Last week, CrossGen proudly announced that they had shipped 100 consecutive issues on time. I thought about holding a street party, but nobody seemed to be interested.

There will be some of you reading this who are regular CrossGen readers. But for the rest of you, be honest. Your reaction to that story was probably along the lines of, "Gee, if only a real publisher could do that." A couple of you may have immediately started looking for the obligatory CrossGen Kool-Aid joke.

There is something vaguely off-putting about CrossGen. And this is odd, because if you can tick down the column, they seem to have their hearts in the right place. Reliable schedule? Check. Expanding beyond the superhero genre? Check. Available to re-order? Check. Solid roster of creators? Check. Creator ownership...? Well, I seem to remember reading that they've got some sort of employee share scheme in place, which is an interesting way of trying to find the middle ground. So let's be generous and give that one a squiggle, somewhere closer to a cross than a tick.

Even so, they're getting a lot of these things right. They have done for two years or so. And yet the impact seems to have been a bit muted. Now, CrossGen would rightly point out that looking at the Top 300 sales chart gives a misleading impression of their performance, because among other things they do so much business on re-orders. But according to Diamond's November figures, CrossGen's highest ordered title was SOJOURN #5, at number 110. Could be a lot worse, but it's not great.

CrossGen's hype doesn't just sound exaggerated, it sounds delusional. And it's hard to credit that reorders could be transfiguring the position that drastically. In September, including re-orders, CrossGen were Diamond's number six publisher that month with a 1.84% dollar market share. The number five publisher, Viz Communications, got 2.41% with noticeably less hype.

Why don't we love CrossGen? They only want to be our friend.

Now admittedly, I don't actually read any CrossGen books. I think I've got two of them somewhere - their first published issue, and a freebie copy of something beginning with an S. You might argue that this makes me unqualified to write about the CrossGen product. And you'd be right - but really, what I'm looking at here is why people aren't reading CrossGen books. That's more to do with the image of the line than the reality.

There are some obvious areas in which CrossGen's PR does them no favours. They seem to suffer from a bizarre sense of their own importance, for one thing. In their latest solicitations, CrossGen tell us with no apparent irony that the coffee-table art book CROSSGEN ILLUSTRATED "may be the most important comics-related book of the year." Even on the offchance that it's true, nobody's going to believe it. Hype that unsubtle is counterproductive. It doesn't just sound exaggerated, it sounds delusional.

There's the unusually corporate nature of the operation. Now, CrossGen have their way of doing things, and hell, they seem to be happy with it. They treat their creators as normal employees and expect them to come into work at the CrossGen offices. There's nothing inherently wrong with this way of doing things. I don't subscribe to the theory that no true creator would want to work in those conditions. Job security has an obvious and legitimate appeal.

But it's not really the image we've come to expect from our comic creators. In an industry (and a fandom) that likes to portray its creators as mavericks pursuing their passion to create, CrossGen's corporate image feels odd. They talk about a "company-wide passion for comic art." I'm sure they mean it - nobody in their right mind goes into comics unless they have passion for it, because god knows there's bugger all money to be had. Still, it sounds like a mission statement more than an emotion. This reaction is dreadfully unfair of us and plays to our knee-jerk anti-corporate bias. But CrossGen could put a better spin on it, to say the least.

The sigils hint at some horribly convoluted never-ending mega-crossover. There's the titles of the books. Dear god, those titles. Even Image at their worst wouldn't have named a book CRUX, let alone SOJOURN. Granted, it shows a bit more imagination than simply naming every book after the lead character, but you'd be hard pressed to come up with less interesting or distinctive names for comics if you tried. SIGIL, for god's sake! Which one is SIGIL? They've all got bloody sigils in them!

At best they sound cryptic and blank, at worst they're an interchangeable mulch that tell you nothing about the actual books. The titles have a horrible "created by committee" sound to them, and the end result is to make them sound like a list of rejected perfume brand names. NEGATION, by Jean-Paul Gaultier. MERIDIAN, by Calvin Klein.

There's the whole "sigil" thing. From what I'm told, there's actually little or no interaction between the various CrossGen titles. Nonetheless, CrossGen are always at pains to stress that their seemingly unrelated titles all part of a shared universe which will be drawn together in the end. This isn't an enticing prospect. The various CrossGen titles are in different genres and set on different planets. It is hard to imagine that the development of some kind of over-reaching storyline is going to benefit any of them. They don't seem like a natural fit together.

The sigil motif is presumably meant to hint at the kind of shared and interconnected universes that did so well as a selling point for Marvel and DC. But those universes are largely composed of books that can co-exist reasonably comfortably. CrossGen's sigils give the impression that the books are going to get themselves mired in some kind of horribly convoluted never-ending mega-crossover in the foreseeable future. This is entirely the wrong signal to be giving.

Then there's the spreading into other genres. In theory, of course, we're all meant to be in favour of this, on the general principle that anything that isn't a superhero book is to be encouraged. CrossGen started off looking like a fantasy line and has diversified to include sci-fi and, with RUSE, a mock Victorian mystery comic. So what's the problem?

The problem is that none of these genres have much of an established audience in comics. Fantasy has been moribund in mainstream comics for years. The superhero audience isn't particularly interested. The arthouse audience isn't particularly interested either, at least if it's staying firmly within the bounds of the genre rules. And the fantasy audience is perfectly well served by a variety of other media, so has no need to come trudging to the local comics shop unless they're being offered something exceptional. It's not an easy sell.

CrossGen's books are nice looking, sturdy and reliable. The Volvo of comics. CrossGen tends to come across as a publisher enthusiastically reviving a bunch of genres rather than doing anything particularly new within those genres (RUSE being one possible exception). Most of the line seems like nice straightforward genre titles. That makes them likely to appeal to existing fans of the genre, rather than winning over agnostics.

You don't go to CrossGen if you want wild experimentation or controversy. What CrossGen's public image suggests is solid, competent, professionally produced genre material that will get the job done without straying too far from the beaten track. Easy to follow, nice-looking books, whose plots have been bolted together with sturdy construction and will hold up in a stiff breeze. A reliable product that will be, without fail, above average. The Volvo of comics. These are all good qualities, but on their own they're also rather boring ones that don't really stir the soul.

CrossGen's unique selling point, which is meant to raise them above that, is presumably supposed to be the sigil gimmick. But the sigil gimmick is a drawback, not a virtue - it hints at unwanted complications rather than intriguing mysteries, and ties together books that sound like they'd be much more comfortable never meeting at all. That leaves CrossGen with their unarguable reliability, but it isn't enough. My bank manager is reliable, but I don't choose to spend my leisure time with him.

This is the key problem. CrossGen seems so boringly nice, so staid and workmanlike. Its employees seem like the sort of people who would sing a corporate song in the morning, and genuinely like it. Ironically, cheerleading about their ability to meet deadlines only compounds this image. It's all very nice that CrossGen is competently run and can achieve such things, but it's only news because everyone else is so hopelessly inept. CrossGen needs a real selling point that actually works. And it isn't going to be the damn sigils.

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

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