Available on Graphicly shelves right now is a magazine called The Drawn Word. Creator Christopher Irving has focused much of his coverage on the brand new The Massive comic by Brian Wood and spent a great deal of time talking with Mr. Wood. The incredibly in-depth article is like nothing you've yet read about a comic creator and the industry within which he works. Below is are the first few paragraphs of the article. Read it, love it, then click the link below to get The Drawn Word Issue 1 absolutely FREE courtesy of Christopher Irving himself.
“I’ll be writing differently, and there’s a reason for that,” Brian Wood reveals. “This is part of this shift in how I’m approaching comics, and often I feel like a lot of my peers are, as well.”
Wood will be doing damn near everything differently in 2012, not because of the imposing Mayan end times (December 21, anyone?), but as part of this new direction forced on him by the ever-changing comics industry. 2011 was a mixed year for comics, literally the best and worst of times, to use a Dickensian cliché, as digital comics continued to try to gain a foothold, both major companies had a string of layoffs amidst reorganizations and scaling back, and DC Comics experienced some record numbers from their company-wide relaunch. As comic books themselves have gone from 22 pages to 20 in an attempt to hemorrhage the bleeding, others have maintained the old page count but for a higher cover price.
When Brian Wood really struck out with the 2003 issue series Demo, he and artist Becky Cloonan were thinking in advance of the end trade paperback product. A visionary in viewing the single issue and paperback collection as two separate entities, Wood is now switching gears to once again empower the single issue.
“Forget that comics were ever twenty-two pages, and think about what we do in the twenty page space. A lot of us feel the answer is to really try to create a monthly comic that has a greater value as a reader, that’ll take you longer to read, and will have more in it and be meatier, and will compensate for the fact that a couple of pages are missing. Aside from the page count, I just feel like times are changing, too. There was a period of time when writing for the trades was a primary focus, and we were very into our decompressed action scenes. We can’t do that anymore. That’s run its course, and it’s up to us to figure out a different way for the next period of the future.”