Welcome to the inaugural edition of my new column. Sorry it took so long but I couldn’t come up with a name for it. And honestly I’m not all that happy with this name, but I knew that I wanted to write about this week’s topic so I pulled the trigger on the title.
But before I get to the meat of the column let me first introduce myself. I’ve been part of Comics Nexus since the beginning (and even before that back in the 411Comics days.) I wrote another column for the site for about five years before it was retired for various reasons. Um, I’m a longtime comic fan and I’ve amassed a decent collection.
Really, DC?
The reason why I’ve called for your attention is that DC has decided to pull the plug on The Great 10. For those of you unfamiliar with The Great 10 here’s the basic premise; they’re China’s Justice League. They were a concept created by Grant Morrison and introduced on the pages of 52. Then they spun off into a ten issue miniseries by Tony Bedard and Scott McDaniel.
And then the miniseries was cut from ten issues to nine issues.
Now DC has done some pretty cruddy things in recent years. They decimated the JLI. They canceled Solo and The Mighty. But cutting a ten issue mini short by one issue is pretty low. I’m not talking “NBC giving Conan the shaft for Leno” low, but it’s in the same ballpark.
I completely understand that DC is a business and needs to be run as such, but at the same time DC needs to make good on a promise to the fans that support it. I picked up The Great 10 expecting to read a ten issue miniseries, wherein one team member would be highlighted in each issue. With the book ending an issue early one character won’t be getting his time to shine (and based on the solicits it’s Socialist Red Guardsman.)
Again, I get that DC isn’t really burning up the charts in terms of sales or market share. But cutting a mini short by one issue is a pretty huge admission of weakness. It seems frighteningly reminiscent of the DC Implosion.
I understand that books end and get cancelled. I loved Human Target, Trigger and H*E*R*O and they all ended prematurely. But none of them were miniseries that were advertised as running a certain number of issues. The Great 10 was supposed to run ten issues and now we’re being told that it’s only running nine. How does that do anything but hurt the company image?
Whatever is being saved on that single issue certainly can’t be worth the consumer’s loss in faith in the company. As a guy who hits the local comic shop every Wednesday why should I keep buying books that are promoted as running a set number of issue when DC has just illustrated that, as a company, they’ve got no problem with cutting a book short and disappointed the customer.
Here’s a better example; the bi-weekly Brightest Day began today and it’s scheduled to run for twelve months and 26 issues. But given my lack of faith in DC, why should I pick it up knowing that it might just run 20 issues. Or worse it might run 25 issues. If DC doesn’t show commitment to a project, they why should I show commitment to DC?
Of course this sort of thing has happened before. The infamous Sonic Disruptors miniseries was supposed to run twelve issues but ended with issue seven. More recently DC’s Vertigo imprint did the same thing with Otherworld, cutting it down from twelve to seven issues.
My compatriot and fellow The Great 10 fan, John Babos is trying to organize a movement to get DC to give the mini a proper ending.
If you want to send a letter a physical letter here’s the address;
DC Comics
1700 Broadway
NYC, NY 10019
(Make sure you send it “Attention Dan DiDio, Jim Lee or Geoff Johns)
And here’s a link to DC’s Myspace and Twitter accounts.
That’s about it for this week. I’m really sorry to start things off on such a negative note. But on the plus side it’s what got me to shift the column from theory to reality. So there’s that.
