I wish to emphasise that I bought the current issue of WIZARD solely for the ELEKTRA preview. I may buy the whole X-Men line, but God, I still have some standards.

Nonetheless, once in a while you learn something interesting in WIZARD, in amongst the endlessly repeated jokes, the editorially independent plugs for anything from Black Bull, and the exhortations to have your comics, your newspapers and your hamster hermetically sealed and graded. This issue, thanks to an interview with Brian Bendis, learned why it is that Chuck Austen is able to draw a monthly ELEKTRA story as well as the weekly book US WAR MACHINE.

I had assumed that he simply had a long lead-in time. But apparently, thanks to the computerised modelling program he uses to create his art, Austen can draw ten pages a day.

Ten pages a day.

No, I thought, surely that's insane. They must mean ten pages a week. After a bit of double-checking with people who have discussed this with Bendis at conventions, I was assured that no, they really do mean ten pages a day.

Fifty pages a week. Around two hundred pages a month. At that kind of speed, he could do two weekly titles on his own, and never need a fill-in. In a marketplace where it's considered quite exceptional for an artist to maintain a monthly schedule, that sort of speed should be revolutionary. I've been told that the reason why that isn't the case right now is because the entry costs for the technology are prohibitive. Maybe so, but the cost of new technology can be expected to fall.

New technology is emerging from the marginal into the mainstream. I 'm not going to write a breathless piece about how this wonderful new technology is going to transform the world beyond recognition (and there'll be food pills, and rocket packs, and we'll all have flying cars...), but it's a new way to create comics, and the implications are pretty significant. Of course, it's not something that comes completely from out of nowhere - Scott McCloud's been talking about this kind of thing for years - but here we're seeing it emerge from the marginal and experimental into the full blown mainstream. It's crossing the line from being something everyone vaguely expects to happen in five years time, to being something that's in the shops right now.

What are the implications of that? The technique obviously has its limitations - a computer may well be able to do enormous amounts of the layout work for Austen's style, which is broadly realistic, but it wouldn't be quite so much help for artists less wedded to realism. The electronic Peter Bagge comic is not yet on the horizon, unless he decides to go for a radical stylistic change.

But the appeal to publishers is obvious. It produces good, solid work. It should never miss an issue. In the long run, it ought to be cheaper - after all, the new artist is going to be producing a ton more pages, at vastly less time and labour per page. If you cut the page rate, the publisher saves money, and the artist is still making more money than he was before, since he can produce more pages in the same amount of time.

Much the same arguments, really, that led to Comicraft lettering what often seems to be most of the mainstream comics in North America. The same kind of domination here doesn't seem on the cards; but they're still powerful arguments that ought to give computer art a real impetus. Late books have been a recurring problem, and for Marvel at least, that's only become more prominent under a new regime that seems happy to hire slow artists and throw the deadlines out the window.

NEW X-MEN is going to be three weeks late with its second issue. DAREDEVIL was the most obvious example, running some six months late by the end of Joe Quesada's run. But NEW X-MEN is already going to be three weeks late with only its second issue; GENERATION X's final issue was two months late; MARVEL KNIGHTS is running over a month behind schedule. For books that are meant to be on a regular monthly schedule, this is not impressive.

There's a school of thought that says artists should not be rushed and should be allowed as much time as they want to finish their work. This, after all, is art, the highest creative endeavour of the human soul, blah blah blah. Leaving aside for the moment whether this rationale can truly be said to apply to the job of illustrating mainstream comics - and in many cases I don't think it does - it's still missing the point.

I try not to write about the X-books in Article 10 - I do enough of that elsewhere - but let's take the most obvious example right now. Marvel hires Frank Quitely to draw NEW X-MEN, a monthly title. By all accounts, Quitely was seriously behind schedule on AUTHORITY when he left it. To the best of my knowledge, he has never sustained a monthly schedule in his career. Never mind - Marvel allowed for that, hiring him on the basis that there would be a fill-in artist to pick up about a third of the issues. Fair enough. And yet here we are, two issues in, and the book is already running almost a month late. Pathetic.

Now, given that Quitely can't keep a monthly schedule, why did they ever think he would have the second issue ready on time? Surely it's plainly obvious that the only way Quitely was going to draw an entire storyline, and get it in on time, was if he started months in advance, and somebody else did the first storyline instead. Surely that would get you the same number of Quitely issues per year, a book that ran on time, and a trade paperback collection where the art style didn't end up changing horrifically between chapters as a result of a fill-in artist having to be brought on to do a rush job on chapter 3?

Really, am I missing something here?

Artists like this don't belong as the regular artists on monthly titles, a post that for all practical purposes they end up holding in name only. They belong on miniseries, on one-shots, or at best on individual storylines in ongoing titles when they have a proper lead-in. Regular monthly titles... that's a schedule that fast computer art is plainly more suited to, and if - no, when - it spreads from here, perhaps we'll see a situation where the artists working by hand are given the time to work on special projects, and the commercial mainstream is dominated by computer artwork.

Artists like this don't belong on monthly titles. There will doubtless be some of you out there who take the view that the monthly serial format is dead. (You'll probably be the ones who call them "floppies" because you read it on the Warren Ellis Forum.) You might well be right, but not necessarily for the reasons you'd like to think. If it becomes possible to churn out large volumes of pages by the same creative team, the ludicrously slow pace of 22 pages a month will come to seem even more absurd. There are other and better ways to serialise than the current format - personally, I'd love to see the weekly digest anthology format given a go - and maybe this will provide the proper incentive for someone to try them.

Or alternatively, this might be a technological dead end that'll be gone in six months. But lettering has been computerised. Colouring has been computerised. They're working on getting rid of the inkers. And more than a few mainstream comics read like they were written by a random number generator linked to a cliche archive. The commercial will is there. If the technology doesn't work now, it will some day soon. And then there will be changes.

So who says you never read anything interesting in WIZARD? It's right there, filling one square inch on page 18.

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.