Saturday, December 29, 2012

DANGER GIRL/G.I. JOE.....Ummm, wait. No, I guess not.

 I had originally intended to run a review of IDW's DANGER GIRL/G.I. JOE collection tonight, but it looks like that's going to have to be put on hold for a bit. IDW has a maddening habit of sending out incomplete review copies, and sure enough, the review copy they sent me only has four of the five issues that the collection will contain. I popped over to Comixology, since I thought the four issues that I read were good enough to make me want to read the conclusion RIGHT NOW. (Maybe that's IDW's strategy.....get the reviewers hooked, and get them to spring for the rest of the story.) So, of course, the fifth issue isn't available digitally yet. It may not ever have seen print (REAL, hold-it-in-your-hands PRINT!) yet.
So fuck it, now I have to wait to read the conclusion and review it.
I will say this: DANGER GIRL/G.I. JOE is the best DANGER GIRL story I've read since J. Scott Campbell jumped ship. I think his art must have provided about 80% of the fun, and once he was gone, it didn't take long for me to drop the book. John Royle provides the pencils here, and they're as close to Campbell as we're probably ever gonna get again, and it's close enough. I had a damned good time reading this book, aside from the fact that, you know, IDW didn't let me read the end. Now I have to keep a post-it note on my desk that says "GET DIGITAL DANGER GIRL/G.I. JOE #5 THIS WEEK (?)!!!!"
How the hell am I gonna fall asleep tonight, when Storm-Shadow and Snake-Eyes were just about to throw down?
IDW provided a review copy. (An INCOMPLETE ONE!)
(Just as an aside to the folks at IDW that set up these review copies.....The "Leave out the last issue" strategy has brought mixed success, at least in my case. In three cases (STAR TREK/DOCTOR WHO, THE CAPE, and STAR TREK/LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES) I knew the review copy was incomplete, so I read the first chapter of it, found it to my liking, and stopped reading, opting to just buy the collection. In another case (John Byrne's TRIO), I bought the missing chapter digitally, after reading the entire (Incomplete!) review copy. Usually, I see that the review copy is incomplete, get pissed off, and if it's not a book that I'm willing to spend money on, there's no review. I'd bet you're losing out on quite a few reviews, and potential sales spurred on BY those reviews, by providing incomplete copies to reviewers. I'm a big IDW fan, and I'm happy to beat the drum for books that I like, but I can't in good conscience recommend a book that I haven't read in full. Just something to think about.........)

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