Tell Me Why I Don't Like Wednesdays

[sdelmonte]

Or rather, why I don't like DC's Wednesday Comics experiment.

Yes, it started out well. Most of the 15 strips boasted great art and at least an interesting first installment. Unfortunately, the majority of the strips have, after four weeks, gone nowhere. Oh, the art is still great and most of it looks great at the large size, even on old style newsprint. But I have never bought a comic for the art alone. I've even suffered through subpar art on occasion if the story is great. But when the story is bland, or pointless, or just bad, you could have the best artists around and I will not stick around.

That's the case here. The strips with Superman, Green Lantern, the Teen Titans, Hawkman, Sgt. Rock and Metamorpho are all quite inert, even though all look great. (Sgt. Rock is further hurt by a total failure by the legendary Joe Kubert to do any art that takes advantage of the size of the page. It looks like classic Kubert, but it could be more.) It's even more painful that writers as notable as Neil Gaiman and Kurt Busiek seem to be just spinning their wheels.

And the less said about the murky, bizarre, impenetrable and pointless Wonder Woman feature, the better.

Only a handful of strips have grabbed me. Supergirl is adorable. Kamandi is a little predictable but seems very much like the action adventure comic strips of another era. The Flash reads like a Silver Age comic without being dated. And Dan Didio's script on Metal Men is very good - maybe he should quit being an editor and just write? (For the record, the strips I haven't mentioned are readable, but not much more than that.)

So at the end of the day, I've spend $16 and gotten perhaps $8 of enjoyment. It's clear that I have no real reason to keep reading. I wish I did. I still love the idea behind Wednesday Comics. There should be a place for oversized, continuity-free adventure comic strips with big name heroes, big name writers and big name artists. There should be a place for experimentation in an industry that seems to be stuck in a rut and reliant on Big Events rather than just telling good stories. And I am glad that a lot of people are having fun reading this, and that maybe DC is making money off it.

But I have a feeling that few of the people involved have a clue how to go from writing 22 pages a month to 1 big page a week. Comic books are not the same as comic strips, and if nothing else, Wednesday Comics is showing us that those who did master the formats offered by the comic strips had special and rare talents. I would like to think that there are writers who could adapt to this format, should DC or some other publisher try this again. But for now, that skill is in short supply. And there are other comics in the usual format that I think I would rather spend my $4 on.

Comments

[zsero.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about Thursday Next?

[sdelmonte]

Didn't care much for her first appearance, so didn't read the rest. But did love the interactive Richard III.

[batyatoon]

"WHEN is the winter of our discontent?"

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I declined to pick it up on the assumption that the better stories will eventually be collected in a different format.

[sdelmonte]

There is a lot to be said for visual impact of the comics on fairly large sheets. I wonder how DC will collect them, though it's possible we will see all 15 collected in a slipcase, each in its own 12 page section. Most won't work as well on standard size paper, that's for sure.