I’m becoming more and more convinced that Tom Brevoort writes his blog so that I’ll have something to link to here on Newsarama. This time, he’s talking about creators who miss deadlines:
“[I]f a given creator can’t get a book done in thirty days, what would you have us do? Because all of the evidence I have indicates that, while people say that they want he books more frequently, what they really want is the books more frequently by the same creators, and at the same level of quality. And that’s just not going to happen in most cases. And in those cases where it’s not possible, it’s in the best interests of the project long term to hold the line, rather than rushing in a fill-in or bringing in half-a-dozen pencilers to hack out your crossover.”
That sound you just heard, by the way, was Dan Didio shouting “Hey!” in an overly comedic manner as he realized that was a dig at Infinite Crisis. It’s not the only cheap shot Tom makes at DC, though:
“It should be noted that late shipping is not a Marvel-exclusive problem. In point of fact, we have fewer late-shipping titles than our largest competitor at the moment. But you readers tend to notice ours more–I’m guessing because you’re more interested in what we’ve got going on.”
There’s a step in Brevoort’s post that I think he’s missing: Schedule more intelligently. If a creator has a track record of being bad with deadlines, don’t schedule the book until you have (x) amount of work already completed and you know that the schedule can be met; in the case of ongoing books, don’t put creators who can’t meet monthly deadlines on books that are supposed to be monthly (or bi-monthly, or whatever), etc. There are always going to be unexpected things that go wrong with deadlines, but I think it’s disingenuous to say, as he seems to be doing, that it’s as simple as “You can have it good or you can have it on time, that’s your pick.”
June 27th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Excellent point, Graeme. Plus, what if the book isn’t on time… and still isn’t good- to cite two examples, the second half of Iron Man (which IMO read like Ellis and Granov phoned it in), or Secret War, which read like it was unfinished.
June 27th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Or maybe people notice Marvel’s more than DC because Marvel’s books are, I dunno, six to nine months late rather than two weeks?