Troubled Production/Real Life/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Troubled Productions in Real Life Comic Books include:

  • David Herbert apparently attracts this kind of production with all his works except Living With Insanity. Tnemrot was supposed to be a print comic and was written in late 2008, going through seven artists before Tatiana Lepikhina joined and is now a webcomic. Gemini Storm was also written at the same time, came out in March 2010 and the second issue is still expected to take another month or two before being released. He has also mentioned other projects that haven't gone anywhere due to artists dropping out or simply disappearing.
  • The Clone Saga. To make a very long story short: a mix of artists wanting to do a bit of Continuity Porn and a bunch of very profit-oriented directives transformed what was originally to be a short special event leading for a milestone number of Spiderman into a slog that seeped for two years and tens of titles, which was unable to be finished despite the wishes of almost everyone involved because it sold well, but the reason it sold well for a long while was because the fans wanted to see how the writers could finally tie the immense tangled web of subplots they wrote themselves into for editorial mandate to keep going as long as it sells.
  • The popular crossover between the Justice League of America and The Avengers languished for 20 years because DC Comics and Marvel Comics couldn't decide on who would win in a fight. It was eventually discovered the reasons those decisions took so long was basically Executive Meddling from Jim Shooter, then the new head of Marvel, whom didn't like the lineup chosen for the crossover (it teamed the X-Men with the Teen Titans, when he preferred it wouuld have been with the Legion of Super-Heroes) and in true temper tantrum blocked every decision he could.
  • Anything that isn't part of the mainstream Marvel Comics tends to suffer from this. One of the more documented ones was The New Universe. Touted as "The World Outside Your Window", the franchise fell apart from the beginning - writers tossed in 616-type elements (aliens, powered armors, etc.), financial backers pulled out before it even started, and people were too engrossed by that slogan. Despite canceling half of the franchise and starting a massive storyline that started with the destruction of Pittsburgh, it never got off its feet and died nearly three years later.
    • newuniversal suffered an equally crushing blow when the files on Warren Ellis' laptop were lost when his hard drive failed. Marvel shuffled him on to other projects and newuniversal died an inglorious death.
    • Marvel 2099, the revisioning of the Marvel Universe as a Cyberpunk dystopia, wasn't the greatest, but when Marvel let go its editor-in-chief for that line as a cost-cutting measure thanks to its near-bankruptcy, many creators bailed, leaving the series to limp to its end.
  • The Image Comics/Valiant Comics crossover Death Mate. So much that it served as a Creator Killer for Valiant.
  • And while we're on that subject, anything done by Rob Liefeld, a master of the Schedule Slip. One legendary tale about it was that during the Death Mate debacle an editor went everyday to Liefeld's house just to ensure that his contributions weren't a year late.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog always had a problem when it came to converting video game storylines into its more serious setting. However, two of the biggest screw ups came about via Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2. For Sonic Adventure, Sega gave Archie a copy of the game... untranslated, so they had to fudge a lot of the story. The original plan was to have the storyline run through then-all three titles - Sonic the Hedgehog, Knuckles the Echidna and Sonic Super Special. However, just before the storyline started, the Knuckles comic got cancelled, forcing Archie to cram all of the Knuckles stories into the Sonic issues as back stories.
    • For Sonic Adventure 2's story, the big problem was that Sega was insistent on Archie creating a tie-in into the game. Archie's solution? Just do enough to whet people's appetite and go get the game. Still was enough to ruin a side-by-side storyline that had a cosmicly-powered Knuckles altering Mobius drastically.
      • Up until Sonic Genesis, most other adaptation storylines would end up just being teasers with Archie Comics practically saying "Game X happened after this story.".
  • The reason The Death of Superman was created was because one of these. The original idea was to marry Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the comics, but then a new Superman TV Series was greenlighted and its producers convinced to DC to hold the wedding until they did theirs. Faced with losing a year worth of stories, writer Jerry Ordway make the joking suggestion of "why don't kill them all?". It says something about how desperate they were that they ended going along with it. Meanwhile, the TV series didn't actually held their wedding until four years later, which in the comic book was enough time to kill and revive Superman, make him go thorough a Dork Age, and even break up him and Lois, only reconciling them after the series finally had their goddamn wedding.