¶ This Wednesday Comics thing is shaping up pretty good. Kamandi by Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook and Metamorpho by Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred.
¶ David Lapham announces that YOUNG LIARS will end with #18:
Got word yesterday. 18 will be the last. There will be plenty of mind blowing shit in every issue till the last. I’m not going to try and force my “ultimate” ending in there but we will have an end, and as this is a series of endings, I can hold out hope that one day I may see it through to the end I had intended be the end, end..
If any of that makes sense.
I’m mostly bummed because YL was so much Goddamn FUN to work on, and it’s not the kind of story that you can just go into from the start. It evolved into what it was and creatively, that was kind of magical and I never took it for granted. I think Shelly Bond might have been the only person other than Maria and I here at El Capitan who would have let me run this course and encourage me to do so. I always wanted to put up a thread on Lee’s fantastic coloring, but he did a hell of a job. He took the fear out of coloring for me.
Worst news of the day… Crap.
That stinks, I just finished the first trade of Young Liars last week.
Sorry to see Young Liars go. David’s characters and storylines really kept me on my toes. I got into a habit of rereading the series after each new issue to pick up on the various nuances and foreshadowing that came into the light with some of the big revelations. Great surreal stuff. Sorry to see it go. Dare I ask the Stray Bullets question?
Still not sold on this Wednesday Comics idea. The creators are a dream, but the format? Sounds crappy. I’m really torn. The old Sunday comics on Wednesday? As nice as those are for comic strips, that seems like a step backwards for print comics. Maybe if these were web comics that later saw print in trade. It worked for Dark Horse’s Dark Horse Presents that made the jump from print to web. These comics have such a great line up, I’m up for the trade paperback. Yet as a weekly newspaper comic strip? Meh?
Hmm.. Looking are more pages. Then I realized even those Sunday comics are moving onto the web and almost every one of them is online for free. I can read most any comic strip I like in the Sunday paper on their company’s web site.
Plus.. $4 for 16 pages of single page stories a week?
As Wednesday Comics was explain to me, it’s old school broadsheet size, which is larger than some of the newspapers, folded down into quarters to fit on the shelf, so it sounds like 1 broadsheet page is the equivalent of roughly 4 “standard” comic pages.
I need to actually see one, but my interest is piqued.
I just don’t get Wednesday Comics. The creative line-up is good, but the format contains very little narrative content (even on larger pages), they sound physically difficult to read (why do I want to unfold a newspaper to read my non-strip comics?), and they’re even more difficult to store or loan than pamphlets.
I’d say that I’d wait for the trade, but the story rhythms and formatting issues make that seem like a non-starter as well.
Xenos and chris7crows–
Don’t buy it, then. And don’t cheat and read it in the store. It’s an experiment in style. It may work or fail, but I, for one, am interested in seeing how it plays out.
I’m rather excited about Wednesday comics, but I can understand the concerns of those looking at rereading the stories in the future.
The entire project looks more like a fun and inventive way to do a weekly at the moment, and that’s it. If you don’t think about the mechanics and just give it a shot, I think that’s the entire nature of the format.
They’re not really trying to tell life-shattering stories or some such. Just a small, weekly periodical with little to no effect. It’s simulating the newspaper feel, which I always found entertaining. In the end, each will just read as a quick story with little ramifications. Much like a short before a film. It’s clearly not for everyone, though.
Cheers.