Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Nextwave Ending

This is probably already spread all over all of the comic book news services, but I'm posting it here anyway. According to Warren Ellis, his Marvel comic, Nextwave, will end with issue #12. He says:

"We were on such a roll with NEXTWAVE that I was actually into the
idea of doing a second year, which is highly unusual for me and
work-for-hire properties. So Marvel sat down and looked at the numbers,
as they wanted to do a second year too.

What they found was that, at our current sales levels, they could afford
for me to write it, but not for Stuart to draw it. Stuart, as a
Marvel-exclusive artist, commands a fee commensurate with his
astonishing talent. I'm WFH-exclusive too, but they just send me
whisky and loose women and I'm fine. So, basically, I could continue
to write NEXTWAVE, but we'd need to find another artist. This, to me,
was just wrong. I mean, Stuart would obviously be given a far better
job that had actual readers attached to it, but it still seemed a bit like
the numbers were conspiring to fire him for doing his job too well.
Everyone at Marvel pitched in to try and make it work, but the
numbers were just against us.

So NEXTWAVE #12 will be the final issue of the ongoing series.

(To clear up a common misconception: NEXTWAVE was always
pitched as an ongoing series. However, my original intent was to
do 12 and then pass it on to someone else. This got garbled,
somewhere down the chain of communication, and so the first
issue or two got solicited as "part xxx of 12".)

However. The numbers game changes when you posit things in
terms of limited series.

NEXTWAVE #12 will be the last issue of the ongoing series: but
there will be more NEXTWAVE to come, presented as a sequence
of limited series.

This was all worked out some months ago, so I had plenty of time
to work the final NEXTWAVE sequence into a conclusion of sorts.
#11 even features a twelve-page spread that you'll have to buy six
copies of the comic to assemble into its full splendour. Everyone
wishes I'd thought of that eight or nine months ago.

That was the news. Return to your duties."

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