Artist Ethan Van Sciver dropped in at Comic Bloc this morning (for the first time since July) to apologize for the lateness of Flash: Rebirth and to answer fans’ questions. A couple of items that stand out are, first, on inking one’s own pages:
The allure of inking one’s own work is simply to work in a different medium (drawing with ink, as I do, is smoother…the effect of putting solid blacks down instead of scratchy pencils is often more pleasant.) and to be sure that the final product meets with my approval.
And second, on conventions:
Conventions are not “vacations.” They are a vital function of what we do, to promote the comics and meet fans. I do not ride roller coasters, lie on beaches, or relax in any sense. They are work.
That’s something worth remembering. For you or me as fans, a convention might be a vacation. But for someone who makes comics for a living, it’s a promotional event, it’s professional networking, it’s a trade show.
Of course, the sentence that will probably interest the most readers is this: “Issue 6 is more than halfway finished.”
I’m a bit more confident now there won’t be more delays and we’ll see issue 6 at the end of January. Plus I’m enjoying the series a lot and I think it will be worth the wait. Good on EVS for being upfront and honest. I know he puts a lot of detail in his work.
Honesty is almost always the best policy, unless one is a spy.
Or in lobbying, marketing, sales, politics, or nerf-hearding.
lol :]
The art has been good, and I’m glad they’ve stuck with consistent art throughout, but I don’t think it’s been “worth the wait”. I still maintain that there are plenty of artists equally or better suited to the Flash than EVS who can actually meet their deadlines – Mark Bagley being a prime example.
I understand that conventions are part of the job, but I still think that creating the comics and making sure they get out on time should take higher priority than promoting them. What’s the point of promoting a perpetually late comic when you could instead be making sure that the comic isn’t late?
I think its worth the wait, EVS’s art is always impressive and amazing. I’m looking forward to #6; I’m glad that he is honest about why its late ^^
I think the delays in the story have killed the momentum… I find it rather ironic that the character called the flash has a title that is moving forward at a crawl. When this series first started I was so into it & so excited to see it moving forward. But with the delays & with 2 other series starting that are chronologically ahead of the final pages of Flash REBIRTH, I’ve lost all interest in how this ends. I’ll probably peruse through it in my Comic Shop, but the chances of me picking it up are between slim & none. I like Johns & I’ll probably pick up Flash when it comes out next year, but REBIRTH for me ended when Blackest Night started & we saw that Barry Allen was still the Flash with no worse for what happened in REBIRTH. All the steam came out of the series with the fact that REBIRTH is basically unnecessary cause we saw Barry come back in FINAL Crisis & was already a big Part of BLACKEST NIGHT even from issue 0… I just don’t have the patience to stick with a series when the publishers can’t still with a reasonable time frame, if 1 issue is late if all the issues get spread out to 5-6 weeks then it’s understandable but this is so long a wait that you have to go back & reread all the other issues to get back to where the next issue is. This is a trade not a miniseries… Just my opinion