Ist Astro City jetzt eigentlich einestellt, oder nicht?

[mausman]

Ich habe ja schon ewig nichts mehr von dieser genialen Serie gehoert. Ist damit zu rechnen, dass ueberhaupt noch irgendetwas kommt?

[comicfreak]

Ja, sie wird kommen!
Nein, ich weiß nicht wann!

[Killer Loop]

Laut den Leuten von Speed werden noch 2 Paperbacks von Astro City veröffentlicht, dann ist das Zeug aus U.S. auch schon durch:weinen: :weinen:

Außer Busiek schafft es das angekündigte Special wirklich in der nächsten Zeit fertigzustellen. Aber das weiß Mr. B. wahrscheinlich noch nicht mal selbst:) :engel: :)

Killer Loop - Moments before Detonation

[L.N. Muhr]

2 oder 3 ausgaben - das ist noch nicht klar! es fehlen nämlich noch 6 us-hefte.... aber letter-man gab sich in essen optimistisch.

[Sebastian Oehler]

Ich raff das nicht so richtig. busiek soll schwer krank sein, aber die Krankheit hat nur Auswirkungen auf Astro city, avengers ist ja regelmäßig erschienen. Aber niemand kann mir genau sagen, was er eigentlich hat. Weiß es jemand von euch?

[Michael Heide]

Kurt Busiek hat eine schwere Quecksilbervergiftung, die sein gesamtes Immunsystem geschwächt hat. Dadurch ist er bei Astro City arg ins schleudern geraten.
Warum er trotz allem weiterhin die Deadlines für Avengers, Defenders und anderes halten kann, hat er mal so erklärt:

Original gepostet von Kurt Busiek:
"In CBG #1452, Jeff Dyer questions the continuing absence of Astro City from comics store shelves, notes that I write a number of other books and have no difficulties meeting my deadlines on those assignments, and calls on me "to either make a commitment to Astro City or to let the series' followers know where the project stands."

Well, I've never not been committed to Astro City, and at the risk of seeming testy, I have often let readers know where the project stands, to the point that it sometimes feels as if I do little else. But maybe it'll help ease the curiosity, at least, of CBG readers if I go into it again.

Much of what follows is not new -- with a few changes in medical diagnosis, it's the same story that's been told in numerous interviews, at every convention I attend, and in the Astro City lettercolumns a few times. The short answer is -- I'm still sick. In fact, my health is worse now than it's ever been in the past. And while this particular illness has been running longer than the Triune Understanding sub-plot, illnesses don't end just because the audience gets tired of them (would that they did!). Boring as it may be to have them hanging on long after their novelty value has worn off, there's not much I can do about this one until my doctors manage to come up with a resolution.

When Astro City sputtered to a temporary-but-lengthening halt, my doctors were telling me that I had chronic sinus infections for reasons they couldn't explain, and those infections were what was making my writing speed slow dramatically, and were why I was having so much trouble framing out the kind of stories Astro City showcases. Since then, they've turned up what they think is the cause -- I've been diagnosed with mercury poisoning. That's not the full extent of it -- I also have unhealthy levels of lead, aluminum and a couple of other metals in my system, persistent viral problems, and a smattering of other problems related to the fact that my immune system's been so weak for so long.

There are a number of symptoms -- fatigue and a dangerously-weakened immune system are among them, but I'm also enjoying skin rashes, joint pain, problems absorbing nutrients from the foods I eat and concurrent problems eliminating toxins from my system. Some days, I have trouble standing up for very long, and my short-term memory and ability to concentrate can be erratic. Luckily, my ability to remember the names of the home planets of the Legion of Super-Heroes seems to be unaffected.

I'm currently under treatment for all this, and am currently taking about a dozen pills at each meal, and homeopathic drops every few hours (a schedule that's a real treat when your short-term memory's subject to unexpected vacations), from the moment I get up until I go to bed at night. I'm still getting used to the drops -- some of 'em go down fine, some of 'em knock me for a loop, leaving me dizzy for a couple of hours. But they should be easing off, both in terms of the number of them I need to take, and in their effect on me -- and if they don't, the treatment will be reconfigured to go slower, so the cure isn't worse than the disease.

I'm not listing all this to win sympathy -- I'd far prefer not to go into it at all. It's not my career, it's my personal life, and my family and I are dealing with it. But it seems that there are a lot of readers who don't understand that "I'm still sick" means more than "I have a stuffy nose."

The bottom line is that, while it may appear otherwise to people who only see me through the comics I write, through online message boards or at the two conventions I managed to attend this year -- no, I'm not healthy, and no, I'm not by any means "having no difficulty meeting my other deadlines."

Jeff mentions four series as other stuff I'm writing, including a book I'm co-writing [Defenders], a book that isn't out yet [Power Company], and a mini-series that's been over for a year [Shockrockets]. I am writing, true, but not as much as he makes it appear, not as easily, and significantly less than I used to.

Back when Astro City was coming out more-or-less regularly, I was writing four monthly books, plus annuals, specials and mini-series here and there. I'm currently writing two and a half monthly books (Avengers, Power Company, and co-writing Defenders), plus fewer side-projects -- and I'm making sure those side-projects are long-deadline projects, like JLA/Avengers, for which I don't have to produce material at anywhere near the rate demanded by a monthly book.

And those books haven't exactly been ticking along like clockwork behind the scenes. Avengers waxes and wanes, with me slipping behind schedule and then catching back up, and Defenders has shipped late more often than it's been on time (though in that case, my health troubles have affected things less than Erik's -- the creative team seems as cursed as the cast). With Power Company, we started well in advance, so we could ramp up to monthly production slowly, and we still have good lead time on the series. I'm just now finishing Thor: Godstorm, on which we've taken a year to complete a three-issue mini-series, and will be starting another project about a month after that wraps up -- but it'll be another long-deadline, slow-production project, one I can handle at a more relaxed pace.

So I'm writing less, taking longer to do it, and being careful not to take on more regular assignments than I can get out regularly, taking with my health situation into account. My writing speeds up and slows down over time, depending on my condition, so some weeks I'll be able to turn out a lot of work, catching up on the schedule or even getting ahead of it, making up for the weeks I get next to nothing done. And while that works out pretty well for Avengers, Power Company, JLA/Avengers and such -- I can get outlines or plots done during one good period, and then flesh 'em out from my notes during the next one with little difficulty -- it's slowed me to a snail's pace on Astro City.

And before anyone jumps to conclusions -- it's not a matter of Avengers et al being easier than Astro City, but a matter of them being different. It's easy to see from reading the book that the stories in Astro City are markedly different from the stories in most other superhero comics, and not surprisingly, the process of writing them is different, too. Writing Avengers as my health allows is something I can do -- I have an outline, I know what needs to happen, and even if I only write it a scene at a time, I can deliver what the book needs. Astro City, on the other hand, is mostly about internal character stories, and each issue has multiple internal structures, some of them pretty delicate and hard for me to pin down, even when I'm working on them. Unless I can balance the whole structure in my head while I'm working on any one page, it's very hard to make the stories work. So after I've done all the outlining and character creation each story needs, once I'm actually writing the scripts themselves, I need about three or four days of uninterrupted concentration to write the script from beginning to end. But I'm not getting a lot of that, these days.
Das ganze ist ein bisschen lang, deshalb muss ich an dieser Stelle splitten.

[Michael Heide]

And while it would be nice if writing fiction were like yard goods -- if producing Astro City was exactly the same process as producing Avengers, so any kind of story could be done easily and dependably under any conditions -- it just doesn't work that way. The skills required may be the same, but the application of them isn't.

So I can work for an entire week on Astro City, and wind up having nothing usable to show for it -- and I've done a lot of that, this past year. It hasn't been completely fallow -- I've managed to finish the script to #23, and have #24 outlined and festooned with notes on history and character and individual scene pacing, but all of the attempts to turn it into a script have been false starts so far. One of these days, I'll make it through and it'll work, and I can start the process over again with #25, which is a story I've been wanting to write since before there was an Astro City to hold it.

That's the score, as it stands -- DC wants to wait until I've got at least three scripts done to put the book back on the schedule, since that way even if I fall apart again, there'll be at least three months worth of monthly, dependable Astro City. For my part, I'm mentally extending that to four scripts, since #26 wraps up the current cycle of single-issue stories, so I want #23-26 to all come out in a row.

Jeff comments that Astro City "was (and can be again) the greatest comic book being published," and I thank him for his faith and for the kind words. But trust me, Jeff, you don't want me producing Astro City scripts that neither you nor I would like -- so until I can produce the kind of scripts the book needs on a dependable basis, it's best not to make promises we'll wind up failing to keep.

In the meantime, I'll continue to make a living writing the kind of scripts I can write -- I like doing them, too, they're coming out well, and my family sure likes it when the mortgage gets paid -- and will keep working on regaining my health. The mercury diagnosis was something of a breakthrough -- it's the first time there's been an answer for why my health has been getting worse and worse, and there's a treatment, which was very nice to hear. But it took over fifteen years to get me into this hole, and getting back out again isn't going to happen overnight.

I'd love to have a different answer, but this is all I've got at the moment."

kurt busiek

Quelle: Newsarama (http://www.comicon.com/ubb/Forum13/HTML/000368.html).

Und wenn Busiek jetzt wieder behauptet, ich würde Lügenmärchen über ihn verbreiten, dann kann ich dem Mann auch nicht helfen.

[Sebastian Oehler]

Vielen Dank dafür, das konnte mir nämlich noch niemand erklären.
Hast du denn Busiek schon mal "verunglimpft"....

[Michael Heide]

Verunglimpft nicht, nur eine seiner Aussagen falsch interpretiert (anscheinend).
Es ging um JLA/Avengers, das er ja schreibt. In einem Interview hatte er erwähnt, dass er tausende von E-Mails bekommt von Leuten, die gerne irgendeinen Charakter drin sehen wollen. Und einer nervte ihn wohl mehrfach am Tag mit Wolverine.
Daraufhin schrieb Busiek bei Newsarama, dass Wolverine nie Rächer oder Justice Leaguer war und folglich auch nicht in dem Crossover auftauchen wird. Perez hat in dem Zusammenhang noch geschrieben, dass er Wolverine dann halt auf ein T-Shirt oder Schild zeichnen wird, das Beast trägt, bzw. hochhält.
Im damaligen Marvel-Forum habe ich das dann mal erwähnt, woraufhin Busiek mich einen Lügner genannt hat. Er hätte das nie geschrieben. Leider war das Marvel-Forum zu diesem Zeitpunkt bereits im Umbau, sodass ich nicht mehr antworten konnte. Später habe ich dann in einem verwandten Thema bei Newsarama das ganze noch einmal aufgegriffen und mit einem Link zu Busiek's erstem Interview untermauert.
Es kam nie eine Reaktion.

[LuG]

:lol:
Sensibel, diese Künstler. :D

[Der Letter-Man]

Hat hier einer was gegen das Lettering gesagt? :p :o :weinen: :weinen:

Lutz: Deine Comics sind unterwegs (höre ich da ein schwächlich geröcheltes "Lechz!"?)