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As regards the genuine thrust of the thread, though… ‘I dunno’ would be my not-entirely-helpful response, not least because the basis of the discussion is a report of an anonymised e-mail from an ex-employee, so it may not be without some degree of hidden/added agenda.
I think that there’s something to be said for DC – and Marvel and many other companies – acting like a business, and not allowing ‘emotion’ or ‘loyalty’ to interfere with the running of things, such as you might get in most other media. There’s probably a moderately thin line between these things and cronyism and the kind of clinging to the past that hasn’t really helped the medium in the past (such as the sudden surge of nostalgicomics the other year, which seemed to have dropped off like the orders for Youngblood issue 2).
And incredibly, my previous cheap jibe actually comes into play here, as offhand I can only think of one other example of a medium where there’s been an NYX-style failure to deliver, which would be Harlan Ellison’s third ‘Dangerous Visions’ book, though as that’s a collection of short stories there’s not that lack of narrative closure or continuation which huge gaps between issues of a non-self-contained comic creates. Imagine if the final Lord of the Rings film had run a year late (granted, the production approach pretty much obviated that, but you know what I’m driving at). Imagine if Stephen King’s ‘Green Mile’ when initially issued in monthly instalments had been nine months late ? I can’t think of a version from the music side of things, but I’ll wager there are some … no, I’m not going to pick on Wilson’s ‘Smile’, as that’s an example of the human frailty involved, so if Kurt Busiek’s got health problems and it holds up his creator-owned title I think more than a little slack should be cut. But it happens with so many mini-series (Dark Knight 2, for example) where you’d think the publishers would have the sense to have the whole thing in the bag before soliciting issue one, which … well, let’s face it, that looks bad.
And as much as we readers may bleat, the shop owners are also affected by this; I liken it to having a friend who you arrange to meet, and you book a table at a restaurant, and they don’t show. You’re annoyed, the restaurant owner resents the loss of sales, but hey, you and your friend have enough good times in the bank you agree to meet again. And again they fail to show. And again. And again. And there may well come a point when you decide this isn’t worth your time, money and energy after all, and there are other people you could be spending these with. I think my moderately heavy-handed analogy is pretty easy to apply…
Though it’s not the be-all and end-all, obviously – Milestone, First and Crossgen were all very proud of their on-time shipping records, but didn’t last as companies.
As regards the idea of the loss of long-running plotlines, I think it may well be that those have faded anyway; the X-titles seemed to have many of those sustaining them for years, but eventually a lot of them have taken a backseat or been resolved (the X-Traitor and all that), and even the ‘iconic’ titles have seen some resolutions of long-dangling plotcarrots: Superman tells Lois who he is and they wed, ditto Spiderman and MJ, Batman tells Catwoman who he is, etc, and it may be that the kind of stuff which kept readers wondering what will happen for years is vanishing, perhaps because the readers themselves are going or gone, or perhaps because the new publishing model means that people are less likely to want to buy an undefined number of trade paperbacks from their local bookshop. They want to pick up a complete story. In TV terms it’s the difference between watching a series of, say, Buffy, and watching a soap opera; with the former, you know stuff’s gone before and may well come after, but you get a story – with a soap, you’re unlikely to see the end of it (paradoxically, if you and many others watch it, you actually prevent any of that sense of narrative closure by making it popular).
I’ll stop now, as I’m kind of free-forming here, and I may not be making a whole lot of sense… I welcome disagreement and corrections! |
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