This week's COMICS BUYER'S GUIDE (March 3, 2000 #1372) features a discussion about the commonality of comics titles shipping late, and the changes in the business over the past decade or so that have contributed to the problem.

Today's continuing story arcs of most titles have all but eliminated the inventory for done in one stories for when a creator, for whatever reason, cannot meet a deadline and the book still needs to ship. I think this is a key detriment to the industry, because it makes books ship late and negates another avenue for younger talents to be given an oppotunity. This is a minor point, though. I think the issue comes in with professional responsibility.

And so I have posted here to ask my fellow professionals their opinion on something:

Should there be a penalty for a creator who frequently misses their deadlines? Perhaps a drop in page rate because they missed the deadline a few months in a row? Or perhaps even a dismissal from a title, regardless of popularity of their talent, because they can't meet their obligations? I realize this business is competitive enough as it is. My feeling is that people shouldn't be given multiple chances to screw up- too many people's real lives are involved in a comic's production and sale, from the creative to production to editorial to the retailer- and it appears that more and more talent today seems to blatantly disregard or simply not respect that responsibility. Isn't this part of what being a comics professional is about? And if so, what can the industry do to bring those who aren't meeting their obligations to be more responsible for their actions (or lack thereof)?

Granted, there are sometimes valid reasons why a talent misses deadline. I suppose each case would almost certainly have to handled on a case by case basis. But maybe there should be a guideline designed so both publishers and talent alike can handle these problems with a little more finess and a lot more timeliness.

I would also like to suggest that talents who have creator owned books that don't ship for 6 or more months simply be dropped by their publisher until they produce an equal number of finished issues up front. Most book publishers would simply cut these people loose and never deal with them again. Maybe it's time the comics industry took after their publishing brethren?

Thoughts? Comments?

My short answer would be no, don't cut their pay or fine them. The fans will deal with them in short order, as will the retailers.

Rik

>>My short answer would be no, don't cut their pay or fine them. The fans will deal with them in short
order, as will the retailers.<<

Except they don't. Anybody seen Alan Moore lose assignments in spite of a lateness record that rivals some of the worst in the business? How late is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen right now?

The problem is that, for the worst offenders, the success of the project is completely tied to the popularity of the creative team, so it's impossible to replace them, no matter how late they get.

Best, Pat

Pat,
You're assuming the problem is with Alan. LOEG is a collaboration.

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Pat is correct. There is no penalty, unless of course you AREN'T a star, in which case there may be a penalty.

And since when has lateness NOT been a problem with Alan, Rick? He's one of "them" isn't he? (Deadline missers?)


[This message has been edited by Jack Venooker (edited 02-25-2000).]

I was under the impression that Moore tends to be ahead of his deadlines (isn't Liefeld sitting on about a year's worth of Supreme scripts?), but that his scripts are so insanely detailed that they take a long time to draw. I don't know how true that is, but it leads me to give him the benefit of the doubt.

>>I was under the impression that Moore tends to be ahead of his deadlines (isn't Liefeld sitting on about a year's worth of Supreme scripts?)<<<

The man's got more unpublished scripts than Paul S. Newman...I can't believe he's a tardy person. He's doing his own line of 5-6 monthly books, that doesn't like the schedule of a slow poke. I'm assuming any tardy books are the result of the art or the publisher (DC held up a couple of issues of Planetary over some nonsense).

As for penalties to late folk...it won't matter. It's a generational thing. The newer "kids" just don't care enough. A lot of popular books (under a big "I") see their numbers shrink after every long gap in issues, which means less money for them, yet that doesn't seem to put a fire under a lot of them (of course there are exceptions).

I really think the mass exit of artists from Marvel in the early 90's to their own companies had just a tiny bit more do with not wanting to be held to strict deadlines than creative freedom. Though being able to put out a book whenever you damn well please is pretty free.

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Lateness has its own built-in penalties. If Jane Slow turns in eight issues of her monthly in a given year, then she's going to have that much more problem finding work, since there are many jobs which require timely turnaround. Not only that, but she will only be being paid for eight issues, which means she'll be making significantly less money than if she had completed twelve, and if the fan interest wanes because of the delays, then she loses on royalties as well.

Now, Mightily Comics may drop Jane from an assignment if she's causing deadline problems; that happens frequently in this business. But it Jane is a popular creator, they'll have to weigh that against losing the sales she brings, sales which are likely to head to Delightful Comics when she takes her series there. If Mightily choses to cut her page rate or take other punitive action, they're also likely to lose her to the competition. It often behooves publishers to find ways to deal with problems, rather than punishing creators.

And with the collections being ever more important, it simply make less financial sense to boot good folks off of books. Perhaps Marvel could have kicked Smith, Quesada, and Palmiotti off of Daredevil after issue 4... but what they have now is a book's worth of material written by one of the more talked-about filmmakers around, which should give it a healthy shelf-life. The quality and the viability of that book would almost surely have been compromised if the storyline had been finished by another creative team... EVEN IF it was another team who were just as good.

Even if it were Moore's fault, I think we could cut him some slack: who else is capable of scripting four titles a month, one of them broken up into 3-4 separate stories, for seven or eight differen artists, and keeping the quality as high as it is?

The question of penalizing writers or artists for lateness presumes that there is some means of determining who is at fault for a given incident of lateness. That's usually not possible. There are often too many mitigating factors involved.

It has also been my experience that an awful lot of the stories that circulate about a given writer or artist missing deadlines are, if not untrue, then often not the complete story. I recall a number of fanzines lamenting that a certain mini-series was late because the artist was late...and they didn't mention (or know) that the company had asked the artist to double-up and do another project concurrently -- with the understanding that it would make the mini-series late.

It has been my experience that a deadline schedule is a nice guideline, but a real editor understands that, in spite of what anyone says, writers and artists are human...and most projects encounter some sort of problems that could not have reasonably been foreseen. Those who are rigid about such things usually make matters much worse, both in terms of doing good work and getting it done on time.