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Boboss: Well, as someone who thinks deadlines and editors can be a very good thing in that they can help temper and galvanise creative energies, I'm inclined to disagree.
Depends on the deadline, obviously. It does work, as anyone who's done creative work knows - they've commissioned it? We're doing it? Time to get serious - but it's ridiculously easy to find examples where it's harmed the work. Transmetropolitan serves as one; the creative team were proud of never missing a deadline, but because Ellis had problems producing the scripts Robertson had less and less time to draw them, and the art noticeably declines in quality over the last ten issues or so. Reading it in trade after the fact, are you likely to be impressed that the deadlines were kept or annoyed at the lack of the great backgrounds that characterised the series early on? Ellis, who IIRC was very ill at the time, and Robertson were extremely professional. The work has lost out because of that.
Other creative industries blow deadlines constantly and they're designed around it. Publishers go to press when a book is ready, though, rather than demanding it be ready for a certain date. If Thomas Pynchon hadn't finished his latest until today there would be no crisis. Bands, other than pop acts who need a constant presence these days, can take time off, record albums and scrap them, etc. Movie release dates are changed. It probably would have suited V For Vendetta better to be released on November 5th, but it wasn't. It managed.
I think the point about feeling other's pain is valid because, unlike adverts on tv, lateness is not an intractible problem - it is often the product of bad planning and/or over extension on behalf of publishers and creators. It isn't just a fact of the world so get used to it, fella, kind of situation - it's a problem that grows out of real live humans being unprofessional.
I don't feel your pain, though. Not wanting to be at all antagonistic. I just think you should change to trades. I know your pain isn't self-inflicted, but from my perspective that appears to be the simple solution. I mean, I'd love there to be a great comic shop near me that I could pop into weekly and check out the latest Drawn & Quarterly graphic novels. Instead there's a cesspit full of porn and figures and console games that I walk away from cursing, so I get my fix off the internet instead. Neither problem - late comics or horrible shops - is seemingly impossible to fix, but in the absence of any immediate solution I prefer to not enrage myself by engaging with an aspect of the industry which I hate.
I'm not for a minute suggesting that lateness can be entirely quashed, but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the situation is a little out of hand. I like buying my comics monthly in that my passion for all but the very best stories tends to wane after more than a few weeks. On the whole I usually enjoy stories more when I don't have to wait four months between issues, and, frankly, I think a lot of people posting in this thread probably feel the same way, but for some reason feel disinclined to say so.
The issue for me is with the industry, which is still stuck in a newsstand paradigm and believes comics should be monthly. The problem is making this demand compatible with the desire to have a particular creative team producing a consistent run of comics. In situations like Ult Hulk vs Wolvie (fuck you, John Byrne) then Marvel have been massively unprofessional in publishing #1 without even a script for #2. No big publisher can get away with that for long, though. Look at Image. It had to seriously clean house and change its ways in order to carry on.
The fans themselves want monthly work. The often-suggested idea that slow artists like Quitely can just do OGNs hasn't been realised because they don't have the same impact on the market as monthlies. The 49ers had a hot artist and comics' favourite writer, but didn't make the impact it could have as a monthly series. Plus it didn't allow the company to make two lots of profit. Until the bookstore model supplants the monthly market, we're going to have late books.
I didn't expect this much anger about them, I have to admit. I was taking the long perspective, looking at books so late they became outmoded. A*S should have had a trade out in time for the movie last year; it didn't. Lateness has made it a speciality book, one for the Grant fans. Late books are lesser books in the eyes of fandom, to generalise.
The suggestion that to complain about lateness is simply unreasonable and quite possibly hurtful. A fucking ridiculous stance, I hope we can all agree.
Absolutely. But there are so many people out there making you look bad, demanding to know why the artist hasn't drawn it yet, demanding to know the details of Busiek's serious medical problem before they're willing to absolve him, demanding that Bryan Hitch gets back to his drawing board whether his wife's ill or not. They give reasonable complaints a bad name. |
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