For anybody not reading the current Old Man Logan storyline in Wolverine by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven – it is definitely worth the price of admission. The alternate, What If..? story they are crafting is riveting, shocking and keeps the reader hooked month after month. If only we had to wait just a month to read the next issue. I’m just guessing here, but the point of a monthly comic, IS TO COME OUT ONCE A MONTH, not once every 3 to 4 months. I read more Marvel comics than any other every month, but I still don’t understand Marvel’s chronic lateness. I was an operations manager in the corporate printing world for a few years and when a deadline is blown, people get disciplined, fired or both. Acts of God, fine. Equipment or computers down, understandable. Missed deadline because of one person, not acceptable. Yes, artists have lives and families too. Crap happens. They get sick, a family member get sick or dies, or maybe they have to move to a new apt./house. Fine. But this every month stuff is garbage and I blame Marvel for their unwillingness to mange their talent and their business.

McNiven is a good artist, but I wouldn’t put him into the superstar artist category. Heck, Alex Ross is in that category and a book with him doing the art isn’t advertised until the entire mini-series is done. DC seems to know how to manage their talent (characters are another matter…), but Marvel lets the same thing happen year after year on multiple books and the same artists do it to them. You would think that Joe Quesada, being a former monthly artist, would know how to manage his talent and keep them happy at the same time. And I know and understand the various deadlines for each member of the creative team on a comic book. The process is started months before a book is advertised to the world. But, damn… this is getting out of control.

Civil War was a great read, but a frickin’ time management disaster. Most 7 issue mini-series wrap up in 7 months, not a year and a half later. Not only did McNiven make the main Civil War mini-series late, but because of him, other ongoing titles were delayed in order not to reveal plot details. I would be pissed if I had gotten my work done on time and then it was delayed because of someone else on another book.

When you have an artist with great art, but they tend to take a little longer than the normal one month to produce 22 pages, make sure that the entire series or entire storyline is complete before you advertise it. Get the finished art first, and then let the inkers, colorists, et. al. continue their work.

Come on Joe, fool me once…

Not only does this hurt the individual titles readership, it hurts retailers as well. It’s bad enough that Marvel constantly delays books by a week, two weeks or a month; but then everything hits the shelves at once taxing both the bank accounts of the retailers and the readers.

Again, I love Marvel’s stories and characters, but let’s get it together. The other guys that were chronically late at Marvel back in the nineties left to form Image and now even Image has had to change their policies to manage their creators.