The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

(The first and last issues of S.W.O.R.D. by Gillen and Saunders)

This week saw the final issue of Kieron Gillen’s Marvel series S.W.O.R.D. ship to comic stores. I’ve only read issue one since every time I popped into a comic shop I couldn’t find any issues available. But issue 1 was a blast.

That it’s finished isn’t too much of a surprise; a space based minor X-Men spin-off was always going to be a hard sell. But the difficulty of generating enough sales for series like S.W.O.R.D. is something that, at least to my mind, highlights the problems of the modern superhero comic industry.

Innovation is difficult and different needs time to develop, but it appears that there’s just no time available – sales have to be there from the start and we’re stuck in a cycle of big event series, superhero comics just chasing their own tail, repeating formulas, recycling ideas and failing to innovate or develop. Sure, there are exceptions but there appears to be a complacency in modern superhero comics that worries me.

(The two collected volumes of Phonogram – and that may be all you get)

Another Kieron Gillen comic at an end was highlighted this week in a very frank and illuminating interview over at Comics Alliance in which Gillen talks about the economic factors that essentially mean that the only way we’re going to see a third series of Phonogram illustrated by Jamie McKelvie is posthumously:

“Best plan I have is just writing series 3 and then writing into my will that assuming I die young and Jamie’s still around, lob him whatever’s in my bank account to draw it. Which is assuming he’d even be willing to do it then. It’s not that we’re bitter about it — well, not just because we’re bitter about it — but that it’s been emotionally exhausting.”

“There’s a difference between making only a little money and starving. We’re very much in the latter. Jamie’s lucky to get a couple of hundred dollars from an issue. While he didn’t tell me about this until after it was all done, there were three occasions when Jamie was seriously considering throwing in the towel. The problem is that Image’s deal is a back-end one. Will we make some money off the trade? Maybe. And that’s a big maybe. But that means Jamie not earning any money for the six months it would take to draw it, which is the main reason why we took over a year to do 7 issues. As in, every time Jamie ran out of money, he had to stop and do something else. A couple of hundred dollars doesn’t cover rent or pay for his fashionable haircuts. And doing this bitty work f–ks up the production anyway, because you can’t concentrate or plan. You just spend your entire life in low-level money panic.”

That something as universally acclaimed as Phonogram couldn’t generate enough sales to keep it’s creators in food and hair products is a terrible admission and evidence, if any were really needed, that this comic industry of ours is still resolutely set up to sell stories of super people to an ever diminishing and ageing audience.

Seems to me that we’re seeing the medium increasingly polarised between the high profile literary graphic novels receiving great acclaim and sales and the insular, repetitious world of straight superheroes continuing their perennial recycling of concepts and ideas into huge event driven series that dominate the comic shop shelves.

And somewhere in-between critically acclaimed books like Phonogram, books that potentially have a huge appeal to a real mainstream audience of general book readers seem to be suffering from this polarisation and being lost in the middle.

Phonogram is available in two collections: Rue Brittania and the soon to be published Singles Club. S.W.O.R.D. will no doubt be collected sometime later in the year.