Warren Ellis speaking in SFX

[Eric Plumrose]

'You never did write for 2000AD, did you?'

Oh, naughty, NAUGHTY Cosh.

[Bico]

"I don't agree, I think that's a misconception."

Fair enough, it's only my opinion - albeit one based on a large and varied pull list, thanks to sharing a standing comics order with five other people each month, which includes almost every Marvel book being published, as far as I can tell.  Even newer books with no continuity baggage rely on you knowing about events elsewhere in the Marvel universe five years ago, like Young Avengers characters suddenly being revealed as Scarlet Witch's imaginary sons, or references to other kid superhero teams in Runaways - a book that sells badly as individual issues, but quite well as tpb collections.  Runaways, Mary Jane, Spider-Girl and Sentinel are all books that sold poorly and were cancelled as comics - only to be relaunched and continued because of strong tpb sales - it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the comics market is becoming tailored towards providing material for the graphic novel market, is it?
Only my opinion.  Probably worth pointing out that DC aren't doing things the same way, however.  When a character's books sell badly, it's cancellation time (with odd exceptions, like Supergirl and Wonder Woman, which seem immune to cancellation despite poor sales and critical mauling).


And the anthology format was, at one point, the norm, rather than the exception for American comics.  Conventional wisdom was that horror books weren't a good risk, either - but Horror comics were outselling superhero books until the Seduction Of The Innocent scandal provided DC and Marvel the opportunity to drive those books off the shelves, only for horror to make a comeback recently.  There's no reason an anthology book can't sell if it has good material, rather than a collection of the 8-page filler stories used to help new artists and writers cut their teeth in the industry, which is probably what would be the first thing that came to mind for any editor thinking of putting a dummy together.

[Natsan]

Bear- you've totally missed the emoticon at the end of that sentence about anthologies not working. That was me being sarcastic about current American comic fan thinking in regards to the format.
I know full well that anthologies do work, infact they're a large part of the history of British comics, not to mention many other countries. I was merely taking the piss out of some narrowminded thinking and ignorance I've seen displayed on places like the old WEF and the current Engine.

[JOE SOAP]

***Fair enough, it's only my opinion***

I don't disagree with your supposition that comics are tailored toward the trade paperback market. I agree with that idea. I was saying that, if you take 2000AD as a model, anthologies do not or don't have to lack the page count required for trade collections, as 4 weekly issues of 2000AD a month would equal 4 or 5 separate monthly US style comics.

[Byron Virgo]

But 2000AD stories tend to be shorter than American mini-series, which are aimed at collecting every six issues as a tpb, whereas the longest run you generally see in a 2000AD strip these days is about 10 parts (bar a few notable exceptions). Also, 2000AD strips, because of their short, serialised nature, tend to have a much more self-contained, faster-paced narrative style than their American cousins.

"Conventional wisdom was that horror books weren't a good risk, either - but Horror comics were outselling superhero books until the Seduction Of The Innocent scandal provided DC and Marvel the opportunity to drive those books off the shelves, only for horror to make a comeback recently."

Not strictly true - horror was one of the forms, like Romance, that was tried during the late 40's/early 50's once the Golden Age superhero buzz died down following the climax of WW2. But Horror is perhaps the most *infamous*, and therefore best-remembered, but it probably wasn't the most popular - that would more likely run in the order of Crime, Westerns and then Horror.

Also, I don't think that Marvel were keen to drive horror books 'off the shelves', given that Timely/Atlas (as they were then) were almost certainly the largest publisher of Horror titles at the time. In fact, there's some annecdotal evidence from the time to suggest that part of the  reason for the industry's self-imposed Comics Code was in fact to 'knobble' the Atlas books; banning the use of the word "Terror" for example, which is a bit of a bugger if you happen to publish a book entitled 'Adventures into Terror'.

[Bico]

Nat - I was agreeing with you entirely, not having a pop.

Garageman - I was talking about the American model of anthology, as it's the American market-thinking that claims anthologies won't sell (in the same way that it claimed books with female leads won't sell, horror books won't sell, fantasy comics won't sell, etcetera).  The American model is to do 8-page stories on the usual monthly frequency, which just isn't enough for trades.  52 has proved that weeklies can sell (big time), and it's only a matter of time before someone chances their arm with an anthology that isn' just some filler strips that have been sitting in a drawer (and need printing before the character gets retconned into an hispanic teenage girl or something).
I could be wrong, but Dark Horse built their reputation (and several franchise properties) on the anthology format with Dark Horse Presents in the 1990s, and still dabble with the format with some success.

[Byron Virgo]

"The American model is to do 8-page stories on the usual monthly frequency, which just isn't enough for trades"

Umm...what about the Michael Fleischer/Jim Aparo Spectre revival in the anthology Adventure Comics in the 70's, which was not only subsequently collected as a mini-series, but also as a tpb?

[Bico]

Pff.  You can prove anything with facts.


Lots of stuff like that is getting collected now - DC Showcase collects several hundred pages worth of back-up material/low page-count stories from the 1950s onwards by featuring characters who never had their own books (Batgirl, Elongated Man), but comfortably filled in the space at the back of bigger franchise books for years.
Actually, a more recent example that springs to mind are the Batman: Black and White trades, which collected backup stories that appeared in Detectives Comics a few years ago.  Technically, it was both an anthology - and a top-seller(1) to boot - at that stage.
















(1)  The quality of the actual comic is another discussion entirely.