PP, I'm not reading, but it seems you are right.

Five Ghost I used to get but got bored around issue ten, maybe the creators as well?

Great Pacific has concluded as you said. At least it had a conclusion, unlike many Marvel books.

Autumnland comes out when scheduled I believe. They never advertised a monthly schedule (with the quality of the art, how could they?!), but the issues still bome out regularly and there's no sign of cancelation.

I'm not familiar with Empire Uprsising.

Jupiter Circle has actually been extremely on schedule, with already 3 volumes concluded and the fourth one soon to reach the shelves.

Sidekick didn't strike me as a book that could sustain a monthly schedule.

Never read Tithe or Saviors, but the later was advertised as a mini from the get go. Tithe has had 8 issues in 11 months, the latest being a 48 page one.

So outside PP and Five Ghosts, I don't see anything alarming, and even with those, it seemed they had run their course in some way, more or less. Still, bummer if those where the ones you looked most forward to.

But I'm pretty confident in Image these days. AT least, books don't get canceled without conclusion for the most part (all the ones I'm buying), come out when scheduled 98% of the time, and never have last minute creative team changes.

Lately, the one of the two books I'm looking forward from Marvel had a creative team change after 3 issues only, second issue was 4 months late if not more, and third issue has yet to come out, some 7 months after issue #1 (Karnak).

Chris Mooneyham also did some Aliens stuff for Dark Horse to make a little more steady income-creator owned means paid on the back end without a page rate. Writers can do multiple books to make ends meet, artists to meet any kind of schedule are limited to 1 book at a time so some take work for hire page rate gigs between arcs to make ends meet while waiting for those twice a year back end payments.

-M

At this point in my life, if I am going to pull a book, I want it to be good, no matter how long it takes. If monthly means fill in creators o rush jobs, no thank you. I never liked inventory stories or reprints to avoid the Dreaded Deadline Doom from Marvel or DC even when I was a kid, I felt I got cheated out of my money. I'd rather wait longer and get what I am actually wanting to buy and what I am paying for. But then I feel the monthly serialized format is a dinosaur form a bygone age anyways. Too slow for modern preferences of content delivery, too fast for quality production values to meet modern customer expectations for art quality, not enough content each month to make it worth the money they have to charge because print runs are so small economy of scale works against it, making it a poor format in a modern market that is more likely to disappoint on some level than satisfy and preventing a mass audience from embracing and purchasing it-and unless more people buy it and economy of scale can be used to make it more affordable rather than against it to make it less affordable, cover prices will continue to rise on a regular basis unless quality of product is reduced by using cheaper materials.

I don't think print comics are a dinosaur, just monthly pamphlet sized comics delivering only 20 pages of content for $3 or more per issue that are unable to deliver a compete story experience in a timely manner by a consistent creative for the modern consumer.

If they are going to maintain that format, I would prefer entire stories be done and in the can before the first part is released so they can control delivery time of content, but print runs are so small and margins so slim for companies on print these days, they cannot afford to stockpile content to ensure on time delivery because it would accrue too much expenditure without enough of a revenue stream to compensate for it.

So it leaves the unsatisfying choice of monthly books patched together by assembly line creators meaning editorial voice is the only consistent one in their creation, or delays between issues to get a consistent creative team because the production rate needed for the quality demanded by a modern consumer take longer than the monthly schedule allows for. Some old school artists could do multiple books per month, but modern consumers would not accept panel after panel of figure only art with the only background being a fill by the colorists that you often see in Silver and Bronze Age books-modern consumers expect a level of detail that wasn't present in most comic art in the Silver and Bronze Ages, and even in those era you got a lot of fill in issues and reprints because deadlines were missed.


-M

Remender does the excellent Black Science, published by Image. Check that out if you want a good idea of what he can do when he's not restricted to playing with other people's toys.

Good idea, that's probably what I'll do. I like to read the independent stuff first, if they've done any, because I'm almost sure to be turned off by work with existing Marvel or DC characters, so much of which feels to me like it's designed by editorial committee. I still haven't tried Hickman's Avengers because I want to read one of his independent books first.