Here’s the money quote – no pun intended – from Axel Alonso’s most recent interview with CBR:
It’s no secret “Alpha Flight” has a strong and vocal following, and is a favorite of many here in the Marvel offices. [Writers] Fred [Van Lente] and Greg [Pak] had a really interesting approach for a maxi-series. And the fan response to the “point one” and debut issues was encouraging enough for us to take a chance with making it monthly…until new budgetary mandates forced us to rethink the strategy.
So, Marvel has “new budgetary mandates” impacting profitability of titles from… Well, somewhere between August, when Alpha Flight was upgraded to an ongoing, and October, when the title was canceled. Considering the book was selling a solid 20,000+ throughout its entire run, I wonder if we can take it as read that that’s round about the new cut-off point for whether or not an ongoing title will stay alive at the House of Ideas?
November 7th, 2011 at 9:21 am
If Marvel has several characters or teams of characters that don’t sell as well as their main lineup, why not look at what others in the market are doing.
Love & Rockets, for example, comes out once a year, in a large/many page book format. They do this because it’s the Hernandez Bros. preference, but Marvel could do something similar.
Why doesn’t Marvel select six lower selling characters. They could introduce a new “Marvel Features” type of anthology book and release an issue every other month. Each issue would have more pages than a regular monthly copy and cost a bit more. So, for example, Alpha Flight fans who many not be numerous to back a regular monthly book would be enough to buy the issue featuring AF.
Sure, they could just produce one-shots (that way they could always say they’re first issues) but I believe that having an umbrella title the comic shop would know that there’d be a new issue on the horizon and fans would too.
November 7th, 2011 at 2:21 pm
If that is true then why wasn’t other books canceled to or before it that sell less?
November 7th, 2011 at 8:56 pm
I don’t know much about creator pay, but could the fact of having two writers and a highish profile artist (Eaglesham) have something to do with it? That’s what it sounds like to me when he says “not profitable.” Like the cost of making the book wasn’t too high given those sales. But, you’d think they could have factored that in and made projections ahead of time. Or let the sales of the mini series come in before they announced it as an ongoing.
November 13th, 2011 at 9:02 pm
That’s a good idea, Richard J. Marcej. But I think Marvel’s mainly interested in ongoing series right now. Top selling ongoing series. Kind of like Hollywood only wants to make blockbuster movies. Emphasize the most popular formats and characters and ignore everything else.