shannon_a

Just finished The Last Run, Greg Rucka's newest novel, what he calls the end of volume one of Queen & Country. It was an obsessively readable novel. I rarely read a single book for more than a chapter or two at a sitting, but I wooshed right through the last half of the book--as an increasing number of cats gravitated to the bed, laying upon or against me.

(They're all sadly bereft now.)

Rucka has increasingly become my favorite thriller/action/espionage author. I loved all three of his Q&C novels (and in fact need to get myself copies of the first two, so that I can sit down and read through all the comics and novels again, now that I know how the story ends) and I've also been very fond of all of his later Atticus Kodiak novels. I'm pretty shocked that I don't seem to have any tags for him here. I guess I've just been tagging them generically under 'mystery books', using an overbroad definition.

I find it very interesting to contrast Kodiak and Q&C, because the Kodiak books are generally very small, personal books, while the Q&C books really do a good job of feeling like internationally important events. And Rucka does them both well.

I'm very hopefully that this conclusion of 'volume one' means that a new Q&C comic book series in in the offing, especially now that Rucka had ended his relationship with DC to return to his own work (not that I haven't loved some of his DC work, especially Gotham Central and Checkmate, both of which I should reread too).

I like reading comics. However, they seem to be a somewhat less professional medium than a lot of other mediums of publication. In particular, writers and authors seem totally okay with hugely delaying their work. Even Neil Gaiman succumbed while working on the end of The Sandman. And the worst offenders: indie publishers.

A comic book getting continually delayed is pretty much the easiest way to make me lose interest. Here's several comics that have frustrated me in exactly that way.

Squadron Supreme. This comic book by JMS was going along swimmingly through the first 18 issues when it was called Supreme Power. Then it was renamed Squadron Supreme and got put out hiatus for a bit. This created a delay that I felt particularly large since I was waiting for trades. However the big problem occurred when JMS abruptly left the title about 7 issues into the new run for reasons I've never been able to discern. He left in the middle of a story line that's pretty much never been finished. Though a new writer has since restarted the series, I'm not even sure I'm interested, since I haven't seen a new issue since 2005, not counting some origin stories and crossovers that I regretted buying. The trade paperback of JMS' last issues is finally due out this year.

Planetary. Warren Ellis' brilliant story of a weird modern world was only supposed to run four volumes, and the third volume was published in ... 2004. Five years later, it looks like the final volume would soon be out. The story is good enough that I still care, but a five-year wait for the last several issues is just out-of-this-world crazy.

Age of Bronze. Eric Shanower's tale of the Trojan War is supposed to run 7 volumes. Volume 1 came out in 2001, volume 2 came out in 2004, then the first half of volume 3 came out in 2008. Since then, Shanower has only managed to publish two issues toward the second half of volume three. Considering that it's taken him 10 years to publish the first three TPBs, it'll take another 16-17 years to publish five more books (if he manages to not split any more volumes) or 30 years to publish eight (if he splits all the remaining volumes). I ain't holding my breath on that one, though I finally purchased volume "3a" last night.

Artesia. This beautifully painted story of a woman warrior first came to my attention in 2005, when the author, Mark Smylie, handed me the first three volumes at GenCon of what he said would be a 22-volume series. In the almost four years since, he seems to have published just three issues of volume four, which is half of the story. If he continues at his current rate, which seems to be about 8 years per volume, it'll be 152 years before he's done. Really not holding my breath there.

Astro City. I can't complain too much about Kurt Busiek's ode to the Silver Age, since I finally picked up a new volume in 2008 (though only because I was willing to pay hardcover prices). However the last volume before that was 2005.

What was it with 2006 and 2007, which seemed to be the years of slowdown for many of these series?

Queen & Country. Greg Rucka's great spy series isn't quite in the same boat as some of these others, since the author seems to have purposefully pulled back to work on other things. Nonetheless, the last two volumes, of 4 issues each, came out in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Rucka claims that he plans about 50 issues, and has written only 32.

I have to suspect that some of these delays are due to cashflow problems, but, dammit folks, the delays just hurt readership and thus increase the cashflow problems.

Sigh.

Crossposted to Xenagia.