I’m sure he also wouldn’t give back the millions he claims he made way back when he was a “star”.

However, i stick to the idea that comics today are written in stints, until the next big job (or bigger paycheck) comes.

That said, I’m far to young to know a world without an actual comic shop and I’m used to these short stints as the norm of comic books.

But if the essentials and vissionaries tpbs have shown me anything, it’s what can really be made of comics as serials, adventures which have the same tone for a great amount of time and are not so much plagued with ‘re-boots’. Ugh.

PS
I too wrote for fan fic for awhile, with 9 issues of Flash, 1 of Aquaman, and 4 for Green Arrow, though i had plotted each much farther. fan-fic is fun. try it!
http://legendsofdc.proboards38.com/

On the note of the DSM a lot of this happened when I was in diapers to training wheels, but I will say the current “Star-chasing” pushes me to buy mini-series and TpB if I want a story. Buying monthly means I want to be led through a characters life by (at tops) 4 guys in 10-15 years.

Whedon and Cassady may fall under that “star” mentality, but at the end of Astonishing X-men I’ll have 24 issues (and an annual) that all look, feel, and sound the same. On the flip side I’ll own 5 issues of Wonder Woman, 8 of Supes (U,U,&A), JLA Classified 1-9, etc. I will say pre-”event meltdown” Marvel had one creative team on almost all their books… for years (not years in the decade sence, but a good 3 years+ I believe). DC was similar with many (Flash(Waid, then Geoff), Nightwing(Dixon), a few others). Now one of the only issue-chewers is Winick… whose payoffs I’ve come to dislike.

Knowing that Gotham Knights (for example) could have been gold, but was killed by events?/editing?/AJ? really makes me leary to get a book about a big name character if another book with a “bigger” name is on that same character… which in a round about way leads me back to Detective being about all the DCU detectives and not just Batman. Ralph, Dick, Vic, etc and then have batman encompass 1 four-part arc a year. If we’re going this “star-chasing” route & Put out 2-3 bat books and a slew of mini-series about batman, then wittle it down and avoid garbage like War “name here” and most of ‘Batman’ this side of Hush (and some might include Hush…). If the good stories are being published in elseworld style minis that have poor sales and the big names are shoveling garbage to fans they know will buy it because its batman issue #—, then something is wrong. I will say Batman could be on an upswing creatively, but DC (and Marvel with Spiderman/X-men) spread the stories too thin.

But seriously-
I despise the three- four- issue stints. The only thing that comes close to reminding me of runs like Simonson’s Thor, David’s Hulk, and Lee and Ditko on Dr. Strange was Geoff Johns on The Flash and, to a lesser extent, Millar and Hitch on Ultimates. Today, a 15 issue run would be considered ‘long’.

I can see retailers complaining if the newsstands got the books *before* the DM did, or got books the DM did not. And from what I understand, some newsstand retailers did complain about the DM for the same reasons.

Aint that the truth! Has anyone seen the variant cover to the new “Justice League of America” #1 by J Scott Campbell? Grab your barf bag!

I had never head of such a thing before, while I wouldn’t be surprised that there were retailers who saw the newsstand and bookstores as unfair competition (to customers they felt entitled to get) but did publishers actually listen and pull out of a market where they got good sales because of the complaints of short-sighted retailers? Baffling.

People who, as Frank Miller once put it, “do three issues and want a parade.”

As opposed to doing three issues and getting Robin out of the Batmobile.