland super-hero comics without the spandex. While their business model was one to admire, their product just wasn't good enough to support it. I bought the two "anthology" trade series because I wanted to support the format, and the stories were entertaining enough to pay $8 for 200 pages, but most of Barbara Kessel's stuff was utterly unreadable, Marz has always been a hack and I swear that Dixon has a single template in his word processor for stories and puts in details as if it were a "Mad Lib."

Everyone who starts a "new universe" forgets that Marvel did it slowly over a 10 year period, and for most of the Silver Age was only allowed to publish 8 comics a month, and NO shared universe since then has succeeded.

17:50 / 06.04.04

Also, for a company that was going to go for all new concepts, most of their comics were just bland super-hero comics without the spandex.

This was actually why I didn't end up reading most of their comics. I really like original stories, and the marketing and covers for most of these looked like predictable takes on predictable genres, only now in comic form instead of as a book or a movie. Does anyone know why they were so stuck on genre stories instead of branching out into completely new territory? I wasn't keeping up to date with CrossGen press releases and stories back when they were more active, so from an outsider's point of view it looked to me like they literally made up a list of genres and crossed them off one at a time (pirates, spies, monsters, martial arts, sword and sorcery, etc.).

I really did want to support them, but at the same time I'm not so much in the "buy to show support" camp than I am in the "buy because I'm actually interested in the story" camp.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

23:58 / 06.04.04

Yep, since the collapse of their "sigil" line, they have been trying everything that hasn't worked in comics before to see if they could get some interest. The bad thing is that they all sold moderately well for an indy comic, but not good enough to support the "office" behind each one.