Congratulations to Paul O’Brien for surviving Chuck Austen’s runs on an assortment of X-books. O’Brien bids bon voyage (or débarras) on the occasion of Austen’s last issue of X-Men, and pauses to wonder if Austen isn’t “the worst X-Men writer ever?” The answer may surprise you, provided you’ve never read any of O’Brien’s delightfully scathing reviews of Austen’s work.
“The disintegrator communion wafers? The Draco? A five-issue adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with armour plating? Everything he’s written involving Polaris? There’s just so much in this run which defies belief. Usually with bad comics, you can at least understand why they seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s incomprehensible that the Chuck Austen run seemed like a good idea to anyone.”
O’Brien has praise for Madrox, and he shares my disappointment that it isn’t doing better in terms of sales:
“For god’s sake, go and buy the thing. Show some support when they produce something genuinely worthwhile.”
This ties in nicely to O’Brien’s column over at Ninth Art, where he considers the plight of critically acclaimed books with miniscule audiences. He focuses in part on the “second season” concept that started with Sleeper and has been picked up by under-performing Marvel charmers like Runaways and She-Hulk. It doesn’t really bother me when a publisher starts with a new first issue, particularly if it draws attention to worthy titles. I do wonder why the publishers didn’t give the titles a decent push in the first place.
Also in this column, O’Brien talks about the Big Two Glut and the disadvantages publishers create for their interesting fringe titles when they saturate the market with high-profile characters in a slew of titles:
“In February 2005, for example, we can look forward to seven Spider-Man books, twelve Batman titles and nineteen X-books. (Depending on how you define each category – but you get the general idea.) By flooding the market with these books, many of which aren’t exactly great sellers either, the publishers ensure that readers have plenty of boringly obvious choices to take up their attention and time before they’re ever likely to consider the lower ranking titles.”
This probably explains why I’m so partial to marginal titles like She-Hulk, Runaways, Manhunter, and Fallen Angel. I’ve never had much interest in the first-stringers, at least not in solo titles. If I get interested in them at all, it’s generally based on the participation of a specific creator, as in the case of Greg Rucka’s excellent run on Detective.
It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of corporate comics, though. There’s at least some commitment to putting interesting, unconventional titles on the shelves or we’d never have seen these titles at all. But when it comes down to promoting them to the audiences who might actually enjoy them, neither Marvel or DC seems able to stretch out of their usual practices. Is there too much of a playbook? Is it fair for so much of the onus of promotion to be placed on the creators, like Peter David does with Fallen Angel?