Oops, I accidentally posted this with no text. My apologies to those of you who get an extra email or whatnot.
First up, my two remaining reviews which I will try to be quick with.
Dark Tower: The Long Road Home #3 (of 5) -- I felt this issue had more substance to it than the last but I still feel it's just going on a bit too long. It almost seemed to be spread out to have an excuse to have Jae Lee and Richard Isanove do up big pretty pictures and there doesn't seem to be as much going on in getting the story telling portion right. It is pretty and the story is okay but I'm losing interest in it. I'll be finishing up this series but it's mostly because that's just he way I am, I hate not finishing off a series I start to read. I highly doubt I'll be back for the next... Maybe I'll look at the TPB if/when it comes out.
House of Mystery #1 -- A rather weird and creepy book here and I'm not quite sure what I think of it just yet. For a first issue it has a lot to whet the appetite and leave you a little intrigued yet at the same time I didn't really get a connection to the characters that appear to be the main ones. I may check out issue 2 but I'm not looking to add it to my pull list just yet.
So a few extra tidbits from the week. I finally saw Iron Man on Saturday. I really enjoyed it and thought they did a fantastic job on it yet, somehow it felt "simple" to me. Mostly because I know the story already and nothing really came out of left field or surprised me (other than a few funny moments that weren't in the trailers). So I always knew where they were going with it. But perhaps I just knew too much. It didn't ruin it for me though, as I said, I still enjoyed it a lot. And I'm really interested to see what Marvel has planned with their upcoming movies: Ant-Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and the Avengers.
A new batch of webcomics are up for the latest Zuda competition so go check them out. I'm going to hold off on saying who my front runners are for the moment.
I saw an article posted on Newsarama about Action Comics Annual #11 and thought "Hmm, it's been a long time since I first heard about Geoff Johns, Richard Donner, and Adam Kubert doing Action, what's up with that?" and after reading the comments I see it was yet another delayed book. Now I'm not even going to try and say which company, Marvel or DC, is worse because I don't really care (and I also just read today that the next issue of Thor will be delayed). And there is also the issue of independent books being late (which I find more excusable personally but still not good) but whatever. It just seems that so many books are not hitting their scheduled release date. Typically, the readers' anger gets focused on the artist and probably a lot of the time the artist is the slow one. But other times it's the writer (I know JMS has been late on some of his Thor scripts and Mark Millar was late on some of his during the whole Civil War/Ultimates problems). And so I don't even want to single them out without knowing the details as to why. I've heard it all, companies don't want to play with the "integrity" of the story by getting fill in artists/writers. Watchmen was late when it shipped (and going so far as comparing your stories to Watchmen is, many times, laughable). It's just a comic book. It's not the end of the world. Etc, etc.
No, it's not the end of the world and I can see it happening from time to time with some books. Either an artist or writer gets sick or falls behind but really, Marvel and DC have to do a better job at this. It hurts their stories to have 2, 3, 6, or 12 months pass between issues. Readers lose the flow of the story, they stop caring, or the stories get spoiled by other books. Which also leads to the question of delaying other books to wait for the delayed book (as Marvel did with Civil War). I'm not enough of an insider to know how to fix this, whether writers and artists are just too busy doing the appearances and cons or other projects, or that comics nowadays are just too ambitious to get together in just a month (or bi-monthly if that's what they aim for). Whatever the case may be, it's becoming one of my biggest pet peeves. If you tell me the book is coming out monthly, then I'll expect a montly book. If you say bi-monthly, fine. But just silently pushing the date back again and again makes it feel like the company is saying "We'll put it out whenever we get around to finishing it." Which is another issue, inform the readers. Have the big head haunchos like Quesada step up and say "Yeah, we screwed up and this book is late." At least acknowledge to the fans that you care enough to try and meet your own schedule.
Hmm, that rant kinda had no direction to it did it? Okay, here were the points I had wanted to make at the start:
- The number of constantly delayed books is getting too high in my opinion.
- Constant delays can hurt a storyline just as a change in artist/writer can.
- It's not always the artist who's at fault.
- I think Marvel and DC (and whoever else) should look into fixing it and be more up front with their fans instead of excusing it with "Well Watchmen..."
- I have no answers and I just wanted to vent. :)
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