Some people believe I don't like print. What with all my digital prosthelytizing on the old pulp soapbox here I can see where someone might get that opinion. As a clarification on the matter let me just say this:
I'm for whatever puts the most content into the most people's hands (and hearts). I'm also for experimentation and creating something inexpensive that draws attention to itself by design.I'm for cool.
Today is the first Wednesday featuring the experimental title WEDNESDAY COMICS from DC. 15 characters and stories in a large newsprint format just like the good old days. We've spoken about it before.
USA TODAY will be running the first SUPERMAN feature from WC in its paper today as a promotion for the project. I would urge everyone to not just read the USA TODAY, but to trot over to your Local Comic Shop and pick up a copy of WC. You will only get a small taste of the project from the USAT and not the full meal. It's only $3.99 - as much as you're already paying for your comics.
The reason(s) I'm asking for you to support this are simple:
- We should encourage experimentation on the part of the bigger companies that yields quality comics at reasonable prices.
- We should build opportunity for creators. More formats = more opportunities for people to break into the industry. Especially if the cost is low and the distribution high and wide.
- There are storytelling opportunities to be rediscovered with the classic "page a week" format. (Just as there are storytelling opportunities for Kindle, Iphone and laptop formats - which will be the subject of an upcoming post).
- Most of the characters featured in the WC run are the "second stringers" - characters that deserve to be redsicovered by new audiences.
- Overall we NEED a healthier, more diverse marketplace for genre media - comics, pulp, video and so on. If we don't support the good stuff when it comes along - then what good are we?
On your way home tonight run over to your LCS and pick up a copy of WEDNESDAY COMICS. Tell me what you think of it here in the comments thread.
You'll be doing me and yourself a favor.
---------------------------------
---------------------------------
Here's a review from CBR.
The best contributions may be the ones that deliberately harks back to the comic strips of yore. Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook come at Kamandi by way of Hal Foster, providing a Prince Valiant-like take on the character that perhaps suggests Kirby’s ties to his comic-strip forebears may be stronger than surface glances would suggest. Joe and Adam Kubert pull a brutal nine-panel sequence that nevertheless evokes Roy Crane and Milton Caniff. Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher’s Flash strip attempts the clever hat trick of offering two strips — one a straight-up adventure, the other a Juliet Jones-style soap via Iris West. And, of course, there’s Paul Pope, whose pulpish Adam Strange delivers Alex Raymond-like thrills while still being delightfully weird.
2 comments:
Before I was laid off at a local Gannett paper I tried to get this into my paper. The publisher was on board. I tried to get information. Tried to contact editorial and I was told they'd follow up. They never did. It never happened. Cost wise I don't know that they could have gone national. I just bought the thing. It's very nice. Not $4 nice because the average newspaper costs 75 cents with ten times the number of people working on it.
But I will say this. Due to more and more layoffs...buy it from the comic shop. Don't buy USA Today because of it. That might sound like a weird thing but more and more people keep getting laid off from a company who really doesn't give a damn about their employees. I've seen and had to deal with it first hand. So what you should do is buy it from the local comic shops and keep them in business. Plus you're not just getting Superman.
It's gonna fail. Just so you don't get your hopes up. :)
Comic readers don't want newspaper-sized comics, especially not for $1.00 more than the regular comics they get, and this is printed on the cheapest paper imaginable.
Should be $.99, honestly, and it might sell then.
(I say all of this as a guy who's owned a comic store for 15 years--we sold 3 copies yesterday, when we averaged about 20 copies of Trinity per week, the previous weekly)
Post a Comment