Although comic books were born because of the unused capacity of the color presses used to print Sunday comics pages and the earliest comic books often included recycled material from the Sunday pages, the comic book soon established its own identity as a separate art form. But this summer DC Comics, thanks to the urging of Mark Chiarello, is about to blur that distinction with Wednesday Comics, a marriage of today’s top comic book creators and the broadsheet Sunday comic supplement format. ICv2 caught up with Chiarello, who explained how Wednesday Comics will be priced and presented to the public and talked about an eventual oversize volume collecting all 12 issues.
What’s your title and what is your involvement with Wednesday Comics, are you the editor?
I am the editorial art director for DC Comics. My job as art director is full time, but every now and then Paul Levitz and Dan Didio ask me to edit something or come up with something on the side, so yes I am the editor of Wednesday Comics.
How would you describe the concept of Wednesday Comics?
The base concept is from when you were a kid and you read the Sunday funnies on your living room floor: Charlie Brown, Dick Tracy and all those great old strips. It’s sort of taking that Sunday funnies format and updating it with all of DC’s great characters--Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman—and involving some of the great creators who are working in the industry today, guys like Neil Gaiman, Paul Pope and Joe Kubert.
Where did the idea come from?
Actually from an odd place. I used to be friends with Alex Toth, one of the greats of comic book history, and he would always tell me about how the old comic strips used to be really important to America, how they were as big as movies, as big as television--strips like Terry and the Pirates and Prince Valiant. That world always seemed strange to me, because for me growing up in the 60s and the 70s, strips weren’t quite that popular, and certainly they are not now. So I thought if we took that format and married it to DC’s great characters and some of the great creators currently working in the business, it could be fun to revive that medium.
How are you going to package this for sale?
The publication size is 14” x 20” so it’s really oversize. It will be shipped folded twice so it folds down to the size of a traditional American comic book.
That’s where the comic book size came from in the first place, isn’t it?
Oddly enough yeah, absolutely. And it’s nice that even though it is an oversize publication, comic shop owners and managers will be able to rack it very easily. They won’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to displaying and selling the comic.
Is it going to be bagged or anything?
Nope.
On the fold-down, will the part that will be exposed to the public on a rack be part of a strip, or will that be sort of a cover?
You know honestly, we are working on that now. Ultimately I would love it to be part of that very first story. Page 1 is always going to be the Batman installment that is written by Brian Azzarello and drawn by Eduardo Risso, so I would love that front page to always be composed of the Wednesday Comics logo and part of the Batman strip--so it’s a “jump-right-in” for readers.
Is it going to carry any advertising?
Again, we are trying to work that out. If it does contain any advertising, it will be something minimal, something on the back cover.
Do you know what it’s going to be priced at?
They haven’t locked it in yet, but it will probably be the price of a regular comic book.
That's quite a range these days, isn't it?
Yeah.
Do you know when the first issue is actually coming out?
First week in July--it will be in stores in the first week in July.
One thing we noticed when we got out our rulers, that this is really going to be old school broadsheet size, not like slimmed-down papers of today?
Right, part of the impetus behind the whole project is the size. I am an artist myself and seeing your work published that large is really kind of cool, and when I started calling artists to take the job, offering them the gig, they all said, “Oh man, that will be so cool I can draw really, really large and I’ll see my work 20-inches tall," so that’s been a really enjoyable aspect of it, just the sheer size of the artwork.
Yeah some of the artwork has started to come in already. Ryan Zook is drawing the Kamandi strip and he has sort of based the layout on the old Prince Valiant strip where you have one really large panel and smaller panels underneath it.
But one of the charms of the series is not only that it involves so many different DC characters, but there are also so many different styles involved—you have kind of an artsy Paul Pope style, you have a classic Joe Kubert style, you have a children’s book style, you have Kyle Baker’s humor style, it really covers everything that comics can be today.
You’ve got six creative teams mentioned and 16 pages--how will the pages be apportioned?
Well they haven’t released the final list of creators. It’s going to be 16 pages and 15 stories and each story is a full-pager.
So with 12 issues, each story will be 12 broadsheet pages long?
Exactly twelve really big pages, and hopefully when we collect them we can collect them all in order so that you can get the run of each story.
So there will be a giant book that will come out of all of this?
Man, I am still scratching my head over that one. It’s going to be a big book when we collect it, that’s for sure.
Kind of like Kramer’s Ergot, or maybe not that big?
Well, you never know--somebody (Sunday Press Books) did an excellent job of collecting Little Nemo strips. The book is enormous, but it’s just so gorgeous. I am hoping we can use that as a model and do something like that.
What kinds of stories will these be in terms of how they fit into the continuity of these characters?
The stories won’t be hardcore continuity per se, but they won’t be fantasies; they won’t be elseworlds stories. It will be very similar to when Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee did Hush for us; it wasn’t continuity really, but it was accepted as real, not imaginary stories.
I just got in the first Superman page, it’s written by John Arcudi and illustrated by Lee Bermejo and it really knocked my socks off. Arcudi wrote this phenomenal story and I am sure you are familiar with Lee’s work. He’s doing an incredible job; it’s absolutely gorgeous, I couldn’t be happier.
Has it been easy to get the creators you want for the project?
Yeah, everybody has been very receptive. I’ve been very fortunate, because being the art director, I don’t have a lot of time for editorial projects, but when I do, I try to come up with kind of a special concept. It really worked out with Batman: Black and White, and I did a series called Solo. They seem to be the kind of projects that the creators really want to do, and that’s very flattering. Hey, I’ve got Joe Kubert working for me--how cool is that!
Anything else you want to get out there about this project?
I don’t usually go online to check the fan response to every project I am involved in, but I did check out this one and the response was so overwhelmingly positive that it made me feel great. It really was wonderful to see that. I think the fans are really reacting to three things really: a neat format, phenomenal creators, and DC’s great characters.
Are you going to sell this anywhere besides comic book stores?
Yeah, but I can’t answer that question at this moment. We are trying to work out something really cool.
It seems like this would be a great outreach tool, wouldn’t it?
Yeah we have some exciting prospects, but I can’t talk about them yet.