Crisis in the Multiple Titles
By Philip Schweier
August 19, 2008 - 20:20
Batman soon followed, and in the years to come we’ve seen Amazing Spider-Man and Spectacular Spider-Man, Astonishing, Uncanny and New X-Men, Punisher and Punisher: War Journal, and I’m sure many more that just don’t come to mind right now.
So it makes sense to me that different titles offer different tones to the stories. For instance, Batman is a great heroic character, maybe partly because he has no super-powers. As such, Detective Comics, perhaps focusing on his skills as a detective, might offer a more – dare I say it? – cerebral comic book.
Title-spanning sagas are great, if they can be contained within the titles and presented in the course of, say, six to eight issues. But when DC Comics has to resurrect the triangle number system they used back in the 1990s so that fans can follow the linear continuity of a handful of titles, well, I can’t but feel that things are getting a little bogged down.
Two titles should be enough for any single character. With a team book such as the X-Men, I’ll grant Marvel Comics an extra book simply to handle the volume of characters they have accumulated over the years.
I have nothing against the ‘90s. Heaven knows I’ve often been accused of spending too much web space looking backward with fondness. But the 1990s weren’t the greatest era for comic books, as the hundreds of retailers who closed up shop will tell you. Publishers large and small felt the pain as the bottom nearly fell out of the industry when speculators snapped up books, expecting their value to accumulate practically overnight, and were sorely disappointed.
So my hope is that as multiple titles begin to tie more closely together, publishers and creative teams are able to avoid the pitfalls from 10-20 years ago. Telling a good story should takes as long as it takes, be it two chapters or 12.
That should be the primary endeavor of the publishers.
Praise and adulation? Scorn and ridicule? E-mail me at philip@comicbookbin.com
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