The "Ongoing" Plight

There's a lot of problems, including many you touch on.

Readers tend to pick up the books that are "Important." Generally, that actually doesn't mean solos, since it's team books that tend to be the most important. Avengers, New Avengers, Uncanny X-Men, All-New X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man are probably the five most important titles at Marvel. And probably Guardians of the Galaxy, which was also helped a lot by having a movie that was highly anticipated before its release (and which everybody loved after it came out). So those are the books people are most likely to buy. Those are the books that "matter." Unfortunately, quality has nothing to do with that particular aspect. An "Important" book can be shit, and it'll still sell reasonably well, and if a book's not "Important," then high quality may not boost its sales much.

That's not to say quality doesn't play a role at all. Look at Mark Waid's Daredevil or Matt Fraction's Hawkeye. They're books that get huge amounts of acclaim, including award nominations, and they do have reasonably solid sales. Compare it to Matt Fraction's Fantastic Four, which got a mixed reception, and had underwhelming sales, despite being (arguably) more important than Hawkeye.

Solos do face a bit of a tougher challenge, I think, than team books. Especially for X-Men characters - most readers want to read about the X-Men as a team, not about individual characters going off and doing their own thing. X-Men Legacy wouldn't have lasted anywhere near as long as it did if it was titled Rogue, because people don't want to read a Rogue ongoing, they want to read an X-Men ongoing with Rogue as a major character.

Cost is also a major factor. Most comics are $4, with an ever-shrinking number at $3. For 20 pages of content, that's a lot of money. You're spending $4 for about 15 minutes of entertainment. Think about that. How many mediums of entertainment have such a poor return on investment? A movie is $10 for at least 90 minutes. Cable is $50 or $60 or whatever for virtually unlimited entertainment. A traditional novel is $20 for several hours of entertainment. Comics are ridiculously expensive. So if you're going to spend that much money on it, a lot of people feel they should get what they're "supposed" to get, which goes back to the "Importance" bit earlier.

And, of course, there's an assload of comics out there. Marvel puts out a good 75 comics a month, at least. That's for a market of maybe 200 000 people. Those people have a wide variety of tastes and preferences. So you get maybe 10% who are big She-Hulk fans. You get 10% who will buy anything with Elektra. You get 10% who are love X-Force. But 10% of 200 000 is still only 20 000, which isn't that many people. There's a lot of books, and each reader has to decide which books are worth their money, and every book is competing for the same book, so there's going to be a lost of books that lose that competition.

And then, of course, some books - to be perfectly honest - don't really do anything to earn the money. Storm falls into that group. I'm sorry, but Storm is not a great book. It's OK. But OK is not good enough when there are so many books that are outstanding. Pak hasn't really done anything to justify the existence of Storm's solo title yet. The book lacks a direction. It lacks a mission statement beyond "it's a Storm solo title." At this point,quite honestly, Storm deserves to be cancelled.

Elektra is a case where she obviously just doesn't have a large enough fanbase to support a solo. Her fanbase is vocal, but small. The failure can't be blamed on the book itself, because it was well-written and gorgeous to look at. The story was interesting, the characterization was solid, and the art was outstanding. The failure here really does belong to Elektra.

She-Hulk, apparently, was only planned as 12 issues. So it's ending because Soule chose to end it.

All-New X-Factor suffered, I think, from a lack of perceived "Importance," and an audience preference for superheroics over people sitting around talking. Because PAD really does love having character sitting around talking. Which isn't a criticism, because I love it, too. But it does result in a lot of middling reviews, and it doesn't really do much to attract new readers.

X-Force, if it's being cancelled, is the result of a lack of "Importance." The writing and art have been solid, the story's cool, the characters are entertainingly messed up, there's exciting action mixed with compelling character work. It's a good book. But clearly, people don't much care about X-Force.

Before talking about the larger issue with ongoings in general, I want to talk about the Storm ongoing in particular for a bit first.

As usual, I disagree with most of what Brett White says , especially when it comes to the quality of the Storm ongoing. I was recapping the series in the Storm thread, but stopped after the first two issues, I'll cover just a bit of what I felt the issues were with the um...issues. I'm not using spoiler tags, but there are possible spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't read the first five issues of the Storm ongoing.

Issue one did a good job of setting up Storm as a likeable, relatable character; no small feat considering how many writers have struggled with just that in the past few decades. Unfortunately, it did nothing to set up any interest in reading further issues of the series, unless you just liked Storm so much as a character you were curious what she would do next. Pak created a new, interesting and compelling character in Flourish/Creep; who also had good interactions with Storm, but she was written completely out of the series by the end of the first issue. 3 stars

Issue two was a such a retread of elements of issue one, right down to Storm overreacting to something, making assumptions, making apologies and even a scene of helping rebuild; that I actually laughed out loud at the panel of Storm tidying up in the Morlock Tunnels. Not good if you're two issues in and already following a formula, and not a very compelling one at that. 2 stars

Issue three was the issue I was looking forward to most based on the solicitations. Forge was my favorite romantic pairing for Storm, in part because some of the things Forge has done and secrets he's kept from her make it hard for Storm to sometimes know if she's trusting him when she shouldn't, or not trusting him when she should. Sometimes the reader isn't sure either and that element of uncertainty and mistrust adds friction to their relationship and interactions. That was on display in issue three, but since Storm and Wolverine hooking up had recently been turned into a Storm/Wolverine romance, there was going to be nothing of that sort between Storm and Forge. Also, more recent actions by Forge had given Storm even more reason not to trust him; and rather than gloss over that, Pak(wisely IMHO) chose to address that and deal with it(instead of glossing over their issues like was done with Kurt and Amanda in the Nightcrawler ongoing). It felt like a needed development, but something more suited to a few pages in the old Marvel Comics Presents, or a b-story in a team book, not the focal point of a whole issue. The "problem" that needed resolving for the issue was an immediately forgettable C-story and the art by a fill-in artist had such distorted/characterized facial expressions in a number of places I cringed a little every time I saw one. 2 stars

Issues four and five were a two-part featuring Yukio.

Issue four starts off with Beast rushing Storm into space. Through her powers, Storm's emotions are tied to the Earth's weather, and the loss of Wolverine is hitting her hard. She's literally freezing her seat and the air around her before unleashing her powers in a harmless visual display seen around the world. I realize men and women are somewhat different, especially in the way they process emotions(or are at least usually taught to), but somehow I can't quite imagine Batman flying Superman into space while Superman is in the passenger seat literally white-knuckling it to keep his emotions inside. I wonder if we are suppose to imagine similar scenes with Storm occurring after the lost of Piotr or Kurt, or was Logan given special status because them being friends who were hooking-up was turned into a romance in the eleventh hour before his death to give his loss more relevance to Storm(I'm not a kid, I can see the man behind the curtain and what strings are being pulled here.)? There's also a scene with Storm rubbing her face against Wolverine's jacket that seems more appropriate for a high-school girl than a grown woman. The issue thankfully gets much better in the personal scenes between Storm and Yukio, and finishes with Storm being thrust into a gladiator-style fight in an arena. Storm as a gladiator retreads ground for both writer Pak(Planet Hulk) and Storm herself(Storm vs Callisto, Storm vs Marrow, and even the miniseries literally titled Storm:The Arena). I guess gladiator-style combat is a trope for Storm's character now? 2 stars

Issue five picks up with Storm trying to avoid fighting in the arena, ultimately agreeing to it when she can find no other way, only to learn her fighting was just a distraction to give Yukio the chance to murder her boss-rival. Storm ultimately comes off as naive and easily manipulated, and not the veteran character and X-Man she should be. 2 stars

I can understand Storm fans fighting to save the series. If Iceman had finally gotten an ongoing I would be championing it's survival like crazy, regardless of how flawed it might be. Something bad can always improve, but something that doesn't exist...There is good writing, some good character moments and (for the most part) very good art; but it's all stuck in issues that ultimately poorly serve both the character and the reader. If someone wants to spend $3.99 a month on a title to sift sand in hopes of finding gold nuggets, I highly recommend reading Storm. Personally, unless it features my favorite character in the whole world; if I'm going to spend that much money on something, it's going to have a good/bad ratio tilted a lot more solidly in favor of the good.

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On the larger issue of the ongoings:

There are a number of factors at play. For me personally, Cyclops and Magneto are two books I just don't want to buy, period, regardless of how good they may be. I was getting more than enough of Teen-Cyclops every issue in All-New X-Men, so buying a solo of the character I was already suffering character-fatigue with every month is not happening. Magneto, I find compelling, but he's not a character I can feel good about or root for; so I'm not buying a monthly solo. Nightcrawler and Storm are two characters I would like to read about and can root for, but are being poorly served by their respective series. I wish Nightcrawler was getting to have the kind of adventure Teen-Cyclops is having, I wish Storm was being given the compelling stuff Magneto is being given. Ultimately, Marvel is somehow managing to tell good stories with two characters I don't want to read about, and bad stories about two characters I do; which ultimately leads me to not reading three of those books and on the fence with dropping the fourth.

For Elektra and She-Hulk...honestly, I didn't buy a single issue of either series. I have literally stacks/boxes of prior series of both characters, and I think this is the first Elektra series I didn't collect. Why? I expected both to be summarily cancelled. If they had been solicited as mini-series I might have gotten both books(I wasn't aware Soule planned She-Hulk as only twelve issues or I might have picked it up.) I'm tired of getting ongoings only to see them summarily and abruptly canceled; with plot-lines left dangling or hurriedly and badly resolved. With a miniseries I can expect(or should be able to reasonably expect) a beginning-middle-end. Marvel should stick to mini-series for second-tier characters unless they have sales from a mini-series, or a one-shot even, that suggest there is sufficient demand for an ongoing. That's the way Marvel use to do it, and I'm not sure why that changed. The only way an Elektra and perhaps even a She-Hulk ongoing series is going to make it is if they put a creative team on the book that also comes with a built-in audience, and that team manages to craft a water-cooler book that expands those base sales into stronger figures.

X-Factor, I have already discussed it's cancellation at length elsewhere. For X-Force, I picked up the first issue with high hopes, found (Nu)Marrow and Fantomex both grating, never much cared for Dr. Nemesis(admittedly, that might have less to do with the character and more to do with him being brought into the X-fold during Fractions run on Uncanny which I strongly disliked, and that I felt his presence there was yet another character stealing page time from actual X-Men I wanted to read about who were stuck playing background to the myopic Cyclops/Emma/Magneto/Namor show. That may have left a bad taste in my mouth that simply gets in the way of me liking him). I didn't like the depictions of Cable or Psylocke enough to offset my dislike of the depictions of the other three, so I dropped it. I picked up the recent issue of X-Force with ForgetMeNot, a character I really liked; and pretty much agreed with his assessment of the current depiction of X-Force: That they are horrible people(I found it interesting that in a recent interview Spurrier said his assessment of X-Force is in line with ForgetMeNot's, so maybe that's what he is going for). That might be fundamentally true of a number of characters I like(Sons of Anarchy comes immediately to mind), but with the SOA I find them to be fundamentally likeable characters that do bad things for usually good(or at least understandable) reasons. I find the cast of X-Force to be fundamentally unlikeable, and I'm just not going to spend money on a book each month if I find the cast as depicted as fundamentally unlikable.

On the issue of action verses character development. A good writer learns how to drive plot while developing characters. In a perfect world you can do both at the same time, and try to strike a balance as best you can otherwise. There is a LOT of mostly mindless chatter in comics right now masquerading as character development. Having people standing around talking isn't in and of itself any better than a mindless action sequence. There was an episode of Masters of Sex(TV show on Showtime detailing the lives of Masters and Johnson from the real-life groundbreaking sex study, with some elements of fictionalization) where the two leads spent most of an hour-long episode just talking in a hotel room. It was riveting. It was compelling. Just watching a boxing match on TV together revealed hidden aspects of both characters. There's no reason you can't have compelling, dynamic, even gripping conversations in comics; but often what we get is idle chit-chat, the conversation equivalent of a mindless battle.

My two cents. Or five. Crap, anybody got change for a dollar...

I think the reason Marvel does a lot of these titles as "ongoings" rather than minis is that minis may not sell as well. Plus, a mini is usually four or five issues, and a lot of these series last 10-15. Calling that a miniseries just doesn't sound right, so they just call it an ongoing. And, of course, there's always the hope that a title will catch on, so that it can keep going. Hawkeye would be the prime example of that.

I think you are on to something with lack of real direction or pitch. Marvel said they wanted a book, and grabbed a team and hoped for the best.

I can tell you with the Gambit solo - it was put out there that Marvel was looking for pitches. The guy who was given the title originally had to bail on the project because of getting a TV gig. Asmus was then asked to pitch and tossed around some ideas.

There was more time spent on it. And initially it was only going to be 4 issue mini, it became an ongoing. I do think being lite in continuity hurt and Marvel tied Asmus' hands quite a bit. There were a great many things he wasn't allowed to do or characters he wasn't allowed to use. Joelle most likely would not exist if Asmus was given Black Cat for the first story arc. Marvel also changed a character on Asmus and didn't tell him. It wasn't suppose to be War Machine ... that was suppose to be Iron Man.

A cross over was planned and scrapped. While I get having Rogue guest appear, it did nothing to help his book. No sales jump by having her in it. While some things were addressed at least he was moving on.

Question becomes how much interference by editorial before its a hindrance.

There is too much tossing stuff out there to see what sticks mentality. Going back to my earlier post - Howard the Duck and Squirrel Girl? Who wants those ongoings?

They may not be random choices, but I can tell you that neither Howard the Duck or Squirrel Girl will get any dollars from me. Someone pitched an idea and Marvel wants to try it out. But it will still come down to if the market will buy it. They want to work on their quirky characters because of how well GoTG did, so be it. Movie results does not translate into comic book sales.

I will soon not be a consumer of Marvel and that is because they're giving me stuff I don't want, female lead books, characters I don't care about and events that do nothing but repeat themselves.

Yes, thats on me, but its my money. 

I actually liked Birds of Prey as well, and agree that felt organic. Xmen book does feel forced and contrived. And I can tell you having Jubilee be a teen mom holds no interest. I get that there might be stories to go with it but, I was not enamored with Shogun like Wood and his following were.

I don't mean to be too negative, I'm just so disappointed in the Xline right now and feel like when ANXF and that "Burning" story in Xmen written by G. Willow Wilson ia over, I won't have a book to look forward to or read. Dropping the hobby isn't all that hard to do for me but it was a bright spot in my mid week.

Then I find out that G. Willow Wilson didn't necessarily want to write Gambit, she asked on Twitter who she should include in the story for the arc and fans told her Gambit. While glad he'll be in it, based on that information - he'll be a prop and I'm not as hopeful as I once was with his appearance in the book.

I'm totally buying Squirrel Girl. It looks like it's going to be good, adorable fun. I get that she's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. But Squirrel Girl is just too happy a character for me not to love her.

As Icefanatic said, Howard's a character who's often done wrong. But the original series by Steve Gerber was fantastic. I doubt I'll be picking up the new series, but if the writer does manage to channel Gerber, then it'll be a book that deserves to exist.