CBR: Splash Page: Wednesday Comics Week Twelve

[CBR News]

After twelve weeks, "Wednesday Comics" comes to an end, and so does this version of the "Splash Page." Tim and Chad rank all twelve strips this week, and talk about the good, the bad, and the future.


Full article here.

[kello]

I never even thought of buying them because they're newspaper-like quality. I just don't think for the price they would hold up. Plus, with all the coverage these strips get on Newsarama CBR, why would I have to buy them?

[superchick]

can't wait to have the supergirl strips collected. I'll take everything that has streaky being super

[fredmanson]

I don't know why some people didn't buy this weekly comic book. I really don't know.

Each time I open one, they are wonderful stories inside. Okay, it's a one page a week. And who cares? These pages were better than many single comics published in the same time.

I hope DC will continue this collection because it's a real great comic book!

To Kello: you have made a wrong choice to not buy one. What's the matter with the paper quality? It's a real white and strong one. And who cares about paper? What is more important in a comic book: paper or story? I have made my choice: story.

[Thad]

Okay, here's mine:

Strange Tales
Tough call, but I'm giving this one my #1. Beautiful art, effective storytelling, two great heroes and one great villain.

Kamandi
Just about everything I said about Strange holds true here too. Hal Foster by way of Jack Kirby -- what's not to like?

The Flash
The most creative of the bunch; it out-Allreds Allred in its experimentation with the format. Great heroes and villain, and great storytelling -- and the fact that that storytelling eventually gives way to a stylistic examination of the medium is a strength, not a weakness.

Supergirl
I think it was all downhill after the Aquaman scene, but this one just oozes charm and playfulness in a way the grim-n-gritty mainstream seems to have forgotten about entirely. I'd never checked out Conner's work before, but I fell in love with it in this strip; she's definitely one to watch. I can actually pick a favorite panel from this strip: Supergirl chewing her lower lip.

Hawkman
Not one but TWO great stories here. Almost nonstop action, great characterization and dialogue, nice art (though the Photoshop texturing got a little out of control once the T rex showed up), and nice bit with the foreshadowing about Aquaman.

Metamorpho
I don't share our reviewers' dislike for Gaiman and Allred's experimentation on this one; I thought the periodic table bit was fun, and Gaiman managing to work dialogue around every elemental symbol was quite clever. Gorgeous art, great characterization, and Java made me laugh out loud more than once.

Batman
I'm ranking this one below where most people have been putting it, and here's why: it's not a very good Batman story. It's a great Azzarello/Risso story, it's told effectively and the art's excellent too, but...what makes it a distinctively Batman story? Nothin', that's what. Swap in Dick Tracy, or the Shadow, or any other pulp detective, and you'd have exactly the same story.

I think it would have been a better Batman story if it had focused on what makes him a unique character -- I'm not saying they should have worked the Joker into it (in fact, I would like to state, emphatically, that they were right not to), but there are plenty of other elements they could have worked in. Instead we get a straight-up detective story with a cliche ending. It was a fun damn read, and would have been the ideal strip to stick in USA Today instead of Superman, but Batman was ultimately not used to his potential.

Wonder Woman
Caldwell's layouts didn't always work (and I'll join the crew saying that his changes in color saturation didn't work at all -- at least not in serialized form), but when they worked they worked to great effect. (I'm thinking of the strips with the vertical panels.) He really played with the potential of the format in a way that a lot of the other artists didn't, and the result is interesting to watch even if it's not perfect.

Deadman
Some great art in this one (I was convinced at first that Heuck was Darwyn Cooke working under a pseudonym), and some very neat Eisner-y layouts. I know it got written off in this column as pretty blah and forgettable, but it was one I looked forward to even if it wasn't my favorite.

Green Lantern
Too slow. I love Busiek and would probably venture Astro City as my all-time favorite superhero comic, but his methodical pacing and down-to-Earth story focus don't make a good fit for a twelve-page Green Lantern story. There's some real potential there -- I love the vintage setting -- but ultimately the story doesn't keep up with Quinones's absolutely gorgeous art.

Sgt. Rock
Brutal and effective; not much story going on here but the senior Kubert is in top form (and, in the junior Kubert's defense, there doesn't HAVE to be a lot of story in a strip like this). Another one that makes the middle of the list but that I enjoyed, largely as a break from the superhero stuff.

Metal Men
It's been stated elsewhere, but this strip was a frustrating marriage of beautiful art and bad writing. DiDio was a last-minute fill-in and it shows. I know the Metal Men are a bunch of two-dimensional archetypes to begin with, but DiDio doesn't do them any favors; he gave me no reason to care about any of them, or any of the other two-dimensional archetypes in the story. The bank heist premise and bottle setting made for a wasted opportunity; fighting Chemo cranked up the pacing a notch but by then it was too late. It wasn't a BAD strip, but a mediocre strip that shows potential for real greatness is more frustrating than something like Teen Titans which never showed that spark to begin with.

Demon/Catwoman
It's a great idea for an unconventional team-up, and the first and last strips showed real potential, but everything in-between? It wasn't a good Demon story (though I liked the Alan Moore-esque use of iambic pentameter), it DEFINITELY wasn't a good Catwoman story, and in fact it wasn't a good story at all. Where Batman works on its own merits despite not using the character to its fullest, and where Green Lantern and Metal Men managed to be memorable for their art despite disappointing stories, this one doesn't really accomplish anything at all.

Superman
Call me crazy, but between the "ALIENS MADE SUPERMAN EMO" reveal and the "Meanwhile, Batman was doing something much more interesting which would have been way more fun to read about" ending, I am convinced the overall badness of this story was intentional. I like to think of it as a sort of anti-All Star Superman, combining all the worst elements of the character and all the reasons people don't like him, a scathing critique of the Superman from Smallville and Returns, who mopes around in Kansas and is not nearly as cool as Batman (as this story sees fit to point out not once but TWICE). Now, it's possible that Arcudi just wanted to write a Batman story instead, but I like my metatextual theory better. In which case, it's a work of genius (and a grand prank on whoever decided this thing should be in USA Today), but is by its nature a bad read.

Teen Titans
To damn this strip with faint praise: I dig Galloway's stylized character models, it's just a pity he uses them only for absurd poses against blank backgrounds. Other than that, there's nothing positive I can say about this mess; it's got too many characters, a nonsensical plot with absurd twists and dangling threads (whatever happened to that bitchy lady who hated superheroes?). At no point did I ever care about any of the characters or in finding out what happened next.

So, that's my quick-and-dirty (well, not THAT quick; took so long to write that I got logged out) overview of what I thought of each individual strip. Hope to post more about the series as a whole and what I'd like to see next time later.

[Thad]

Regarding the series as a whole: loved it. It's the boldest, most creative new idea in comics since I-don't-know-when. Chiarello really hit this one out of the park, DC deserves kudos for letting him do it, and all the creators involved deserve props for their contributions, even the ones I didn't particularly care for.

That said, there's always room for improvement; here goes:

My only wish is that they don't do 15 12-part serials again. My biggest complaint about "Wednesday Comics," which I've had since the first issue is that format choice. Where are the one-off strips? Shorter stories? More variety, dammit! Maybe split up pages, have certain creators do four-panel comic strip type serial. Really look at the wide range of things this format lends itself to and explore all of them.

Seconded. Pacing is a real problem when all your strips have the same structure; #10 in particular suffered from every strip hitting the same point of its arc at the same time.

The Flash hinted to us that the broadsheet format need not be the only one used by these comics; this format provides room for tons of different kinds of layouts. Family Circus-style cartoons with a single circular panel, Calvin and Hobbes-style half-sheet strips, or even the conventional three-panel gag strips that populate the modern Sunday comics page. Or, as you say, four-panel serials, or broadsheet done-in-ones, or series like we've seen here but without the requirement that they take 12 sheets to tell. Hell, you could break them up like Rocky and Bullwinkle or Underdog cartoons, with an issue bookended by two parts of the same serial and other stuff in-between. There's endless potential to this format; go nuts!

Moving back a bit:

I'm not picking creative teams and characters. I see people doing that a lot and I have no interest in it. I wouldn't have picked many of these strips and a lot of them worked very, very well. Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook on "Kamandi"? Was that on anyone's wish list really? Or Karl Kerschl and Brendan Fletcher on "The Flash"? The best strip was done by creators with a character that no one would have called for! Let Mark Chiarello make those decisions since he's better at it than the rest of us!

Agreed, and the best "dream pitch" I saw him come up with in an interview was Steve Ditko on The Creeper.

That said, Tim throws out some good names; I'd love to see Jeff Smith or Gilbert Hernandez (hell, throw Jaime and Mario in there too!), and let me just throw Bruce Timm's name out there too even though he's way too busy to be a feasible choice. What about Veitch or Bolland? McCloud? Okay, okay, I'll stop.

[TC:] One final topic before we wrap things up for good. What do you say to the people who may not have bought "Wednesday Comics" because it didn't "count"? The stories were outside of continuity, and thus they don't matter in the grand DC narrative. So can you blame the fanboys and fangirls for skipping this comic?

CN: They're morons who don't care about good comics, just about propping up trademarks and would rather read bad stories that 'count' than good ones that don't, and that's just stupid. Of course I blame them. Who cares about continuity in the face of quality? You don't buy a comic because you don't enjoy it, fine -- but if you need it to be an official up-to-date-in-continuity story, I question your sense of what qualifies as an enjoying read, and I have no use for you. You are a huge part of what's wrong with comics. (And that's them, not you, Tim... you're what's right with comics, of course.) What a stupid reason not to read something. My god.

Seconded.

I mean, I've had my fair share of buying bad comics out of sheer force of habit (I've got boxes full of 1990's X-Men and Spider-Man, just like I'm sure most people here), and I'm picking up Blackest Night (but JUST the main mini, NONE of the tie-ins and not even the two main GL books). But if you want to talk about some damn fine reading, well, All-Star Superman's not in-continuity, and neither is Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Red Son...I could go on. On the Marvel side, we've got Strange Tales, which I'm quite enjoying, and Nextwave doesn't exactly fold perfectly into the MU either, despite some creators' gallant efforts to that effect.

Here's the thing: anyone who bought every issue of Countdown and all the tie-ins and then complained loudly about how bad it was...they're what's wrong with the comics industry. Quit buying things you don't like. If you bought every issue of Countdown and all the tie-ins because you LIKED it, great, more power to you (I myself quite liked Final Crisis, and that doesn't exactly seem to be a mainstream opinion), but if you didn't, put your money where your mouth is and spend it on something that's actually good.

And I also think about this sometimes: I never read fanfic, largely because it seems absolutely terrible (from the tiny bit I've sampled), but also because fanfic doesn't count. It counts less than an Annual written by Frank Tieri. It counts less than a "Hawkman" strip in "Wednesday Comics." And so if people see "Wednesday Comics" as some kind of high-class fanfic, maybe they're skipping it because of that. They wouldn't be totally wrong.

I'm going to call bullshit, and here's why: I guarantee you every single one of those fanboys has read The Dark Knight Returns, and what is that if not "some kind of high-class fanfic"? It's not any more canonical than any strip in Wednesday Comics, but people have the good sense not to dismiss it on that absurd basis.

Moving back to WC and ways to improve: an idea that got floated a lot in the early days that seems to die off is this concept's potential to attract people who don't read comics. As a trial run, WC showed how it could be done, but as for the execution, I don't think it roped in any new readers. But it could.

Thing one: sell at newsstands and checkout counters. People still buy those insipid Archie digests; if I saw the two displayed side-by-side, I'd definitely take the one with Batman on the cover. (Though given their relative price points and page counts, the choice might not be that easy.)

Thing two: make each issue new reader-friendly. That can mean two things: either self-contained stories in each issue, or recaps at the beginning of each strip. Hawkman and Kamandi, among others, managed to get readers up to speed in a couple sentences each week, but most strips didn't. (Wonder Woman DID have an intro panel every week, but bafflingly, it just explained who Wonder Woman was, as if reader's didn't know, rather than what had happened so far. And Batman was a rare strip where a reader could probably follow the beat of each week's story individually without knowing anything that had come before.) You can't go dropping readers into the middle of a story without letting them know what's going on; you're going to lose them that way.

There are other distribution methods. The USA Today preview was a great idea, though it would have been better if it had been in the print edition for all twelve weeks instead of just one. And if it had been a strip that was, you know, actually good. (Or two, or three! That way you could combine strips with well-known characters, to draw the readers in, with lesser-known ones, to broaden their interest.)

I'm sure there are people at DC considering all these ideas, and I'm sure they all pose a financial risk to the company. And I'll be honest, I don't see Wednesday comics singlehandedly saving the comics industry or print media. But done correctly, it could at least make some inroads.

Anyway, great work all around. Gripes aside, I love the concept, I loved the series, and I'd love to see more.

[noh-varr]

I never even thought of buying them because they're newspaper-like quality. I just don't think for the price they would hold up. Plus, with all the coverage these strips get on Newsarama CBR, why would I have to buy them?

The main article got it wrong, I've yet to see a single person say they didn't read WC because it wasn't in continuity (the whole rant about following in continuity stories over good stories is a valid argument in most cases though) it is the silly point made quoted above. The paper sucks, how much can a single page a week actually give you, etc. WC was not designed to be saved for later so you can sell it for cash, it was designed to give you a weekly dose of a story so you could enjoy yourself, you know the whole POINT of comic books. Individual issues of comic books were not designed to be saved for later, they were designed as disposable entertainment like an episode of television. Next week there will be new ones and you can find out what happens to the cast then. I think WC is the best concept to come out in the last decade if not much longer.

And the argument that since they were talked about why follow them, then hell why follow ANY book. You can just come here and find the review of what happened in Avengers or Batman so why do the actual reading of the comic and waste your hard earned dollars?