Civil War: Cease Fire

I've made way too many comments about Marvel and DC recently but I can't really ignore this bit of info. Civil War #4, initially solicited for release tomorrow, then pushed back to 8/30, then 9/6 has now been rescheduled for 9/20, over a month after it's initial release date. Unlike DC, who had similar scheduling issues with Infinite Crisis, 2/3 of Marvel's titles tie in directly with the events of Civil War, meaning a slew of books (most notably Frontline, Amazing Spider-man and Fantastic Four) will be delayed as well. Most interesting is that Marvel clearly sees they have a situation on their hands because Civil War #5 is now not scheduled to ship until 8 weeks after issue #4, in November.

So much for sales momentum, but fear not, because Marvel will still be able to inflate their sell-in numbers by offering 1:75 variants on every single issue of Civil War (in addition to the already announced 1:25 variants). Now that's going to the well about 7 times too many.

This is going to be a fun one to explain to customers, especially those who first visit to the store was specifically to find out about Civil War. But then, why shouldn't they be exposed to the ridiculous publishing schedules created by "monthly" comics.

Yet one more reason I love graphic novels.


UPDATE: Newsarama now has the full announcement from Marvel, including a list of titles currently affected and projected release dates into January. We'll see how well those hold up.

As an aside, I've already seen some discussion about ways to avoid this sort of situation, but realistically the only way to do so is to wait until the entire story is completed, which is not something that Marvel or DC will ever consider an option so long as "monthly" comics are their primary format.