The comics industry can be a pessimistic place at times. What with hugely overextended franchises, rapid cancellations, pretty much the entire North American industry remaining entirely marginalised even in its home country, and the increasingly shameless money-grabbing by major publishers, it's easy to become cynical. (In that vein, I particularly enjoyed Marvel going out of its way to inform us that the sold-out AVENGERS #500 is not going to be available for re-order. Don't despair, though, because the Director's Cut version is out in a fortnight, and it's only five dollars!)

In amongst all that negativity, however, every month there is a little optimism. In Previews each month, in amongst the long-running titles and the high-profile new launches, there will always be fair number of new titles that don't have a hope in hell. The ones with minor (or worse, entirely new) characters, by creators you've never heard of, in a genre that's never sold, with no promotion beyond a couple of largely unnoticed interviews that the writer arranged himself. Unloved, unpromoted and largely ignored, their first issues are nonetheless shoved out into a marketplace that couldn't care less.

'These are books which have no chance of being a hit.' These are books that, by any rational standard, have no chance whatsoever of being a hit. Frankly, they'll be doing well to make it to issue #12. But every month they keep coming - titles released in the cheerfully optimistic hope that maybe this time things will be different. Maybe this time a book will buck the trends, grab an audience, grow by word of mouth and actually succeed.

Of course, it's understandable why indie publishers put out this kind of book. For one thing, it's not like they have surefire hits to fall back on. For another, putting out commercially unpromising material in the face of mass indifference is almost the raison d'etre for some of these guys. And with the audiences they play to, and the level of sales they're prepared to accept, the idea of finding an audience and settling to a tolerable level of sales isn't wholly unreasonable.

Crusading for the seemingly hopeless is one of those things that indie publishers do. Fair enough.

But then we get to the bigger publishers. And they do it too - churning out new titles and obscure miniseries that surely don't have a hope in hell. Occasionally one of these will be an oddball artistic project that really is being published for its artistic merit. Projects like that can be worth doing because they're good for the corporate image. I doubt that even the biggest supporters of UNSTABLE MOLECULES within Marvel seriously expected it to tear up the charts.

That accounts for a few suicidal launches. But by no means all. Marvel and DC's superhero imprints continue to splurge out titles that clearly aren't aiming for Eisners and don't have any designs on cult status. These are books that seemingly want to be proper, old-fashioned hits, yet obviously have little or not hope of achieving it. Why does somebody decide that a new IRON FIST series could be a winner this time round? What makes DC take a flyer on a book like MONOLITH, despite the fairly monumental odds against it succeeding?

'Why does somebody decide IRON FIST could be a winner this time round?' After all, this isn't the record industry. The economics for them are rather different. Sign a bunch of new acts. Resign yourself to losing money on the vast majority. One will turn out to be a hit and will pay for all the other ones. Comics - or superhero comics, at least - don't seem to work that way. It's been years since a title launched that was a truly unexpected hit, or that clawed its way up from a low-selling start.

It really does seem as if many of these books are dumped on the marketplace on the basis of a glassy-eyed optimism that this time things are going to be different. Many, in fact, feature existing characters with a proven track record of failure. Both major publishers have what amounts to an informal list of well-known but cancelled characters whom they feel compelled to keep bringing back despite the fact that not many people care when they do. Books like NAMOR and MARTIAN MANHUNTER keep coming back every few years, less due to public demand than because of a vague feeling that these characters somehow ought to have their own titles - whether anyone wants to read them or not.

At least those characters tend to have a few hardcore fans, though. Completely new books don't even have that benefit. They have to rely on whatever publicity they can gather and whatever name value their creators have. Often - irrespective of the quality of the actual work - that name value is virtually nil. The result is yet another rapidly cancelled book.

A good example of this is GUARDIANS. Marvel shipped the first issue of this series in July. It's got no recognisable characters, and the creative team of Marc Sumerak and Casey Jones. Jones is a somewhat recognisable name, but not the sort of artist who can sell a title on his own. Marc Sumerak was, until recently, a Marvel assistant editor and has virtually no track record as a writer. Now, in fact, the book's pretty good. However, it's also been axed with issue #5. A similar fate befell STARJAMMERS, featuring an artist you've never heard of, a writer you'll know only if you read genre fiction, and a bunch of minor characters stripped of everything that connected them to the X-Men (the only thing that made them remotely marketable in the first place). Axed with issue #6, before the second issue even hit the stands.

To be fair, STARJAMMERS is crap. But GUARDIANS isn't bad at all, and it deserves better.

'Do we just give up on trying to launch new books altogether?' So where does this take us? Do we just give up on trying to launch new books altogether? Well, no - for one thing, it's entirely possible for many of these properties to succeed with a sufficiently big-name creator attached. Jim Lee could sell pretty much anything, for example. CLOAK & DAGGER would be up there in the top five if Lee announced it as his next major project. Hell, SPACE TAXI would be up there in the same situation.

But if you don't have a big name attached, where do you go then? Well, clearly the current approach - publish it anyway and pray for a miracle - isn't working. So what else might work?

Back in the good old days, new characters used to turn up somewhere as guest stars before launching in their own titles. In these more creator-driven times, and with everything keeping an eye on the trade paperback format, that may not hold up so well. There's always the back-up strip, a device that is hugely underused these days. That's a bit risky, of course, because either you have to raise the page count (and the price) or slash the lead story to make room for it. Either way, a lot of readers will complain. Besides, I'm not convinced it actually works - Marvel used it to trail CALL OF DUTY, and that book sank without trace almost immediately. Then again, DC have been toying with it in the Batman books, so maybe it's not completely dead just yet. If the new title has a legitimate claim to being related to the lead story, it may work.

The approach taken by RUNAWAYS and SLEEPER may be closer to the mark, though - cancelling the book with a view to relaunching it in the near future. The difficulty here is that RUNAWAYS in particular still bears the stigma of being a title that was low-selling, axed, and taken away for retooling. It remains to be seen whether the book's general good reviews can create a buzz that gets round that.

It may be that the best approach is simply not to launch these sorts of titles as ongoing books at all - it practically dooms them to swift cancellation and a perception of failure. Instead, launch them as miniseries. Run the first arc, and if there's enough demand, use that buzz to give a proper launch to the ongoing title. This seems to be effectively how Marvel is running its affairs internally, with books being commissioned for the first arc only, and renewed if initial sales justify it. That results in an awful lot of books, some of them well-received, being axed at an early stage. Why not just run it as a mini in the first place, and launch an ongoing title off the back of that if it works out? Then you'll have an actual audience, word of mouth, good reviews to point to, and even the possibility of sticking out a quick trade paperback or digest before the next arc - sorry, the first issue - ships.

The instinctual reaction to that is to say, "But miniseries don't sell". Well, no, they don't, that's true. They sell appallingly. But we're talking here about the sort of books that have virtually no prospect of success as ongoing titles anyway. They're hardly going to do much worse this way. The first arc is there to test the waters and grab attention, on this model. It's not there to be a huge seller in its own right. And hell, it worked for LUCIFER.

It's a thought, anyway. At the very least, it's got to be an improvement on the current model, where new titles are launched like lemmings over a cliff. This way, at least they get to go out with a little more dignity.

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

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