Jog (of Jog – The Blog) has a new installment of Jog Likes Comics up at Komikwerks, and it is very, very funny indeed. It broaches the subject of late comics (not “dead” late, but “tardy to varying degrees” late):
“But as I was soon to discover, Daredevil: Father didn’t become monstrously, humiliatingly late by accident. No, it turns out that each and every copy of the first issue of “Daredevil: Father” is actually a sentient psychic organism that can talk out loud and predict the future and make you smile when you are lonely.”
His “if we like comics, we’ll wait” thesis seems to me to be a very sound one. I’ve dropped some perennially delayed titles not because they didn’t show up when promised but because I just wasn’t enjoying them that much. Lateness tends to wind up at the end of a list of other complaints.
I do wonder if readers are maybe more charitable towards scheduling glitches in creator-driven comics than product from Marvel and DC. I know that I’d like more issues of, say, Amelia Rules! to come out on average, but I don’t want them unless Jimmy Gownley is well and truly done with them.
I have a slightly different set of expectations from corporate comics. It’s like the difference between going to a sit-down restaurant where there’s a chef whose culinary sense sets the menu, or running into, say, Wendy’s for some chicken strips. I’ll wait a while for the chef’s entree, but the chicken strips? Please.
And, yes, that is a desperately unfair generalization, and many very talented people work in corporate comics, and they should have as much artistic lattitude as possible. And, yes, chicken strips are as satisfying in their own way as a nice plate of risotto.