It's funny how easily a comic can slip off the radar if it hardly ever comes out.  Of course, slow schedules rarely have much of an effect on sales.  But they certainly do a lot to kill anticipation.

Astonishing X-Men isn't a late book, just a very slow one.  It took a lengthy hiatus between issues #12 and #13, and then resumed shipping on a bimonthly schedule.  Joss Whedon has an over-reaching storyline set for 24 issues.  He began back in May 2004.  We're still only two thirds of the way through.  I don't get annoyed by the slow schedule of this book - after all, they've been quite upfront about it.  I just keep forgetting that it exists.  Every time an issue comes out, I see on the shelves and go "Oh, is that story still going?"

I wouldn't normally review this issue, since it's part four of six.  But all of this week's X-books are in mid storyline, so I figured it would be worth checking in on the X-books' theoretical flagship title.  To my amazement, it turns out that I haven't reviewed an issue of Astonishing in almost a year.  I hadn't noticed.

Here's the thing.  It's very fashionable these days to justify any sort of slowness on the grounds that it'll look great in the trade paperback which, after all, is the format of the future.  Now, that's a valid consideration so far as it goes.  But the reality is that we are not in the glorious, trade-paperback-oriented future.  For mainstream superhero books, a huge chunk of the audience is still buying the book in serial format.  In fact, in the USA alone, around 120,000 people are reading this book in serial format.  Unless this book turns out to be an incredible perennial success, that's probably going to be the majority, or at least a very big proportion of the readership.

Now, if the serial format is one of your major formats, it's not good enough to think of pacing purely in terms of page count.  You have to think of it in terms of publication schedule as well.  That doesn't mean a book has to be monthly; but it does mean that you have to deliver issues which are reasonably satisfying chunks of story in their own right.  You can't really get away with stretching a fight scene over three issues.  The X-Men have now been fighting the Hellfire Club, in what's essentially the same scene, for four months.  That is not good pacing.

A couple of years ago, when Whedon would have been laying out his storyline, this sort of thing happened all the time, because stories were forever being stretched out to six issues to make for a chunkier trade paperback.  Quietly, and without making a big deal about it, publishers seem to have acknowledged that this was a bad idea.  Two and three-part storylines have become common again.  There seems to be a renewed acknowledgement that a series has to be written for both formats - after all, who says that you can only have one story per trade paperback volume?

Astonishing, unfortunately, suffers from a bimonthly schedule attached to a storyline with a serious case of six-issue bloat.  Interestingly, the solicitations have the book resuming a monthly schedule from this point, which has got to help.  But for the moment, it's a real stumbling block for the book.  If you sit down and read first four parts of the storyline as a whole, it's really quite good.  It bounds along happily, it has cute character moments, it has strong comedy, it has gorgeous art.  It will make a very nice trade paperback.

And yet it's so damn slow.  This has the look of a story that would have made a good four-parter on a monthly schedule - around three months from start to finish.  Instead, it's going to take the better part of a year.  That's a pacing issue, and it damages the story, and it's a real problem, however much certain people pretend otherwise.

This title sells around 120K in serial form.  It will not do to pretend that the serial reading experience does not count.  That is just self-serving nonsense from creators trying to justify their schedules, and industry commentators determined to pretend that the glorious future has already arrived, reality be damned.  Horribly slow books are the worse for it, and the finished product needs to be downright jaw-dropping to make it worthwhile.

Astonishing is, at its best, a very good straightforward superhero title.  It's certainly gorgeous to look at.  If it was on a monthly schedule, or if I was reviewing the trade paperback, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about it.  But I'm not.  I'm reviewing a serial which comes out every two months.  And it's not a great serial, because a mildly interesting story is being stretched out over far, far too long a period of time.  With considerable reluctance, I'm going to leave it as an A- book, but let's not pretend there isn't a problem with this sort of thing.

Rating: A-

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