Hard Time: Season 2 Preview on DCComics.com
Go here. Then come back and tell me if I was exaggerating, even a little, about what you can expect from Season 2.
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Go here. Then come back and tell me if I was exaggerating, even a little, about what you can expect from Season 2.
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September 30th, 2005 at 8:55 AM
How long do I have to wait for the next issue? I can’t wait to see what happens next. You’re right about the intensity of the book stepping up. It seems to me that now that you’ve set the groundwork for the story, you can start to move to a whole other level of storytelling. Great stuff.
September 30th, 2005 at 10:04 AM
Sounds great. I wish I had issues 7-12 though…
September 30th, 2005 at 11:08 AM
These pages demonstrate the value of experience and acquired craft in writing a great story. One of the positive developments in American comics right now is getting to see writers like yourself and Steve Englehart bringing years — decades! — of experience to the table and writing with maturity and confidence. In comics, writing has been mostly reserved for the naive twentysomething… perhaps because it suits the industry to have more tractable and easily impressed kids in that role. If older writers were barred from writing prose fiction because of their tendency to stand up for their rights and mouth off at exploitative publishers, the literary world would be impoverished, which I think we’ve seen until very recently in comics.
Recently, a lot of online forums have been talking about the purging of talents such as John Broome, Alvin Schwartz, Gardner Fox, and Arnold Drake when they approached DC management with their demands for better treatment; I think decades later we’re only just coming to realize what a pivotal moment that was in stunting the healthy growth of the comics medium.
So I was mulling this over, and suddenly it hits me: does Ethan Harrow owe any (deliberate or accidental) debt to Larry Trainor, the Negative Man? Some fans have found parallels between your Defenders and Drake’s Doom Patrol, specifically in your villains the Headmen — Ruby Thursday makes an excellent surrogate Madame Rogue, and counterparts for the Brain and M. Mallah can also be found — and even if it wasn’t a conscious decision, it would be logical if there was some influence there. I wonder if this might not be the same phenomenon?
September 30th, 2005 at 4:12 PM
That really does look nice, Steve.
I can only say that DC deserve rewards for backing you on this one, and I hope we can get more folks interested in stepping off the track (now I have that Ray Bradbury story in my head, but this time the butterfly lives and looks gorgeous 🙂
Ade
September 30th, 2005 at 9:38 PM
Nope. No exaggeration. Those pages look excellent. Colors dazzle. This is going on my standing order list, sight unseen.
One suggestion. When the preview is lettered, what chance of getting it onto a site such as Newsarama, Buzzscope, etc?
The current Previews is also re-offering the “Hard Time: 50 to life” trade (page 74), *hopefully* sales will be enough to have the second part of season one collected.
September 30th, 2005 at 11:35 PM
This looks good.
October 1st, 2005 at 10:35 AM
I can’t wait. Hard Time is one of my favorite books, and I hope that more people will discover it in it’s second season.
October 2nd, 2005 at 11:40 AM
I saw that DC did spend the big bucks for a full page ad in the latest Previews. Damn, I am really looking forward to this.
October 3rd, 2005 at 1:50 PM
At the Boston con last weekend, CBR reported:
“The (DCU) panel also stopped in admiration for the announcement of “Hard Time: Season Two.” DiDio noted that Steve Gerber is a masterful storyteller and noted that this was one of his favorite books. Ethan van Sciver chimed in by saying that “Hard Time” was his wife’s favorite book, too.”
October 3rd, 2005 at 5:13 PM
Wow! Looking forward to this. ‘Hard Time’ has been the only new comic I’ve been recommending to people.
October 3rd, 2005 at 8:19 PM
Looks great, any chance that a successful season 2 would lead to issues 7-12 finding their way to a trade release?
October 4th, 2005 at 1:18 AM
Isaac: “…any chance that a successful season 2 would lead to issues 7-12 finding their way to a trade release?”
Yes, and it probably wouldn’t take the whole season. If the numbers on the first few *Season 2* issues are encouraging enough, a collection of the original 7-12 would become almost inevitable.
October 4th, 2005 at 1:20 AM
Dave: “The (DCU) panel also stopped in admiration for the announcement of ‘Hard Time: Season Two.'”
Uh…wow.