The New 52: Trade Waiting Traded For Story?

Trade waiting is a double edged sword.  Readers (and some writers) hate it because they’ve got to take a story and pad it out to six or so issues so it can be collected easily in a trade, resulting in stories that feel watered down or overwritten.  But on the flip side, a lot of readers would rather wait and buy a story in trade than buy individual issues, thus making the practice of padding for the trade feasible for companies.

However it’s DC, in the wake of the new 52, who has decided to hell with this. During a presentation at the Retailer’s Roadshow in New York (of which there is one hell of a write-up here), DC flat out stated that trade waiting is done, encouraging writers to tell a story as best they can, and let editorial scratch their heads over how to collect it in trade. This is finally the kind of news that we wanted to hear about in this relaunch, a change to the tedious pacing and book scheduling that has plagued the industry for well over a decade now; could the return of the long gone days of well told, character driven done-in-one stories be far behind us?

There were a few other notable tidbits from the interview; new spine covers for those trades that will offer up more information to the readers; also, Dan DiDio gave his personal guarantee that the 52 relaunched titles would ship on time, expressing that he was really embarrassed when a book ships late.

The insistence on the term “re-launch” over “reboot” continues as well, with DiDio stating that DC knew some things weren’t working and some things were, stating that the intention is a sliding time scale and more malleable history (you’ll notice we’ve changed our column header to The New 52 in an effort to clear up any confusion; I’m still personally insistent that it’s more of a reboot, but we’ll see how it shapes up).

DC’s roadshow continues, today hitting Chicago. We’ll post more information once it’s available.