Poor old CrossGen. I know it's only been a few weeks since I last wrote about them, but the company is continuing to rack up the column inches. In a nutshell, not much has changed - that elusive second injection of capital is apparently just around the corner.

Meanwhile, CrossGen is restructuring. That presumably means one of two things: either it has an interested investor who's made some demands as a condition for putting in money, or the management are trying to make the company look more attractive in the hope that somebody will come along.

As I write this, there's not been much in the way of official statements from CrossGen. I did check the website, but it's not desperately informative on the subject. I'm tempted to suggest that this was not the time to put that advert on the front page for limited edition George Perez prints - "Two months only! Never to be available again!" Regardless, there are plenty of very good reasons why CrossGen wouldn't want to get drawn on these things publicly just yet.

'The argument is that the system promotes camaraderie and teamwork.' But the reports are that CrossGen's restructuring is pretty drastic. It has put its creative staff on a page rate and given them permission to seek work from other companies. This effectively sounds the death knell for CrossGen's unique studio set-up, whereby creators were kept on staff as salaried employees and were expected to work from CrossGen's Florida offices.

It's an approach that was always met with a certain degree of scepticism. The idea of creators coming into work every day and having an office in the publisher's building is, to say the least, alien to the comics world. On any view it was a bold experiment. Now that it's been abandoned, have the sceptics been proved right?

Well, not necessarily. After all, CrossGen's immediate problem is an acute cash shortfall. Going back to the old fashioned way of doing things is an obvious method of rapid cost-cutting and freeing up some much needed money. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the experiment failed. It may simply mean that, because of its wider financial problems, CrossGen was not in a position to keep the experiment going.

As is well documented, CrossGen supremo Marc Alessi was always a big supporter of this way of working. No doubt he will be bitterly disappointed that it's had to be abandoned. Alessi always argued that this was a system that had worked well in the software industry where he'd made his fortune. The argument is basically that it promotes camaraderie and teamwork. Of course, what works for one industry won't necessarily work for another - but there's no denying that it's the dominant way of doing business in plenty of other industries. It must have something going for it. It's not an idea to be dismissed out of hand.

'CrossGen has set out to carve itself a niche in the market.' The usual objection is that it's not a system conducive to creators, who are mercurial types not best suited to office life. The office team may be all very well if, like Alessi's previous company, you're working on an early version of Java. It's another thing entirely for creative types - it's just not that sort of job. Writers do not get up, go to work, write stories from nine till five and then head home again. Or at least, so goes the argument.

However, it depends what sort of work you're trying to create. Certainly the CrossGen way of doing things was never going to be for everyone; that much is common sense. And there remains a certain perception of creators as people with unique, distinctive personal message and insight to convey. There are plenty of creators whose work is so uniquely personal and distinctive that it's almost impossible to imagine them thriving in a studio environment. It's hard, to put it mildly, to imagine people like Peter Bagge or Garth Ennis working well in that sort of environment. (Especially considering Bagge's take on a cut-price version in SWEATSHOP.)

But not everyone is that sort of creator, and not everyone wants to be. Nor is everyone that sort of publisher. It's not like CrossGen has ever held itself out as competing in the same territory as Fantagraphics or SLG. From all appearances, it wants to publish mainstream entertainment, and has set out to carve itself a niche in the market by occupying various genres that have a populist audience in other media but were largely neglected in comics.

And there's nothing wrong with that, of course. There's a spectrum from high art to pure entertainment, and any healthy medium will have plenty of people at the entertainment end of the spectrum. CrossGen's way of working isn't all that divorced from systems that have done alright in other media - many US sitcoms have been written by committee for years, with some very good ones being produced along the way.

'It's nice in theory, but the world just doesn't work that way.' Unless you're a writer/artist, comics are a collaborative medium. That's especially so in the case of mainstream work-for-hire comics, where the editorial influence is much stronger. And if you're going to produce a comic by collaboration, you would have thought there were fairly obvious advantages to be gained from all being in the same room. If anything, surely comics are rather unusual in adopting an approach where the creators can be scattered halfway around the world. You do get bands like the Postal Service where the collaborators scarcely meet, but it's hardly the orthodox way of doing things.

Besides, when you were a kid, didn't you envisage the Marvel and DC offices as being full of writers and artists, making actual comics? Basically, something rather similar to CrossGen? I know I did. Of course, I was young and innocent back then.

And of course, there are tremendous advantages for creators in the regular pay cheque, compared to the uncertainty of freelancing. (Well, up until the company runs out of money, anyway.) It's all very well to say that proper artists and writers should bite the bullet and strike out on their own, but this is effectively the same as saying that everyone should quit their jobs and set up in business for themselves. It's nice in theory, but the world just doesn't work that way. The commercial risks of freelancing or, worse, self-publishing aren't for everyone, and not all the good creators will be risk takers by inclination.

As with so many things about the comics industry, perhaps CrossGen's working practices are only really unusual because we're comparing them to the rest of the comics industry, as opposed to the rest of the planet. You wouldn't want the entire medium to be run that way, but it's a little surprising that the set-up should seem quite so off the wall.

Then again, studio operations such as Udon or Archangel Studios have done alright with a more collective approach to their work. This is a somewhat less drastic version of the idea, but it's along similar lines. Perhaps CrossGen's basic idea wasn't unreasonable at all. For all that it was dismissed as a misguided import from another industry, chances are that if we were creating the comics industry from scratch, something along the lines of that system would emerge. As with so much of CrossGen's business, it might be a perfectly good idea that was pushed too far too soon.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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