It is good to see things returning to normal. And there is no more certain sign of normalcy than Kurt Busiek dragging himself out of his sickbed for the monthly ritual explanation of why ASTRO CITY is late. This is a pleasing sign that our normal sense of proportion is reasserting itself. Evidently the healing process is well advanced.

Kurt has every right to be annoyed, not least because he has explained on many occasions before the exceptionally good health reasons behind his slow progress on that title. It is fair enough for regular readers to ask when the next issue might be coming, but it is another thing altogether to start whining about his laziness when even the most cursory fact-checking exercise would have turned up the explanation. And Kurt always seems like such a nice chap, too.

On the other hand, I've seen a few people siding with Kurt by reciting the well-worn mantra that creators should be as late as they want, in the name of Art. This is a rather popular viewpoint among those segments of fandom that like to take inordinate pride in not being fanboys.

It is, however, totally wrong. Here is why.

First, a key point: "late" and "slow" are not the same thing. A late book has missed its scheduled shipping date. A slow book has just taken the creator an inordinately long time to finish. A twenty-two-page pamphlet comic solicited and duly shipped on a six monthly schedule would be awfully slow, but it wouldn't be late.

Slowness in itself does not cause lateness. What causes lateness is when a book is solicited on a monthly schedule even though there is no realistic prospect of the creators finishing it on that schedule. It is dangerous to point to any examples because, without knowing the behind-the-scenes stories, it's impossible to know which books are culpably late and which have merely had a run of terrible luck. But it would be fair to say that there came a point where the publishers of DANGER GIRL, BATTLECHASERS and - a year ago - DAREDEVIL realised that this "schedule" thing just wasn't working out.

Excessive delays cause the audience to lose interest. Okay, but who cares? So the book's late and somebody screwed up. At the end of the day we still get the story; what's the big deal?

Well, it matters for artistic reasons. There are pacing issues in monthly serialisation. (Or bimonthly, or fortnightly, or whatever.) A serialised story has to be paced in terms of time, not just in terms of page count. Excessive delays are likely to lead to the audience losing interest or quite possibly forgetting the plot altogether. Some of these people have lives, you know. You can't expect them to remember every little plot detail they read when you last put an issue out under the Clinton administration.

As an aside, this is also a problem with the ultra-fashionable idea of collecting every storyline in trade paperback form: the pacing is different. There are plenty of stories out there failing to hit the right pacing to work in both formats - whether by recapping every month in a way that will be grindingly repetitive in the reprint, or by completely losing sight of the monthly pacing, and dragging out a relatively slight idea for the right number of pages but over way too much time. 200 pages may seem like a nice sensible length for your story, but in serial form it'll take eight months. At that pace, it can often start to seem like you're watching a video on freeze frame advance.

Anyhow, really long delays don't help the story - certainly not if the story was written with monthly pacing in mind. BATTLECHASERS and DANGER GIRL seem to be losing their audience. Or take that David Mack DAREDEVIL storyline - five "monthly" issues, dated December 1999 to March 2001, around three times longer than it was meant to take. The reasons for the delay may have been perfectly good one in all these cases - I don't know. But it didn't do any of the stories any favours.

And it doesn't do sales any good in the long run, either. After all, if the reader's lost interest or simply forgotten that the title exists, chances are he won't be so keen to buy the book. But there's more to it than that.

The customer does not buy an issue to read one chapter in isolation. Here is the traditional way of looking at the customer's position, used regularly in excuses. The customer comes along, pays his money and walks off with his story. The transaction is complete. The customer can therefore piss off until such time as the creator chooses to publish Chapter Two. He's got what he paid for, and that's the deal.

This analysis has the attraction of simplicity. But so did the Flat Earth theory.

The flaw in the logic is that it assumes that the individual issue is a single item, complete in itself. Which is generally bollocks. It's part of a serialised story. The customer did not buy it because he fancied reading one chapter in isolation. Quite likely, he was at least thinking of buying the rest of the story too. He is buying something incomplete. If he likes it, he will probably want to buy the rest.

And the poor beleaguered customer has every reason to expect that he will be able to do so. The individual issue has, after all, been marketed and promoted as part of a series. The next issue will be coming. Not only that, it will be coming next month. Thus comforted, the customer takes out his money and hands it over. On the implied promise that - barring unforeseen circumstances or perhaps cancellation due to low sales - the next chapter will be coming along within a reasonable period of time.

Alas, the poor dim-witted customer believes that when publishers say "monthly" they mean it. And that when a story is promoted as Part 1 of 5, he will be able to buy not only Part 2, but (snicker) Parts 3, 4 and 5 as well. Before he dies.

But the customer is in the right. The book wasn't sold to him as a self-contained object. It was marketed to him as a chapter in a serial. Of course he's entitled to complain when the next chapter never turns up. It's like ordering a bed and then discovering that the mattress won't be along for eight months because the shop owner is a perfectionist and wants to hand carve all the springs. That's very nice of him, but he might have thought to mention it before I paid him for the frame. Not only is it basic professionalism, it's basic ethics. Don't market something as a monthly title unless you at least have a reasonable expectation that you can achieve the schedule. It's not exactly brain surgery.

For an industry that claims it wants to be taken seriously, it won't do. One of the things that puts me off a lot of indie titles is the total uncertainty as to when, not to say if, the next chapter will be published. So when a book does market itself as a having a regular schedule, then damn it, I expect a reasonable effort to stick to it, because it's a selling point. That doesn't mean you don't hire slow creators, but it does mean giving them a sensible amount of lead-in time. And I certainly don't want to hear of creators soliciting the first half of a miniseries and then not finishing it because the muse has deserted them. I'll even allow slippage of a week or two here and there; it's when you have monthly titles running a month late that I get annoyed.

Art for art's sake is all very well, but the moment you start charging people for admission, it stops being the sole consideration. The audience is entitled to expect a bit of professionalism from the comics industry. Readers don't expect creators and publishers to act like a bunch of amateurs who'll get around to publishing the books when they're good and ready, while expecting us to be grateful that they could be bothered doing it at all - even after they got us to pay for the earlier chapters and encouraged us to pre-order the remaining ones. For an industry that claims it wants to grow up and be taken seriously, it won't do. The hardcore audience may be willing to be jerked around by books published months overdue for no adequately explained reason, but don't expect anyone else to put up with it.

We are entitled to expect that a book will come out more or less on time. We are certainly entitled to expect that reasonable efforts will be made to achieve that. Often there will be perfectly good reasons why it can't be done; it would at least be politic to tell the readers what they are. ("Ill health" would do just fine. Any more is none of our business.) It's not exactly the bill of rights, I know. But then I'm really not asking for much, am I?

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

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.