Comically slow
So here’s DC Comics’ bold new idea: a return to Sunday newspaper-style comics.
It’s called “Wednesday Comics,” and the uncleverness of that title presages the bad idea behind all this: recapturing an era that reached its peak 50 years ago or more. Yes, every Wednesday for 12 weeks, DC is putting out a folded newspaper-print section of comics. Note to DC: There have been a few developments in the years since newspaper adventure strips were big. We call them television, and video games, and the internet. While you may find some geezer somewhere willing to wait an entire week to get one more page of story, you won’t find a large clan of people clamoring for a return to slow. My kids sneered at your first Wednesday Comics release today — “Why would anybody want that?” asked my 11-year-old daughter the avid comic-book reader — and I pointedly did not plunk down $3.99 for a series of one-page stories that will conclude months from now as we enter the holiday season. I can barely stay off my iPhone for 15 minutes and you think I’m going to spend 12 weeks crawling through a comic book one page at a time?
Meanwhile, I got my weekly email newsletter from your rivals at Marvel today. They always focus on comics that you can now read online for a small subscription fee (a model that works well; I have friends who are subscribers and who love it). You do that with that internet thing you may have heard of. Do you have anyone under the age of Methusaleh working for you? If you do, I have to think they’ve been huffing too much funnybook ink, because the idea of launching weekly one-page comics strips at the precise moment when comics strips and their host newspapers are dying is, well, dopey.
I’m sorry for your lame packaging model, because the contents look great. Paul Pope doing “Adam Strange,” “Hawkman” by Kyle Baker, “Sgt. Rock” illustrated by Joe Kubert, and especially “Metamorpho,” by the inspired pairing of Neil Gaiman with artist Michael Allred. But when I read the list of the artists and writers involved, I just got more annoyed. Why not print these as eight 24-page comics, with two stories in each? I have little doubt that around the end of the year you’ll repackage these comicitos into a hardback or two, and for a price that’s competitive with spending $48 to get all this in a format and timeframe I just don’t want. In the meantime, I would remind the comics shops that get stuck with these that newsprint is recyclable.
July 14th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
And if they do reprint those comics, will it be in a similarly large and awkward format? I keep waiting for someone to put out a weekly comic in which all the stories are self-contained. Lately I’ve even found comics that are labelled as One Shots and when I (wisely) check them just to be sure, the story is continued in a different title.