Imagine comics without monthlies...

Fysh

So this week's Permanent Damage features Steven Grant talking about a potential alternative publishing model for the likes of DC (and Marvel if they felt like it) whereby effectively the monthly model would be ditched and instead they would regularly publish one-shots and miniseries using the same characters they already have. The idea being that this would allow them to improve the quality of publications (by removing the monthly deadline) and make them more accessible to non-comics readers (by having each publication be a relatively self-contained title rather than entrenched in continuity). He refers to the whole thing as "special event" publishing, in that the same approach that is used for the likes of Final Crisis and Secret Invasion would be used for all books.

I find this an interesting idea, but without spending a while looking through sales figures and correlating the figures of profitability from the comics themselves (rather than the profitability of the properties as a whole including money derived from being optioned for other media, eg Batman : TAS or Smallville) it's hard to say whether it makes sense for them financially. But that's not what I'm curious about.

What I'm curious about is how this would affect the average comic-shop-frequenting fan. When Marvel have recently (and reasonably succesfully, it would appear) consolidated all their Spider-man publishing into one three-times-a-month title, the argument can convincingly be made that a chunk of fans like having a "regular fix". Would people prefer fewer issues but greater creative control (and presumably, by extension, creative quality)? Would they stop buying as many comics if the habitual aspect of reading were downplayed or destroyed?

Personally, I would likely consider buying more DC titles if there was a genuine move towards "greater creative integrity", but for me part of that would be a willingness to let go of the entrenched status quo and continuity - but since the status quo is arguably the product they're selling, perhaps this means that I'm not their target audience. What do you lot think?

magwea

That Steven Grant is one long winded writer, does he get paid by the word?

Anyway my thoughts.
Isn't most everyone in Ireland a trade buyer, pamphlets being cost prohibitive."Greater creative integrity" and long form comics is not a given, simply more of a headache for editors.

ztoical

magwea wrote: »

That Steven Grant is one long winded writer, does he get paid by the word?

+1 yeah there was a hell of lot to read in that and it just kept going.

magwea wrote: »

Anyway my thoughts.
Isn't most everyone in Ireland a trade buyer, pamphlets being cost prohibitive."Greater creative integrity" and long form comics is not a given, simply more of a headache for editors.

yep theres the question how this would affect the average comic-shop-frequenting fan vs how this would affect the average Irish comic-shop-frequenting fan. You pretty much have to live in Dublin if you want to picks comics up every month. Pretty much every shop outside of Dublin gets very sporadic supplies of single issues and even in Dublin its not the best so people wait for trades. There's also the cost issue, I've found myself back picking up single issues while I'm in new york not because they are easier to get but because they are dirt cheap. I alot of people in ireland wouldn't notice if they stopped selling single issues. Other areas of comics work without them fine [you don't have single issues with BD's and manga goes the magazine with several different comic stories road, that are then later collected into trades]

magwea wrote: »

"Greater creative integrity" and long form comics is not a given, simply more of a headache for editors.

Theres also the copyright control issue - giving artists the chance to work on longer stories gives them more room to create their own characters and move away from the established characters which is where the big publishers make their money. Single issues allow for the conveyor belt system that keeps control over licensed characters. I would like to see single issues move away from the ongoing system and "big event" model. Micheal Turner use to say single issues should be like tv shows and have a series running for x number of issues then stop for a couple of months and start the next season - it would allow for more balanced stories and less filler crap.

magwea

I like the way Warren Ellis is publishing Freakangles, a model that owes much to 2000AD, 6 pages a week with the overall 144 story already written in full. It addresses the satisfying chunk readers are looking for and the overall narrative thrust. Warren understands how periodical comcis work and webcomics. This is going to do gangbangers for Avatar once its published as a trade and might spawn some imitators.

Anyone see what i'm getting at?

Ztoical, good work on the Indie Spinner Rack shout-out in the Mocca round-up episode. Lovin' the way they butcher your name every time.

ztoical

magwea wrote: »

Ztoical, good work on the Indie Spinner Rack shout-out in the Mocca round-up episode. Lovin' the way they butcher your name every time.

lol cheers. God love them they do make the effort - when I was talking to Mr. Phil at MoCCA he really did try to get it right. From now on I think I'm going to add the phonetic spelling to the back of any of my books [and maybe a fun dictionary definition to go with it ] And they gave my boy Will's series the Sea a great shout out right after - everyone should check his stuff out

Fysh

Heh, come on it wasn't that long. Although it probably would've been more cohesive if it hadn't been adapted from a series of forum posts, I guess.

Anyway, I'd figured that the "not buying singles" thing in Ireland wasn't all that prevalent. Certainly I didn't buy them all that much, but that was more down to Other Realms (my old local shop) having an approach to stocking which depended on their supplier, who was working in the shop at the time, and apparently a random number divided by pi and multiplied by, I dunno, the weather or something. Some months they were great, other months useless. I often found myself buying things in Dublin/London because they'd shipped months previously but Other Realms never got them in (or, I've been informed, occasionally got them in but then had some of the staff hide all the copies for them or their friends....). I agree the cost is pretty bad but that's essentially a given for living in Ireland, unfortunately - heck, the cost of a lot of TPBs isn't much less that the cost of the original issues...

Regarding the comparison to TV seasons, I agree. The Ultimates and The Ultimates 2 are good examples of this - solid material that, given the staggering delays that happened towards the end, would simply never have been produced if monthly constraints had been forced upon it.

magwea

Checking it out now, cool Taiyo Tatsumoto/Kate Beaton feel. Four panel adventure strip so 1950ies, i like.

Fysh

magwea wrote: »

I like the way Warren Ellis is publishing Freakangles, a model that owes much to 2000AD, 6 pages a week with the overall 144 story already written in full. It addresses the satisfying chunk readers are looking for and the overall narrative thrust. Warren understands how periodical comcis work and webcomics. This is going to do gangbangers for Avatar once its published as a trade and might spawn some imitators.

Yeah, it's really good - had a brief chat with Paul Duffield about it at Bristol and he mentioned that the TPB is due sometime in September. Can't wait for it myself. Hopefully others will follow like Fraction did with the $1.99 for 16 pages model.

ztoical

Fysh wrote: »

Heh, come on it wasn't that long.

yes it was!


I just walked from my place to my studio and was thinking about this thread along the way and looking at it from the point of view of artists I would hate to see single issues go as it would make it alot harder for new artists and writers to break in - Marvel/DC are less likely to give a new guy a chance on a big graphic novel as they are on a single issue. Also I know a few of the editors at the big two like to go out of their way to find new artists to do the covers for single issues and for a few people thats been their way into the industry. I mean you could still include all that in a collected graphic novel but the pace would be slower and therefore getting paid for it would be slower [you usally get paid for that work within 60 days of publication not when you finish the piece] so for artists working freelance thats along gap between paychecks.

Fysh

Yeah, I think that's the big problem if you talk about shifting from a bunch of monthlies to an ad-hoc "as the creators become ready to produce the material" approach...if the drive is to increase the quality overall, then presumably that's going to involve killing off a lot of the lower-quality work. (Where quality in this case may be defined as at least partially based on saleability, but that's a discussion for another time). Which, as an industry that has to support its creative members, is not a good idea.

I'd say that a larger number of "Marvel Comics Presents" type anthologies could be an answer to it. Imagine if you had a title with no fixed lead characters, released like 2000AD on a weekly basis, which was made up of short one-shots and smaller serialised stories. The shorter content would allow for the more regular publication, the anthology nature of it would allow it to avoid burning out the creative teams, and it would also serve as an "overview of the greater universe" type book.

I still think that both Marvel and DC could make plenty of money out of sales by making CBR-type digital versions of their comics available through a comics version of iTunes. It's not like most of their stuff isn't scanned and uploaded anyway so they might as well at least *try* to get money out of it. It's a lot simpler to pay a dollar for a digital copy of a comic than to have someone decide it's not worth three/four dollars, then download it for nothing and read it anyway....

magwea

ztoical wrote: »

yes it was!

And horrible rambling, I new Steven Grant was a comics veteran, Permanent Damage has very much the old fogey feel.

ztoical wrote: »

Also I know a few of the editors at the big two like to go out of their way to find new artists to do the covers for single issues and for a few people thats been their way into the industry.

Thats pretty neat, considering that "in days before" the cover artist was always the A class artist and interior artist simply the quickest they could find.

Paul is great, check out his essay on drawing http://spoonbard.deviantart.com/art/How-To-Draw-v1-3-40590655. Is good stuff.

Carl Horn wrote a great piece on the economics of the Japanese manga anthology that might be relevant and was definitely an eye opener for me. http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=%09%09%0922292

shenanigans1982

Personally I would miss the monthlies if they were done away with. I also think that just having trades come out every 6 months at the least ( assuming there are no delays.) would lead to a very disjointed universe where all the books would lack any sense of cohesion. I know that everyone hates continuity, but when done right it is good to have a current story that has its origins in something that happened years before. With the trades everything would just seem like a self contained story ignoring what came before it.

ztoical

magwea wrote: »

Thats pretty neat, considering that "in days before" the cover artist was always the A class artist and interior artist simply the quickest they could find.

yeah I think its changed somewhat in the last 10 years or so - you still have alot of A class artists doing the big covers but when you've so many single issues each month a few editors [more so at DC then Marvel] will use it as a chance to work with someone new they've fond. Its not so much about the work they produce but about how they work with editor - the ideas they come up with and how they take direction from the editor on it and then if they can meet the deadline. Its also a great way bringing artists who might have been trained and worked in different fields into comics and that brings a fresh look and style, for example the likes of Yuko Shimizu who studied advertising, rather then just people who've spent their youth coping over comic artists.

Anthology style books would be a way to go except most big publishers aren't found of them as they are seen as big money losses [Flight being the exception] There have been a few attempts like DC Bizzaro book which brought a lot of small press people to the notice people and the recent Pop Gun from image, plus a handful of smaller collections from different publishers. We shall have to wait and see if thats just a phase or more steady thing.

magwea

Yuko Shimizu has one hela famous namesake. You almost had me thinking that the creator of Hello Kitty did monthly covers.

That bizzaro world anthology probably had the blogs on fire with its awesomeness, the Kochalka strip being the highlight for me, but it really has nothing to do with the type of comics DC is publishing.

ztoical

magwea wrote: »

Yuko Shimizu has one hela famous namesake. You almost had me thinking that the creator of Hello Kitty did monthly covers.

yeah she had probs starting out cus of the name so she used the webname yukoart.com but said recently she's got herself established enough now thats not as big an issue any more.

magwea wrote: »

That bizzaro world anthology probably had the blogs on fire with its awesomeness, the Kochalka strip being the highlight for me, but it really has nothing to do with the type of comics DC is publishing.

The bizzaro book was very off the wall for DC but there was some great stuff in it like the Kockhalka strip and Dave Roman and Raina telgemeier who were both featured in it are now writing an X-men limited series for Marvel

livingtargets

mweh,I wouldn`t be too mad on getting rid of monthlies.
The reason I was(and still am)smitten with comics was the idea that art doesn`t have to be hanging in a gallery with a big pricetag to be art and could come out monthly and even weekly with an accesible price and enjoyable story.
But equally well I still enjoy reading small press and "alternative" one-offs and GNs and the like,but I don`t think that they`re the be-all and end-all of comics and I think monthlies play a big part in comics as well

Fysh

Periodicity doesn't have anything to do with accessibility or value though. I think that a lot of the attachment to monthly comics is because that's what we're used to. It's nice to have a regularly available comic but tbh I don't see it being that hard to get a shop to regularly order and reserve whatever comic you want to read if it went from being monthly to using an ad-hoc publishing schedule. It's not like it somehow makes it more expensive and elitist, it's just that it might take a tad more effort to get it.

Bear in mind that I'm not talking about changing the content completely here, just the delivery method. So you'd likely still have Marvel and DC rolling out titles with their various characters, the idea would just be that the stories would be as refined as the creators wanted by not being tied to schedules as strictly as they are now. And frankly, if people will put up with waiting a year between issues of The Ultimates or Grant Morrison's Authority or Rob Liefeld's latest Youngblood series, I think that quite a lot of the established market would tolerate such a model. They might not like it, but then that's the lesson Brand New Day and countless other comic events have served to reinforce - a lot of the hardcore fanboys shout a lot about what they do and don't like, but their buying habits don't often match their shouting habits.

magwea

Didn't comics came out as periodicals because publishers would get their payments faster then from books. Is this still the case, anyone know?

Also no monthlies, no alternate covers.

chebbo

I give floppies 10 years at the most.

Check out http://www.myebook.com to see why.

Chebbo

Fysh

I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of the profits and costs associated with printing monthly comics, versus the profits and costs of OGNs (TPBs would be interesting too, but the economics would be skewed since the costs of the contents are already covered by the serialised form).