Limited Series - Lengths of Limited Series

Lengths of Limited Series

Four-to-six issues is still the norm for most limited series, and presents the most reasonable investment for comic publishers, though there are series that run for as short as two or three issues. The twelve-issue maxiseries form was popular in the 1980s. Many memorable series ran this length, such as Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Watchmen, Amethyst, Princess of Gem World and Squadron Supreme. This form almost faded out in the 1990s. One point that went against it was the greater financial risk in investing in a lengthy limited series. The popularity of the maxiseries length was resurrected by DC with the success of Batman: The Long Halloween and The Kents.

Stories of greater length, those running to more than twelve chapters, were often done in multi-title crossovers, though the 1995 Marvel Comics event, Age of Apocalypse, involved several limited series that replaced the ongoing X-Men-related titles for four months and book-ended by two one-shot specials. This idea was revisited by Grant Morrison in 2005 with the Seven Soldiers of Victory project, and which he dubbed as a mega-series. Marking the difference between the two, Age of Apocalypse was produced by several writers while the ambitious Seven Soldiers was the work of a single writer.

The DC project, 52, which ran from May 2006 to May 2007, became the largest limited series aside from Cerebus, composed of 52 weekly issues. DC did not label it as either a maxiseries or a miniseries, calling it simply a series (which is misleading since the project was always intended to end by the fifty-second issue). On 9 May 2007, DC immediately followed this series with another, similarly to be published weekly for 52 weeks, entitled DC Countdown. When DC Countdown was completed, DC launched another series in the same weekly year-long format, Trinity.

As a rule, the number of issues a limited series will run is determined from the outset. However, there have been cases where this rule was changed. There are usually only two reasons for this, one being commercial, the other being, to a rarer extent, creative. Dark Horse’s 1993 Aliens: Colonial Marines was originally supposed to run twelve issues. When the sales of Colonial Marines faltered midway through the run, the series was shortened to ten issues. Marvel’s Fantastic Four: Big Town was set to run six issues only to be set back to four issues. Number changing does not always result in reduction of issues. The first Gen¹³ was to run four issues, with the fourth a double-sized finale. Instead, the final issue was split to two in order to meet publishing schedules. Brian Michael Bendis found difficulty in resolving the finale of Ultimate Six and Marvel granted his request of extending the series from six to seven issues. The same thing happened with Marvel's Eternals Vol. 3, which went from six to seven issues when writer Neil Gaiman asked for an extra issue to resolve the ending. Most recently, the eight-issue X-Men First Class, as well as the six-issue Avengers: The Initiative, were both amended to become ongoing series instead, although with X-Men First Class the new books are officially considered as a second volume.

Occasionally, an ongoing series will be turned into a limited series. Marvel's The Ultimates began as a monthly series, but became a limited series when production issues arose. When Ultimates 2 was released, it too was released as a limited series. When Marvel's New Universe line of comics was cancelled completely, the final issues of the remaining three titles (Psi-Force, D.P. 7 and Justice (New Universe)) were labeled "#32 of a Thirty-two-Issue Limited Series", in the same style that Marvel used to mark limited series at the time. This was humorously repeated as Marvel, when ending its Transformers comic book in 1992 with issue #80, put a caption on the cover of the book claiming that it was "#80 in a four issue limited series;" the title had begun as a 4-issue series but was converted to an ongoing series due to its popularity.