[...] After a slight delay, Paul Grist’s “monthly” series continues, with Tom Tom the Robot going up against [...]

It also harms the comic as Jack Staff is written as a serial comic and in ways where things from earlier issues cleverly link into seemingly unrelated things in later issues & there’s that unique non-linear storytelling strand.

And yes, it IS an ironclad, unbreakable promise in a business sense and an ethical sense. Image promised “NOW MONTHLY!”, often and loudly. If Image is responsible for breaking that promise, it’s an insult to the consumers and retailers; if a printer/distributor is responsible and Image isn’t chasing them up over it, it says to me they don’t care. Either way, it’s annoying. It’s a lot more than annoying for retailers, who will now forever more (if they didn’t already) not believe the title’s schedule, and they’re the ones taking a risk by ordering the damn thing.

To take this tone when someone fails to release a comic book on schedule is silly. I just don’t get it.

It’s when you promise a book at a particular time and constantly break those promises that I have a problem. If you have schedule problems, complete your work before you offer it for sale. If you know you can’t make a monthly schedule, don’t do a big publicity push promising a monthly book.

Grist’s work is awesome, but come on, enough with the complaints. He’s a one-man band. He has to write, draw, and do all of the production work on every issue on his own. On the opposite extreme, Jeff Smith has his wife and an assistant helping run his company. Marvel books have whole teams working on them. Give him a break and celebrate his exceptional vision and creativity.

The most delayed projects on my pre-order list are all Image or Dark Horse books.

As for Grist, I can forgive the monthly stuff as long as we’re getting work somewhat regularly.

Other than the superhero tentpole books, I no longer really care if a book is monthly or on-time.

But as a periodical, it is about as complete a failure as there can be. Its creator and publisher need to totally and honestly re-evaluate how to make it work as a graphic novel or series of graphic novels — although by now I think the vast majority of readers must have lost faith. I am as patient as hell when it comes to understanding late-shipping books of quality, but this Jack Staff situation is one too many kicks in the teeth for too damned long. In its own way, it’s as much of a joke as Rob Liefeld announcing any given book is going to be coming out.