I'm talking months late.
Sometimes years.
And, before someone even mentions it, no, there is no way that I think a good looking book justifies it being more than three months late. As a professional, it is not only your job to make the book pretty, but to complete it on time. To paraphrase Keith Giffen, if you can't handle a monthly book, don't take on a monthly book.
Fortunately, the trend seems to be receding. Good thing. I had instituted a pretty staunch rule in my purchasing of comics that allowed for one late issue every six months (late being three weeks or more). Any more than that, I dropped the book.
I've dropped many, many books over the last couple of years.
Anyway, many artists complain that they can't manage to complete 22 pages of comic every month. I respect that, if they don't take a monthly issue on. For example, the current Brave and the Bold series, being drawn by George Perez, is only slated for 10 issues a year. Perez knew the monthly would be impossible, and adjusted accordingly. No problem - we knew ahead of time. Kudos for Mr. Perez understanding his limitations.
But, you wanna know who really has my respect?
Mark Bagley.
Mark Bagley is an anomaly in the industry. It has been said that he can actually draw (and pretty well, I might add) not a single comic a month, not even two comics, but something like two a and a half.
That is about 55 pages a month.
That's huge. How huge? Well, given the original art is done on 11" x 17" art board, if you put all of the pages together, they would stretch over 50 feet long.
Of art.
Every month.
Bagley had an amazing run on Ultimate Spider-Man, doing over a 110 consecutive issues. All on time.
Bagley recently made the move over to DC Comics from Marvel, with rumors of a very high profile project.
Given the recent activity of DC Comics (that is, two consecutive weekly books, 52 and Countdown, each lasting a year), it was pretty easily guessed what Bagley would probably be working on - the next year-long weekly series from DC.
In the last couple of weeks, this teaser image was released, touted as Bagley's first DC work:
The exact details were not released until this weekend. Bagley is indeed working on the new weekly series. The series, entitled Trinity, will focus on Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and starts in June. Bagley will be supplying 12 pages of each issue, with 10 pages of back up story by other artists.
For those of you slow with the math, yeah, that's 48 pages a month (given a four week month).
The great thing about this weekly series, unlike Countdown, is that it will be running parallel to the events in the current DC Universe. That is, it won't be tied in (or "tied down," even) to the events. It is in the DCU, but not really a part of what is going on in the other books.
Which should allow a lot of people to read the book without feeling like they have to pick up a dozen other comics each month just to make sense of everything.
The series is being written by Kurt Busiek, who is a writer I've enjoyed over the last couple of years on Superman.
I'll admit - when I first heard that DC would be doing another weekly series, I wasn't that interested. When I first heard the rumblings about Mark Bagley, I became a little more interested. Now, knowing the writer and the concept of the book, I'm fairly confident that I will want to try this book out.
Besides, I'm just completely amazed by the output of 48 pages a month.
Just amazing.
I'll type at you later.
Comments
The only other artist that I know to even come close to Marks record is Humberto Ramos with 2 issues per month. But upon closer examination of his art you can see how and where he cheats and cuts corners.
( lots of face shots and little backgrounds on a page ; but the backgrounds he does provide are very good)