For anyone who's interested, it appears as though CrossGen Comics is finally through. Rumor is they fired all their remaining employees today and declared bankruptcy (unknown whether it's 11 or 7 -- if they fired everyone it's probably the latter).

A former executive of the company didn't dispute the news when I asked him.

It's been a long road for the company, and mirrored the journey of the dot com's -- raise a lot of money, build a huge office with dozens of employees, spend a ton of funds on marketing...and in the end fail to cater to what the public actually wants.

It seems like a million years ago now, but at WizardWorld last year the founder and CEO took me outside and spent nearly half an hour explaining how DC and Marvel were doing it wrong, and how in a few years they would shoot past them as the number one publisher in the industry. Oh well.

Best of luck to the employees. I'm sure they'll bounce back...although it sucks for those who moved to Florida to work there.

Good luck to the employees, but the shenanigans the management pulled as the company was falling apart didn't really endear them to me. It's kind of moot as far as I'm concerned anyway, since I never got into any of their books.

I can't say I'll miss Crossgen too much, I really liked Sojourn and Scion, but those went downhill kinda quick after Marz left. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and El Cazador were both fairly entertaining (hopefully KKBB #6 will come out), but I won't cry myself to sleep tonight.

Hahahahahah. I think it's awesome Crossgen is finally going out of business. While I don't wish anyone to lose their job, C-gen was founded by a millionaire who I'm sure will be just fine & the way they treated their staff was horrid so they got what they deserved. Hated their product & everything they stood for. The were more concerned with trying to come up with catchy new ways to sell their books rather than the quality of their product, which was just abysmal. The comic book industry is a place comprised of people that do what they do b/c they love it, it's not an industry to try to make a quick buck in, & Crossgen created a slave factory for their creators under exclusive contracts to crank out generic crap as fast as they could mass produce it. Sorry for all you Crossgen fans, but now maybe you'll take the money you were buying you Crossgen books with & buy some truly deserving comics like Invincible, Queen & Country, The Walking Dead, The Goon, Fallen Angel, Fables, The Losers, Ex Machina, Gotham Central, The Brit, She-Hulk, Birds of Prey, etc. etc, etc.

I *loved* Abadazad in its short time. A totally unique and wonderful story was unfolding and I will be incredibly disappointed if it doesn't pop up somewhere else soon.

For part of their line of books, I would agree with you, but they also had quite a few original ideas and titles that covered genres the "top 3" weren't, especially sword/sorcery. I will agree that the overall quality had been diminishing for the past year or so and it was an unforuate situation with creators not getting paid. However, to slam the entire line of books as "generic" is a tad harsh, even if you didn't like them.

Of those books, I read nine of them. So its not like I was "ignoring" the "good" stuff in favor of Crossgen books. As I mentioned previously, I dropped Sojourn a few months back, Scion I hadn't read in almost two years, and the only two Crossgen titles I was reading were El Cazador (which I was just trying to finish up the arc) and Kiss Kiss, which I enjoyed.

Wow, I've constantly disagreed with on this board, but I'm still really surprised by your comments. I've read some of all the CG titles and I've enjoyed everything I've read, but what really impressed me was their innovation. I think it's *****ing amazing that in just a couple years they did more trying to get their comics out there than just about any other comic company has done in their entire history.

As a comic store owner, I don't know if you'd be more or less likely to approve of the different formats, but I thought they were great. I loved that they put all of their comics online and that you could read the first issue of each title for free. I thoght some of the ideas for the extras on their online comics were really cool. Even though the execution of the dvds was poor, I think it had a lot of potential. I thought the Traveler tpbs were well done and it looks like Marvel might be copying them. Too bad a lot of the Oni and manga tpbs take a similar size and still charge the same price as a full tpb. My biggest disappointment though is that something like the Forge/Edge collections have never worked. From what I've heard that's the preferred format in Japan for new ongoing comics and I think it's a great idea.

It is a shame that they are most likely closing up shop before KKBB and Abadazad could even complete their archs. I didn't get back into comics until the beginning of this year, and was only able to discover them near the end. Oh well, maybe by some fluke some of their titles will get picked up by Marvel or DC and then maybe they will become really popular, and then the original series low print Cross Gen Issue will be worth big money. Probably won't happen, but at least I can hope for it.

Sounds exactly like DC and Marvel to me. Do variant covers enhance the quality of the product? Relaunching with a new number one when a book's sales get low?

Again, the "slave factory for their creators...to crank out generic crap as fast as they could mass produce it" sounds exactly like DC and Marvel to me. The increasing avalanche of X-Titles, and the Spider-Man books to a lesser extent, are the epitome of soulless, corporate, editorially-mandated cash grabs. There isn't anything approaching innovation in the overwhelming majority of these titles.

Anyway, both of these companies exist solely to make money, period. To be blunt, any belief that they're here out of "love" is extremely naive. Just ask Marvel's shareholders.

Then you don't know much about the industry. While I don't agree with 90% of what Marvel has done lately, if either D.C. or Marvel had the business ethics that Crossgen had, they would have both gone out of business decades ago. Crossgen didn't pay a lot of their creators, they backed ouf of contracts, they provided a miserable working atmposhere for their creators (which directly goes against what they promised them inititaly. DC has done nothinig lately but focus COMPLETELY on improving their quality while still putting out innovative titles (see the Vertigo) line which is someting Crossgen only pathetically attempted.

And NNY, all of those "innovative marketing" attempts C-gen made were just bells & whistles. Lame gimmicks that all failed. C-gen didn't want to put out quality books, they wanted to create a new way of marketing that they deserately wanted Marvel or DC to catch on with so the comic book world could look at C-gen as revolutionizing the industry. I've read nearly every book they published, & they were all cliched, drivel. Pirates of the Carribean is big, let's do a pirate book. Let's build a universe out of a theme that ties them all together (Valiant), LOTR is huge, let's make fanatasy book that uses every fantasy cliche imaginable.

I know C-gen fans will hate that I said all of this, but I think the failure of the company & the tales of it's fomrer employees only proves my point.

I forgot to add that I think them not paying creators is terrible. I think a lot of their problems, including that can be at least partially attributed to them being too ambitious. Between putting out too many books and experimenting with the different formats, they just moved too fast with too small a fan base. I think they really wanted to get to the point where they'd have enough material to put out on the web or in the Forge/Edge tpbs. But when you put out that much material in such a relatively short period of time you end up competing with yourself. Ironically, the series that got the most acclaim all came out after their launch books. So maybe they would have died even quicker if they hadn't put out those other books.