197. Prog Packs

September 2009: Absent from the story as recounted here has been the tale of how 2009 was a very odd time to be an American 2000 AD reader. It all worked out for the best, as Rebellion used the early, experimental launch of the Clickwheel service (which I'm still using) to test the waters for the comic's online delivery, but for several nebulous months, American readers who couldn't afford the upfront cost to splash out for a subscription had a choice about reading. They could either get digital progs about two weeks after UK subscribers got their copies in the post, or they could continue relying on Diamond Distributors to send copies to their comic book store. That's the path that I chose, and it did not work out so incredibly well.

But before we step back, I do want to acknowledge that while there were growing pains, 2000 AD is, today, flatly and unquestionably the industry leader in same-day digital comics. This is especially notable because, last week, when Marvel Comics launched a huge promotion for several hundred free back issues on the comiXology platform, demand was so high that it crashed their servers. The American publishers do not yet allow people who "purchase" their comics to actually own them; rather, people rent them and can read them on a distant server. I don't know whether the comiXology crash was merely a few hours' inconvenience or the digital equivalent of a house fire, but people sure did act like it was the end of the world. Just a couple of days later, a service called J-Manga announced that it was shuttering. As Comic Book Resources reported on March 14, "After May 30, members no longer will be able to view the titles they’ve purchased." This would never have happened with the Galaxy's Greatest, because here, readers buy a comic, and download it, and keep it. I'm actually looking forward to getting to 2011 in this story, when I can start cropping images without laying old progs down on a flatbed and scanning them and the darn things never, ever lining up quite right. I'm a little incompetent in that regard.

And, as we step back, I'd like to include one little bit of background to my knowledge base of 2000 AD in America that I may never have clarified: for almost a decade, I "worked" part-time (just a few hours a week) at the very best comic book store in the United States, where I had a regular order for 2000 AD for twenty years (1992-2011). I don't claim expert and exclusive knowledge into the inner workings of what went on between publisher, distributor, and retailer, but I am absolutely hotdamned certain that the endless delivery problems were not caused on the retailer level. Nor do I believe in any fashion that Rebellion - or for that matter Titan Books, who were also often victims of very late deliveries of product that I'd ordered - were incompetent enough to keep fumbling the shipments of their product. But I was present at that retailer for many, many occasions where the checkins of what was in the boxes from the distributor turned up missing titles, damaged goods, and, more than once, half-eaten snack foods crumbled and dropped atop the comic books.

It is not the retailer's fault when the packing list says that there should be fifteen copies of a comic book in the box and there are only twelve. It is not the retailer's fault when the box was packed so poorly that several pounds of heavy hardbacks have toppled over and ripped the cover of a flimsy magazine. It is not the retailer's fault when the box is full of orange dust and the remnants of a Frito-Lay's Cheeto. And it is certainly not the retailer's fault when the distributor posts a PDF on their website for all the world to see every Monday, claiming that two days from now, a certain product should be in stores. Call it "issue 20" for argument's sake. Of course, we're still waiting for "issue 19." Wednesday comes, and neither issue is in the box. The following week, "issue 19" might show up, but this sheer, agonizing ongoing incompetence is solely and exclusively down to the distributor. They're called Diamond, and any good employee with a head on his shoulders at that company can assuredly count fourteen dingbats and goons among his fellows. (This is why I'll decline to name the shop in question here, although my praise of it is no great secret. Business is tough enough without the Cheetos crunchers in the warehouse wanting a little retribution.)

Now, it certainly might have been true, particularly in the 1990s when 2000 AD was published by Fleetway, that there were occasions when the publisher simply didn't ship enough comics to America to fill the distributors' orders. That was the explanation provided for occasional shortages, but it beggars belief that this could in any way be the publisher's fault. Why on Earth would Fleetway, and later Rebellion, when asked for two thousand copies, only send 1800? No, the system was flawed on the distributor's end: Diamond would simply not order enough.

But when there was a shortage, what Diamond would apparently do, then, was first make sure that every shop that ordered multiple copies for their customers got at least one of them. Since, for a couple of years or so, I was the only customer at this shop that read 2000 AD (for shame!), I'd get the short end of the stick when this happened. I didn't want to deal with it any longer, so I ordered two copies a month and found homes for the second copies. And this ensured that I did receive one of every issue, although hiccups sadly continued for quite some time. When I finally cut down to just one copy a month toward the end of 2008, I then got the awful "you've been shorted" news three times. Progs 1613 (November), 1627 (March) and 1634 (May) did not arrive at either my comic shop or my "backup," Criminal Records in Atlanta, which used to order one copy of each for their shelves. That's right, the same issues didn't show up at two different stores. And then came the summer of the polybags, which meant that a shortage didn't mean you missed a single issue; it meant that you missed FOUR.


Now, I chalked up the change from twice-monthly shipping of two issues every other Wednesday to once-monthly shipping of four or five issues in a bag to a desire to repair Diamond's decade-plus of shipping incompetence, but this was said to not be entirely true. Earlier in 2009, Diamond made the sensible decision to quit carrying guaranteed-unprofitable items. We didn't like it, but we understood it. For many years, the distributor would pretty much stock and ship anything that looked like it might appeal to geeks. This resulted in a massive monthly catalog for retailers to make their regular preorders. For many, this was a time-consuming chore, because most retailers stick with ordering the tried-and-true big sellers from Marvel and DC and Dark Horse. The big change came in the summer, and I believe that it came in two tiers: if orders for a product failed to meet a higher minimum threshold, then Diamond would not purchase the product from the publisher. If the publisher couldn't reach that higher minimum threshold across the line, then the publisher got dropped. You could probably Google for more information and specifics about this.

Since 2000 AD was right on the bubble, Diamond came up with an idea to keep it profitable: polybag several issues and treat four/five of them as a single monthly product. That way, it would be quicker to handle, I guess, and less easy to lose? It made internal inventory easier? Computer records simpler? Whatever; it was said to work for them, except that it did not for us.

The wheels went off instantly. In the July 2009 issue of Previews (in stores in June), Diamond solicited "2000 AD September Pack," with issues 1651-1655. This, as its name implies, should have been in shops sometime in September. Sadly, Diamond doesn't keep public archives that far back, but I can say with about 99% certainty that these issues were listed on the "arriving this week" announcement PDF in late October. So they're already thirty days behind. And yet they were not shipped (to Atlanta) on the date promised. The next four weeks went by. No progs. On Monday, November 23, 2009, the "2000 AD October Pack" (1656-59) was listed as arriving in shops 11/25/09. On that day, Atlanta shops received the "September Pack" of 1651-55, two months late. The "October Pack" arrived on December 16.

And it was weirder and weirder depending on where you lived. I was in regular correspondence with several fans and retailers around the country at the time, researching this problem. While neither my shop nor Criminal had received progs 1613, 1627, or 1634, shops in other cities did. In Boston, where I had visited earlier in the summer, I found 1613 at Million Year Picnic and 1627 at Hub Comics. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the prog packs were coming four weeks late, and not eight like in Atlanta. I still don't have a hard copy of 1634; it is the first issue since 1208 that I don't own a physical copy.

But there are more holes to come. There's the "May 2010 Prog Pack" of issues 1682-1686. That never arrived in Georgia stores at all. Of course, by then, I'd found a solution. Starting with Prog 2010, I started buying the comic from Clickwheel regularly, and if the hard copies arrived, I treated them like extras. I was aggravated - hell, 1685 should be framed - and, eventually, I got tired of the aggravation. Later in 2011, I sent word that I was, with regrets, finally ending my subscriptions entirely. The economy had stunk for ages and money was tight anyway, and the comic shop was an awfully long drive away. I saved a lot of money just sticking with my nice weekly purchase. It's available about 6 am every Wednesday morning, and I can read it while I eat breakfast.

Pictured up above to break this wall of text is Lucifer from Necrophim by Tony Lee and Lee Carter. It's by leagues the best of Tony Lee's stories for 2000 AD, even if you can't help but wish that the protagonist Uriel would have come up with a slightly less convoluted plan to destroy Lucifer and rule Hell, one that doesn't involve telling slightly different stories to eight other characters and keeping them at odds with each other. I seem to have enjoyed Necrophim, which was published as one 26-part serial across three stories (1628-1723), more than many readers. The second chunk of this complex serial was published during this awful period with the two-month delays and it reads much, much better without all the chaos and confusion that surrounded delivery of the comic at this time.

Re-emphasizing again, for anybody Googling through: you do not need to worry about this nonsense these days. Just buy the comic online from the shop for your laptop or your iPad or similar device every Wednesday. There are no problems with it at all anymore, and you can collect truckloads of back issues for your hard drive. Same day delivery: it just makes sense!

Next time... well, it'll be a few weeks. Time for another short break from all these walls of text and scanning to talk about some recent collections and stories over at my Bookshelf blog. Thrillpowered Thursday will be back on April 18! Tell your friends!

188. Locked Up

September 2008: Simon Parr, a long-serving production and design droid, contributes this issue's cover, which highlights a very controversial serial called Stalag 666. The serial is written by Tony Lee, and it's his first work for the House of Tharg, and it's drawn by Jon Davis-Hunt, who had previously provided the excellent artwork for Tempest in the Megazine. To say that it gets a mixed reception is the understatement of the year. Stalag 666, overall, is probably the least-loved thing to appear in the comic since Bison about six years previously.

Honestly, it's not quite that bad, but it sure isn't good. In my book, it is nowhere near as awful as its reputation suggests, but it sure does have a lot working against it. I recall that some fans were a little confused about the way that Lee managed to bypass the understood method of getting some work from Tharg by slogging through lots of one-offs and Future Shocks, instead offering up a resume of work for small publishers like Markosia and IDW, for whom he was writing Doctor Who, starting with a mini-series called "The Forgotten." I'd like to think that the ugly incident that overshadows Stalag was motivated more by the ugly jealousy of somebody who'd had no luck getting his submissions accepted than by anybody who thought that they had a beef with the serial's content. I'm talking, of course, about the letter of shit.

So here's what happened: Stalag 666 debuted with a double-length opener in prog 1600 and immediately broke one of the cardinal rules of fiction: don't tell your readers that there's a more interesting story somewhere in your world than the one which you plan to tell them. Instead of an all-action story of war between humanity and the reptilian aliens who dress and act like Nazis - and that's another problem with the serial, the villains are reptilian aliens who dress and act like Nazis - Lee chooses to tell a story about some humans desperate to escape from a cruel prison camp. It suffers from one or two problems common to 2000 AD during this period, like having far too many characters, and confusion as to who the central protagonist actually is, but really, even at the time, it was just mediocre and skippable, and nowhere near as world-ending as its detractors claimed. It actually starts off at least structured very well, with an opener that explains the world and its cruelty, and ends with the character who might be the hero arriving in the camp. After that, however, it's really talky and kind of obvious.

Jon Davis-Hunt, who had earlier been so impressive with Tempest, took a huge stumble backward with this serial. He'd recover - his work on Dandridge is a joy - but stuck drawing eighty-something pages of the same dull people in the same dull place took its toll on him. His camera angles never seem to change, and everything is delivered in the same boring medium shot. The occasional action scenes are lifeless and the very occasional moments of over-the-top gore look completely ridiculous. One reason I was reminded of, and mentioned, Bison earlier comes with an execution at the climax of episode six, where one of the characters is literally sliced in half by a single blow from the main Snake baddie, a geyser of solid burgundy splashing out of him, comically. I was reminded of the "Candlehead Eruptions" that looked so incredibly stupid and ridiculous in the later episodes of Bison.

Though we'll never know for sure what prompted it, beyond hideous mental defect, I'd like to think that, because the timeline seems to work, this amazingly dumb visual at the end of part six was the final straw for one even dumber anonymous reader, somewhere in England. This cretin took the time to find every negative review of the serial that he could, from the formal ones at the old 2000adreview.co.uk, as well as from the official site's forum, copy-n-pasted them into one document, and attached not only a vulgar letter, but also - wait for it - a generous sampling of his own shit, smeared across a page of photocopy paper. This package was duly delivered to one of Mr. Lee's previous addresses in mid-October, and forwarded along to him.

After Lee informed fandom of the event, by way of an entirely-justified rant, the story got picked up by some of the comic gossip sites. Everybody with a brain was duly offended, and the otherwise good reputation that 2000 AD fans have of being sensible, optimistic, level-headed, and encouraging adults got a black eye. It's never good to have a sociopath among your ranks, because it makes everybody look bad. The attendant noise and discussion completely overshadowed more than just the serial, but the comic itself. For a few weeks there, I know that I just wasn't interested in 2000 AD at all, since the incident just sucked the fun out of everything. I read the issues as they arrived, and I have to say that none of it stuck with me. Progs 1602 until about 1610 - bearing in mind that American comic stores were receiving these about a month late - are completely unfamiliar to me. This is why I didn't remember the exact point where Steve Yeowell lost interest in drawing backgrounds in The Red Seas - it comes in episode three of "Old Gods," as night skies become lazy cross-hatching and trees become simple squiggles - and why I wrote a letter to Tharg complaining that I couldn't understand what was happening in Book Three of the ABC Warriors epic "The Volgan War" - sorry, Green Bonce, it wasn't your fault - and why I could not for the life of me remember one dang thing about the fourth Lobster Random story.

In my defense, "The Forget-Me-Knot" - it has the same title as Emma Peel's last episode of The Avengers - really is a dense and confusing story. Lobster Random is among my favorite characters of the decade, but Simon Spurrier seems to have written this story while suffering from a fever. Even allowing for the writer's reputation of being very wordy and full of highwire sci-fi concepts, and the presence of an amnesiac leading man, this is certainly the most complex adventure for the character to date.

Having been rescued from The Vort at the end of that recent "surprise twist" serial a few weeks ago by the reporter Meridien Bless, Lobster has been formally identified. Wanted by police and security forces across the system, he's immediately targeted for execution on sight, but rescued by his old mech-lover Klik, who double-crosses him - she can't help it, she has a double-cross software patch - and delivers him to the two mercenaries who've been pestering him for years. That's when it gets weird. Bless rescues him again and returns him to The Vort, where he hopes that the planet's hallucinogenic rain can restore his lost memory. But then Bless drinks some of the same rain, and Lob starts getting her memories mixed with his.

There's a lot to like about Lob, but with the wild resurrections and heady concepts - there's a big, planet-possessing supernatural force manipulating everything to ensure its freedom - it's somehow lost its fun edge, and that great feeling it previously had that every chapter worked on its own. Once an episodic series in the very best way, it's now the sort of story that demands ongoing reader attention because everything is piling atop each other. It's good - in fact, it's very good and the best thing in the prog - but it's certainly not the Lob that we fell in love with.

It also ends in prog 1610 on a stinking big cliffhanger which everybody involved should resolve to address in 2013. Get on with it, guys!

Next time, we'll try to make some sense of The ABC Warriors, and we'll go as my Wimsey takes me as Ampney Crucis debuts.