Atomic-Robo.com

This weekend was a Robo Double Whammy. We turned in the finished pages for Atomic Robo #6 Saturday morning and I completed the script for the first issue of our next mini-series later that night. Scott won’t start drawing it until January, and that’s assuming there’s funding for a second series, but what the hell else have I got to do? I’m aiming for four issues at this point but it’s honestly too early to call. We could easily do five or six by the time it’s over.

That’s what I love about doing creator-owned stuff. Printing Robo as a series of mini-series is effectively “writing for the trade”. For those of you who don’t know, that’s usually seen as a bad thing. Readers love trades, but they hate it when the monthly issues are manipulated to conform to a pre-determined trade paperback size or release schedule. So you’ll end up with these four or six issue storylines that could have easily been wrapped up in three issues. If a whole lot of nothing happens in an issue, you can bet people all over the internet are whining about “writing for the trade.” It’s viewed as one of the sins of modern comics storytelling. We can get away with it because we’ll never have to stretch four issues of story into six issues of content to meet an arbitrary editorial mandate. If the story arc is four issues, then the trade will be four issues. The pacing doesn’t drag, the story doesn’t suffer, and the customer gets a complete arc in one package. Everyone’s happy. The end.

Well. Assuming sales justify a trade, of course.