Consider it the cost-cutting exercise you haven’t noticed just yet, but Marvel’s collected editions are getting shorter after the fact. In the last two weeks, the following collections have all been announced as dropping 8 pages from their solicited page count in Marvel’s updated forecasts to retailers: Avengers: Big Three TP, Enders Shadow Ultimate Collection TP, Ultimate Comics Ultimates by Jonathan Hickman Vol. 1 Premiere HC, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man by Brian Michael Bendis Vol. 1 Premiere HC, Vengeance HC, X-Factor: Super Unnatural Premiere HC and X-Men: FF Premiere HC, with Fear Itself: Fearsome Four Premiere HC losing 16 pages in the revised solicit. The prices of each book, of course, aren’t changed by their new length.
With all of the upheaval at Marvel in the last few months, it’s not too much of a stretch to guess that this is another part of the same cost-cutting that has apparently seen a new cancellation threshold for series being installed as well as the dismissal of 15 employees in October. What’s unanswered with all of the product updates is what content (if any) is being lost with the eight (or, in Fearsome Four‘s case, 16) pages that have been cut – Covers, sketchbook material or merely endpapers with creator and backlist information? At its new pagecount of 136 pages, Ultimate Comics Ultimates by Jonathan Hickman Vol. 1 still can contain all six issues of story advertised, along with the covers for each issue and still have ten pages left over, by my count; is “all” that’s being lost peripheral extra material?
Update: Asked and answered, apparently: Marvel collections editor Jen Grunwald tweets at me: “You DO realise that all of Marvel’s comics are now 20 pages instead of 22 so that a 4-issue TPB would drop 8 (etc.) pages, right?” I’d assumed that the pagecount of the stories would’ve been factored in before solicitation – and also that the 20 page stories weren’t behind the 8 page drops, because most of the affected collections have more than four issues in them – but if anyone would know, it’d be Grunwald…
January 19th, 2012 at 11:23 am
How long until Marvel has advertisements in their Trades?
January 20th, 2012 at 6:10 am
The AVENGERS: THE BIG THREE TP is a collection of old material. That page count shouldn’t be affected by all of the comics now being only 20 pages.
January 20th, 2012 at 7:14 am
Wait… hold on….. Did a Marvel editor actually CONFIRM the cut in page counts?? Because up to this point, we’ve had another editor saying page counts were never standard, and we had Tom B and Axel A continually saying that there wasn’t a line wide policy in cutting pages.
January 20th, 2012 at 8:32 am
Aaaaaand it looks like she’s now deleted a later tweet where she said she thought the cut from 22 to 22 pages was announced.
This is almost becoming Marvel’s version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell! (except that DODT was alot more serious and had a real discriminatory impact on people’s lives, whereas we’re just talking about comic books here.)
January 20th, 2012 at 10:15 am
I love how she manages to come off as both snide and condescending while STILL proudly confirming that Marvel’s new policy is that all books offer less content. That takes chutzpah right there.
January 23rd, 2012 at 3:23 pm
Yeah, even the $3.99 titles have been dropped to 20 pages.