>Makes a lot of sense if you've got any intelligence at all: Selling 10 books
>at $4.95 is $49.50 as opposed to 2 books at $4.95 is only $9.90. Simple
>math. Stretch the story out and you'll make more money, unless you screw
>over the audience and put out crap. Which is the whole point. If Joemovie
>doesn't like the way Marvel takes a 2 issue arc and makes it into 10, then
>simply don't buy the books.

I'm sorry, but as everyone else here has pointed out, your math simply doesn't
work.

On ASM, they collect together about every six issues for graphic novels.
Doesn't matter if I do one, two, three, four, five or six issue arcs, the size
of the GN is the same. More to the point, the people who buy ASM are the
people who buy ASM. Every month it sells about the same number of books, give
or take. We're pretty consistent. Writing big arcs doesn't make Marvel any
more money than small arcs. Or no arcs.

And, in truth, I get yelled at no matter *what* I do on arc stuff. If I do a
three-issue arc, I get yelled at for padding...if I do a one-issue stand-alone,
I get yelled at for writing "filler."

But understand, straight from the horse's mouth (or the opposite end if you're
so inclined)... there is no pressure to do any length in my story arcs, they
let me tell the stories at the pace I feel works best for the structure. And
there is no more money made by Marvel if I do a long arc as opposed to a short
one. Zip. The sales are the sales, the GNs are the GNs.

>DC and Marvel are both guilty of this practice. Granted, some writers take
>longer to get the story out, JMS being one of them, but the publishers have
>a great deal of say in this sort of thing.

Again, they haven't said boo to me on this thing. Not once.

Finally, as for Supreme Power...I gave everybody fair warning in every
interview I did on this book: it's not going to be a conventional book, it's
not going to be plot driven, its going to be a strong character story and it's
going to develop over time into something extremely intense. There's some
serious action coming up very soon, but it's not aimed at stopping Doctor
Destructo before he can unleash his Whammo ray and turn Chicago into gold so he
can clean up. It ain't that kind of book. It's kind of an experiment, which
is why it's under the Max label. Some dig it, some don't, no harm, no foul.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>Supreme Power is great too. The problem with Amazing Spider-man,
>possibly due to the nature of the book, is it's so often unambitious.

I always try to break up criticism into fair and unfair, productive and
counter-productive, and I think that's a fair criticism. When I came onto the
book, it had been angst ridden and kind of a downer for so long that one of the
things I wanted to do was make it a fun book, the kind of book you feel good
about reading.

Of course, the trouble with this is that it necessitates less ambitious stories
because you only get the big stories by putting your character up a tree and
throwing really big rocks at him.

Having said that, though, I think I'm nearing the limit of what I can handle on
primarily fun stories...I think it's about time to start throwing rocks at him
again.

We all come up snake-eyes sooner or later, y'know....

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>Also, a friend of mine has refused to read comics for years. I convinced
>her to read the first issue by appealling to her "Babylon 5" fandom, and
>she's hooked. (In fact, she's debating whether to buy the trade
>paperbacks, or hold out for the hardcovers.)

....there's gonna be hardcovers?

One other thing on Supreme Power...if you remember the original miniseries that
Mark did, he had Hyperion undertaking a fairly massive endeavor to try and set
the world to rights (as he saw it, at least, which put him at odds with
others). Mark took kind of a plot oriented approach to getting him to that
point.

Without tipping my hand too much...I wanted to try a different way of getting
someone to a point like that. He's going to make some very bad decisions down
the road, but I want that road to be absolutely plausible and understandable.
If you know where Hyperion came from, and what he has gone though, you come
away with full understanding of why he might do what he might do. I want
readers to be able to go deeper inside Hyperion's mind than in any other book,
to have an intimate familiarity with his background and how it will affect his
actions.

Ironically, in so doing, I made a decision early on not to do any interior
dialogue or monologue. You never hear his thoughts, ever. (The one sort-of
exception I made was when he dives into the water looking for his folks, and
you hear "mom? dad?" and it could be a thought or spoken.) In this way, you
keep what he's really thinking a mystery...and that makes him a bit more
ominous, I think. You don't really know how much he knows, or suspects, of
what's going on around him, and how he's being used.

It's a challenging book to write, but I'm really quite happy with the result.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>Isn't Chicago GOOD enough to be attacked by Doc Destructo to be turned into
>gold?
>
>No, of course not. What was I thinking, obviously the higher-ups at Marvel
>in association with the Masons, under leadership of the UN, getting their
>marching orders from the Illuminatti, in thrall to their Martian alien
>pupper masters have deem only blessed New York City is *worthy* of being
>stomped on by international, interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic, or
>even interdimensional archvillains!

(considers this for a moment)

Yeah, that's about right.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>> ...there's gonna be hardcovers?
>
>Amazon.com says the first is due in November.

....it's on Amazon.com...?

I've GOT to start going to staff meetings.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>> ...there's gonna be hardcovers?
>
>Amazon.com says the first is due in November.

Where? I just checked, and couldn't find anything.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)

>http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y3CA21CE6
>
>I didn't have any trouble finding it. Did a search for "Supreme Power"
>in Books and it popped right up.
>

Hunh...for some reason, it didn't show up when I did the same, but the link
works. It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy....


jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd.,
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine
and don't send me story ideas)