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independent comic companies The comic book industry hasn't been stable for over a decade and it looks as though the most promising company to surface in recent years, CrossGen, is having financial troubles and I find that to be a little sad. Ever since they started fans have had a very mixed reaction to what CrossGen offers in terms of books and its approach to the industry in general. In fact some people have been saying that the company was going to fail from the beginning. Instead of offering more books in the super hero genre, CrossGen was going to offer science fiction and fantasy oriented books, because they felt that those genres had more of a universal appeal and would reach a larger audience. Not only would the company avoid the spandex arena, but all of their books would be free of advertisements. It sounded promising and the books themselves offered high quality art, but in my opinion there were some definite drawbacks to the CrossGen line. When they first debuted about three years ago, none of the four books that they offered appealed to me. Despite what they believed science fantasy holds little interest for me and I didn't like the fact that the books were all tied together in some way. Oh, they said that a person didn't have to read all four to get a decent story, but if a person did they would see a larger story with more details. When I did finally sample one of their books, I didn't start with one of the first four. My first experience with CrossGen was with their Victorian detective series Ruse and I liked what I got. The art was very realistic and the two primary characters Simon and Emma had a great dynamic going between them. For me it was unlike anything being offered on the market and that was also its weakness. Apparently it didn't generate enough interest in terms of sales and is always near the bottom of the top three hundred. Over time I tried a couple of their other books and I kept noticing something about them that bothered me. All of them are very slow paced in terms of story telling. Now for some people this is perfectly acceptable and makes the transition to a paperback format that much easier, but it took some adjustment on my part. From my point of view the individual issues felt padded and they read better when read three at a time. Despite my complaints about their approach, I am always happy to see someone offering something new to the industry, so it was sad to hear that they are laying off people and many others are heading back to DC and Marvel for work. Those two companies need someone else to keep the books creative and CrossGen did get their attention by taking some of their better talent. Hopefully CrossGen won't implode like Comico and Valiant did during the last decade. |