Verily, All-Star Batgirl will be winging its way to stores soon!

Actually, from what I hear, he was way ahead of the writers...

Slow day at the office that you feel the need to attack ADVERTISING hype? Next thing you'll be telling us that this issue of (insert your choice of comic here) does not actually change the (insert your choice of comic book universe here) forever.

If the Boston Red Sox advertised a DVD of their current best batsman's highlights with the assertion that he delivered on the impossible task of hitting .250, Jason would be justified in sarcastically calling that person a modern day Ted Williams.

(I am making the possibly-unwarranted assumption that the Red Sox have somebody who can hit .250.)

Hey, the Red Sox have the best record in baseball at the moment, two games ahead of their closest rivals, the Mets. And four hitters over 300.

Of course, this is May, and the Red Sox often get off to good starts. We'll see if I'm as quick to defend them in August or September.

Hey if you guys think it's worth an entry on your site, that's up to you. I'm just another reader. It would be more newsworthy to me if Jones was claiming this and if that was the only thing Jones produced in that entire year but it's just the typical hype you get from the interns who produce the solicits.

Lewis, first of all, I'm a curmudgeon. If there's a snarky, cynical comment to be made, I will traverse to the ends of the Earth in order that I might make it.

Second, yes -- it is advertising hype. But so what? It's inane advertising hype, and it's perfectly legitimate for me to call DC on it. There are a lot of things you could say about J.G. Jones's 52 covers in a solicitation. You could say that J.G. Jones was entrusted with the awesome responsibility of providing the covers for DC's flagship title. You could say that for a year, readers have been treated to J.G. Jones's incredible art each and every week. You could say that J.G. Jones's covers captured the zeitgesit of the comic-reading public. But don't tell me it's impossible to draw 1 pin-up a week and expect me not to laugh.

Third, given the fact that comics miss ship dates with alarming regularity these days, I'm going to push back when someone tries to lower the bar on what's reasonable to expect from creators in terms of timing.

Wasn't Neal Adams almost or entirely a cover artist for DC for a while? How many covers per month did he do?

Deride what you will about the hyperbole, but JG Jones did a lot more than "1 pin-up a week" or "4 splash pages a month." His covers were beautifully composed, full of detail and polish, and as closely tied to the plot of the book as anything by Dave McKean on Sandman or Glenn Fabry on Preacher.

Jake, I'm not saying the covers aren't beautiful, or that Jones didn't perfectly capture the contents of each issue with his art. I'm saying that drawing one cover a week is not even close to an impossible task, and I'm saying that the fact that DC thinks it is -- or at least thinks it's plausible advertising hype -- says a great deal about this industry.

When 52 first started, there was a great deal of noise made about the fact that it was a weekly, that this was a book that was going to come out each! and! every! week! notwithstaning the fact that fan-favorite books routinely miss their ship dates by months.

Recall that last week we finally saw the release of Ultimates #13 and All-Star Batman and Robin #5, 8 months and 12 months respectively after their previous issues. These are supposed to be monthly books.

But let's talk about 52. DC is busy patting itself on the back that it didn't miss a ship date for a whole year. And yes, that's an impressive feat -- sort of. I mean, 2000 AD has been publishing weekly for 30 years and as far as I know they've never missed an issue. But let's put that aside and agree ot be impressed by 52.

52 had 4 writers -- Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Grant Morrison, and Greg Rucka. None of these guys are lightweights. 52 issues, 4 writers -- that's basically equivalent to each of them doing a monthly book.

Then you've got Keith Giffen, who also contributed as a writer, and also did breakdowns. Here, I am impressed. I have no idea how tight Giffen's breakdowns were on this book (see my next paragraph), but regardless, he actually had to do breakdowns on each and every issue. Call it 20 pages per issue (for the main story), and Giffen, at least, has cause to brag.

Every issue had its own penciller and inker. First of all, the fact that they are crediting it as a penciller and an inker suggests that Giffen's breakdowns were extremely loose. Normally, where there are breakdowns, you'd expect a single credit for "finishes," which would translate to something like "inking plus." So the fact that they couldn't go straight from breakdowns to finishes suggests that these were not breakdowns in the traditionalsense. Second, I think there were something like 4 or 5 different penciller/inker teams -- in other words, like the writers, the artists had the workload of a monthly book.

Finally, there was J.G. Jones, who had to provide a weekly cover. And again, I have nothing against his artistry. I think he did a fine job with his covers. But doing a weekly cover is not particularly impressive in terms of prodigious workload.

So why do I care?

I care because the U.S. comic book industry is -- for now, anyway -- built on a periodical model. These are books that purport to come out monthly (or, in the case of 52, weekly). Yet over the past decade or so, we've increasingly seen the industry move to "it will ship when it's ready" model. Meanwhile, though, they keep telling us they are selling us monthly books. These practices have driven both readers and retailers out of the business, and are bad for the industry.

Now, notwithstanding All-Star Batman and Robin, DC is not the worst offender when it comes to this. Marvel is much worse, as is Todd McFarlane Productions (or whatever he calls his company), as are Rob Liefeld's various companies. So it's probably a little unfair to seize upon this. On the other hand, even Marvel didn't have the stones to solicit Spider-Man/Black Cat #4 by saying "Presenting the final issue of Kevin Smith, Terry Dodson, and Rachel Dodson's monthly epic!"

Good point about the "it'll ship when it's ready" model, Jason. Do you think it might have something to do with the laxness in the computer software industry?

It's pathetic that with so much money and so much talent, they can't ship on time. Manga is running laps around them.

I'm not sure where "it'll ship when it's ready" comes from. Probably a number of places, but it seems to me one of the biggest contributing factors is the recognition of the comic book as art. 30 years ago, a comic book was a commercial product, and if there was supposed to be a new issue of Spider-Man on the stands on May 23, then there was a new issue of Spider-Man on the stands on May 23.

Now, however, we're not interested in a new issue of Spider-Man. We're interested in the story being told about Spider-Man by J. Michael Straczynski and Ron Garney -- and if that's supposed to come out on May 23 but misses it's date and doesn't get released until June 13, it's OK. Well, not exactly OK, but it's a better alternative than pulling a Len Wein/Ross Andru fill-in off the shelf.

I think what we're seeing is the creators and publishers recognize that we all now agree that comics are art, and this leads to a sense that comics therefore can't be rushed. After all, you wouldn't rush Michaelangelo or Picasso -- why should we rush Millar and Hitch? And I think the answer is that if Michaelangelo says he's going to have the Sistine Chapel painted by May 23, and he doesn't get it done until October, he's going to catch some heat over it. This isn't to say that when all is said and done and enough time has passed, we won't remember the artistry and forget all about the blown deadline. Because really -- who the heck knows (or cares) at this point whether Pope Julius II was happy about how long it took to get the place painted. And a year from now, if you buy Ultimates Omnibus, will you care that the 26 issues took five years to publish? Probably not. But if you've been buying those issues as they came along, you're probably a little pissed at the fact that Marvel kept promising you the next issue on a particular day and then kept missing that deadline.

This is not to say I am against comics as art. Nor do I wish a return to the day when, if a deadline was blown, they'd just throw a reprint or a filler story in. At the same time, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we, as readers, were promised an issue of Spider-Man on May 23. Comics are art, but they are also a commercial product -- and I think maybe the creators and editors have been so focused on the first half of that statement ("comics are art") that they lose sight of the second half ("they are also a commercial product").

(1) If you want to know how "tight" Giffen's breakdowns were, go to this site and click on the "Reporter's Sketchbook" links - DC has been posting the breakdowns throughout "52." The breakdowns are pretty rough, nothing you could really ink directly from, and some of the pencilers used them as only very rough guidelines. In general I think the terms "pencils," "layouts," and "breakdowns" represent progressively less detailed drawings.

(2) One way artists like Kirby, the Buscemas, or Kane were able to do so many books was by supplying far less detailed pencils than are common nowadays and leaving them to skilled inkers to finish. In the magazine Rough Stuff, editor and veteran inker Bob McLeod has suggested that the change in practices may have arisen from younger artists' mistakenly thinking that the elaborate rendering style that came into vogue with Image-style comics was there in the pencils; thus they started supplying every little stroke. This necessarily takes more time, leading to the overstretched deadlines of today - and, not incidentally, turning inkers more than ever before into the "tracers" that the "Chasing Amy" joke refers to.

(3) The "comics as art" approach to publishing schedules would make more sense if more of the comics produced this way were more artistic.

(4) Writing for the trade seems as much responsible for today's deadline issues as "comics as art." If you're expecting to make a significant amount of profit from the collection of a series of issues, it makes more sense to keep the same creative team working at the same level over the course of those issues than to just give up and switch creators when the original ones fall behind.

(5) I kind of wish for a shift back toward the "commercial product" model. There's something to be said for deadline pressure. True artists may do well with long lead times (though not always, I'd bet), but others, given too much time to contemplate their "art," will become overly self-conscious and create stagnant or just wrongheaded comics. Deadline pressure may lead to flashes of gonzo inspiration that the creator would weed out if s/he had any more time, but which can inadvertently be "art" or just plain entertaining. (Over at Comics Should Be Good! Greg Hatcher has a nice post in praise of what he calls "grindhouse comics" - the comics equivalent of "B movies" - which he argues are rarely produced anymore owing to the change in publishing approach.)

I agree with you, Humanatee: it's time to switch back to the commercial model for comics. Artistic types tend to be pretty lazy, and a lack of deadlines enervates them, it doesn't energize them. The worst thing you can tell a procrastinator is that there's a chance s/he can push back that deadline.

Some of the best work of all time has been produced by the 'guild' system. Ruebens used tons of assistants all the time, to name just one, and if it's good enough for Ruebens...

I thought "Low Standards" was supporting my position, but aftering seeing that signature, I'm not so sure. (I'm also not entirely sure what the point of the "guild system" remark was - an analogy to the "assembly line" method of producing comics?) So just to drive my point into the ground, I'd mention that many now-considered-great comics (or comic strips) - stuff like Krazy Kat, Peanuts, or The Spirit - was produced in very commercial, deadline-driven circumstances. It's possible, I suppose, that had George Herriman been given freer rein, he would have come up with better material, but I'm not so sure. I haven't read deeply in Will Eisner's later, more "artistic" work (I was very turned off to his approach on reading his over-the-top "Hamlet on a Rooftop" when it first appeared in, I think, Will Eisner's Quarterly), but my impression is that it suffers from the self-conscious concern with being profound that I mentioned above.

To draw an example from another medium, movie directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Samuel Fuller made decidedly commercial, often genre-based films whose artistic merits were belatedly recognized by auteur theorists.

I'm a sometime student of evolutionary biology (it was more or less my college major, though I went into a different field of science), and I like the model of creativity that derives from it: "Overproduce" work that varies in often strange and unexpected ways, and let history sort out what's successful. Unfortunately, for this approach to be sustainable, it has to be relatively cheap to produce and purchase the "product" - and in the days of a $2.99 standard price, that's not really true any longer of the comics industry.