Steven Grant talks about the practicalities of format:
In 2002, I wrote a graphic novel that sat around and sat around and sat around the publisher’s drawer without being drawn until this summer, when the strategy was reformulated: rather than publishing graphic novels, they’re now going to run mini-series. I don’t know why the change (though I have my suspicions). I didn’t ask. Push comes to shove, I don’t really care. What I did care about was that something designed for one format was now being wedged into another… It’s not unusual to have a project accepted for one format, to develop it with that in mind, and then to be told they’ve decided to put it into another format instead. These decisions are mostly economic; projects in the original format have done less spectacularly than predicted and the company wants future project in what’s perceived as a more profitable format, or some other company has put out a new format that the company in question wants in on, or some executive has a whim. Or any other number of reasons. Moments like these remind you that comics are commercial in nature. With a handful of exceptions, whenever an artistic consideration hits a commercial one, commerce wins. (Even then, when artistic considerations win, it’s usually because the publisher decides it’s ultimately more commercial to let the creators have their way, as when the publisher believes that a less profitable project by that creator/those creators now will lead to more profitable other project by the same person/team later.) But this does highlight the common schism of comics: by and large, publishers aren’t in it for art and talent isn’t in it for commerce.
…We have this perfunctory notion of story in this business as something completely plastic and malleable, but the fact is that when you change the format you change the story. The surface elements of a story may stay the same, but the underlying mechanics change considerably. An eight-pager has stricter demands than a 22 page story. A mini-series has requirements and restrictions that a graphic novel can evade. A continuing series needs different elements than a mini-series. Very little of which is ever taken into consideration.
