Thursday, March 19, 2009

Wednesday Comics: Great Idea Or Stupid Stunt?

DC Comics just unveiled the weekly series to follow Trinity, which fans have been wondering about for months now. It's called Wednesday Comics (after the day of the week that new comics go on sale) and it features single-page strips for a whole slew of characters printed in a newspaper-like format (measuring 14" x 20", for cryin' out loud!). You can read all about it here if you're interested in more details. It sounds like 16 features, each 1 page long, running for 12 installments over 12 weeks. If I'm interpreting that right, then it's only 16 pages long (plus ads, potentially) which is pretty short... but of course, with the larger page size, it could be equivalent to a 32-page comic in terms of how much actual real estate is involved (especially if the strips are designed to take advantage of the bigger area).

I give DC a lot of credit for experimenting in this way, regardless of how it all works out in the end. There's a certain strange irony to one print format in danger of obsolescence deciding to mimic another one that's clearly in its death throes, but nevertheless... At 12 issues, I'm more likely to try it and potentially even stick with it than I would be with another 52-issue run like Countdown or Trinity (the former of which I should have given up on, the latter of which I did). Of course, if they price it too aggressively then I still might not bite. $2.99 might be reasonable if it looks intelligently laid out; $3.99 or more probably makes it a "pass" for me.

Storing a comic series that's printed in newspaper format offers its own challenges, but I'm not going too far down that path just yet. [Update Mar 20/09: Something I read today seemed to imply that the issues will be comic-sized until you unfold them to the larger dimensions. If true, then the storage issue goes away.] I'm more interested in hearing what it'll cost, who will be working on which characters, and what it will look like. It's definitely provided a lot of comic fans their big "Huh?" moment for the month, though! And that's not a bad thing, in this case.

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