Limited Risk

Tom Brevoort, Senior Vice-President of Publishing & Executive Editor at Marvel Comics (@tombrevoort), wrote this on his Formspring account, in answer to "re: Destroyers: Is Marvel now preemptively cancelling yet-to-be-solicited books based on anticipated sales?":

"Not exactly. We've been saying for months now that we're going to be putting out fewer limited series, and instead focusing on our core monthly titles in response to where the marketplace seems to be right now. That's what we're doing. And that means that some projects that were initiated earlier are going to fall by the wayside. But at least among the best of those in terms of ideas, there's nothing saying that we can't revisit them later if conditions change." (His account is here at formspring.com/tombrevoort)

Not sure this bodes well for much of anything... Is he doing a bit of damage control on the several cancelled minis of late? Is he presenting us a 'new economy' policy? Both?

Limited series, mini-series, maxi-series, whatever you want to call them are the place where larger companies like Marvel (@MARVEL) experiment. As such, it's where the next great series comes from. "Luke Cage: Noir" was four issues that made it to my '2oo9 Best of the Year' list. "Marvel 1602", although not a favorite of mine, has made the company a lot of dough and brought a lot of fans of Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) to the Marvel corporate characters in a sideways manner.

Minis are a very good thing. Less of them is potentially a very bad thing. But, as always, if it's really a matter of saving absolutely required green to keep the company moving to keep bringing out more comics later... then I'm for it.

~ @JonGorga

What Makes the Art Sequential?

"Being in a sequence," you're probably saying to yourself after reading that title.

I posted this on Flickr recently:


So... is it comics?

A few nights ago at the house of someone who's work I'm editing I was reacquainted with my Bard College senior project. I'd e-mailed it to her on request months ago and she printed it out. I wrote over two years ago:

"In his ground-breaking book with a textbook approach to explaining comics, Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner defined comics immediately as “the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea” but then far more simply as “Sequential Art” (Eisner 5) i.e. visual art in sequence. Scott McCloud followed Eisner’s lead in his own Understanding Comics when he put forth his suggestion for a dictionary definition of comics: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 9) and continued in the following pages of Understanding Comics to demonstrate how his definition broadened the world of comics both historically (McCloud 10-17) and artistically (McCloud 18-20) by demonstrating that many things were comics, simply because many things had not appeared to be comics by old, restrictive perceptions. This thesis borrows McCloud’s definition, attempting to simplify it nearer to Eisner’s compact version, synthesizing them to: visual art in deliberate sequence to create meaning. McCloud’s “juxtaposed” is the first to go as there are several kinds of juxtaposition in comics (left to right panels, top to bottom panels, pages left to right) and not all are key to the medium, McCloud’s “pictorial and other images” falls under the umbrella of “visual art”, McCloud’s “deliberate sequence” is the most important part of his definition, as images in sequence are to be found in a few cases that are not comics but not in deliberate order, and is thus retained exactly, and McCloud’s “convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” can be summed up as the creation of informational/aesthetic “meaning.” Simpler, more concise, and more accurate: visual art in deliberate sequence."

Putting images into a sequence. Is it enough?

~ @JonGorga