So Marvel's finally got NEW X-MEN running on time again. Aren't you glad? Isn't it nice to be able to head on over to the comic shop and see it on the shelves, just when Marvel promised? Won't you be happy to race home, crack the cover, and see Igor Kordey's rushed art job, well below what he's capable of doing, so that you could have that comic on time? When the trade comes out and those pages are right next to Frank Quitely's painstaking, carefully rendered visuals, won't he look wonderful for it?

No, no, and no. As of #124, the book is now on time; very good. But I aim to convince you that this is far from the most important thing when it comes to comics publishing, and not for the usual reasons.

By way of introduction, let me say that I'm not all that hardcore a comics fan. My area of expertise is more in the way of videogames, which, during my comics career, I've devoted more time to playing and writing about than my actual studies. I feel qualified to discuss lateness because it's also a serious problem in that industry. The storied saga of Dallas-based developer Ion Storm's problems with getting a game done in under three years was reported in more than a few mainstream outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, and as often as not developers will simply give "when it's done" for a release date.

'Won't you be happy to see rushed art, so you could have the comic on time?' Another company famous for its inability to meet ship date after ship date is Working Designs, which doesn't even produce any original product of its own. Instead, the Working Designs people license Japanese games - usually role-playing or shoot-em-up titles - and localise them for American release.

Somehow this process takes them an average of two years per game, whereas turnaround time for a translation project at much larger studios - Sony Computer Entertainment America, for example - is six months or less. In one particularly jaw-dropping case, a Sega Saturn game they announced before that system's launch ended up being delayed for so long that it had the distinction of being the very last title ever released for the console.

In spite of this, Working Designs has a thriving fanbase that will eagerly snap up whatever they decide to put on the market. The reason is simple, and it lies in the motto of its CEO: "Delays are temporary. Mediocrity is forever".

You'd better not hold your breath for a Working Designs game, but when it finally arrives on the shelf, you can buy it confident in the knowledge that what you are purchasing has been exhaustively cared for, worked on, and polished to within an inch of its life.

Well, all right, you may be saying. But that doesn't give them, and it doesn't give comics creators, the right to fart around doing whatever they like for however long they like. And if you were arguing that from a certain standpoint, I might agree. We shouldn't coddle them just because they are 'artists' and you shouldn't rush 'art'.

''Delays are temporary. Mediocrity is forever.'' No, we should coddle them because, in the end, they deliver a better product. Not always, of course. The Ion Storm game DAIKATANA was delayed again and again over the course of two years, and it still came out as crap. ORIGIN - one of the few comic books I am able to buy locally in my small, rural Mississippi town - has been merely okay for all its lateness. But there's lateness in the service of getting it done right, and lateness as a way of buying time in order to desperately try to fix obvious flaws, and the latter is not the sort of lateness I'm discussing here.

What I mean is the kind of lateness that's caused X-FORCE to slip a few times in the release schedule, but has also allowed Mike Allred to work at his own pace for all but one issue since the series' beginning. (And that one issue, mind, was presumably only because Marvel felt that the delays had to be addressed.) The resulting work benefited Allred, allowing him to have his work represented in the best possible way. It also benefited the reader, who could read as high-quality a work as the creators could produce. Most important of all, it benefited Marvel, which could have a well-crafted, consistently drawn story for future republication, where it can make money long after Allred's page-rate has been paid.

But wait. Allred is being paid a page-rate and not "royalties" because he's working one issue at a time, not on a book. It's in the "future republication" that the stickiest part of the issue comes in, because a serialised comic cannot be serialised without a vast support mechanism, and part of that mechanism is monthly (or bi-monthly, or quarterly) deadlines. A comic isn't like a game; I can pay full price for a yearlong subscription to a comic, and I can pay full price to pre-order a game before its release, but only in the former case do I not get what I paid for when a series misses shipments.

'Lateness has allowed Mike Allred to work on X-FORCE at his own pace.' Now, if it were that simple, then clearly the thing to do would be to focus on timeliness above all. Not long ago it was this way, and it barely mattered at all whether one single issue among dozens was below par; there'd be another one next month, and the "current" would be forgotten in the vast throng of back issues that populate every shop that's been in business for over a year. But now, collection of these serials with an eye toward permanence is becoming fashionable. And permanence is ultimately the reason why lateness is broadly irrelevant.

Douglas Adams was a legendary procrastinator, consistently failing to meet deadlines. Reading the HITCHHIKERS trilogy for the first time in 1991, I was not aware of this. Nor would I have cared, had I known. The X-MEN movie came out two summers ago, only seven years after I'd first read of plans to make a feature film in the letters column of UNCANNY #300. It won't matter to anyone who rents and enjoys the DVD in the future.

To be sure, tardiness is not a prerequisite for quality. My focus on the x-titles here ignores the slew of quality work that's printed month after month, right on time. But that's not my point.

My point is this. Get yourself a copy of any late issue of NEW X-MEN (and try to remember if you can, without looking it up, the number of weeks between its solicitation date and its release), and place it side by side with one of the filler issues. Ask yourself which irks you more right now, at this moment: The temporary delay? Or the permanent mediocrity?

Nich Maragos is a San Francisco-based videogame journalist for 1UP.com.

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