Lit Randy Stradley's ten rules

Good rules to have, although I can still think of a number of Dark Horse comics that have broken them.

Äh dident Legacy go to Tattooine and have some SW movie dialogue hints?

Only by John and Jan really making the case for it!

9. All series must end at Issue 50, no matter where they are plot wise. Writers should be forced to rush their endings to fit this deadline even when its announced with little warning.

10. All series that are written by Randy Stradley may continue indefinitely, no matter how much time it takes between separate issues.

Randy's Orders? I want to see them all... and here I thought they resemble the Robot Chicken Contingency Orders or Fett Clubs Rules

There should be something about Randy writing all the stories himself under numerous aliases

Ah, but that wouldn't be one of "Randy's" rules

I think they're valid points to raise.

For the first one, we really have no idea whether it was Stradley's decision or not, and given his role in Dark Horse and its Star Wars wing I think it's fair to assume that, at the least, he was prominently involved even if it wasn't entirely him. Not to mention his varied contradictory justifications for why Legacy was cancelled (such as my favorite, trying to pin the blame on fans for not buying more copies of it) seemed highly deflective to me.

And for the second, frankly I'm doubtful a series with as consistently protracted delays as Dark Times would last if it was done by another creative team.

If Dark Times had a different team, you may not get delays but neither would you get the Wheatley art!

While I agree with the spirit of this rule, I still believe someone should say "I have a bad feeling about this" at least once in every Star Wars story.

My view was more that if Wheatley was working on a series written by anyone other than Stradley, Stradley wouldn't be nearly as tolerant of the delays. I get the feeling that if Duursema took five months to do a single issue she wouldn't be drawing for DH any more.

Really, at this point I wish they would just wait until Wheatley finishes all the art for the next arc before even announcing it. I'd rather wait a year and a half and then get five issues monthly than waiting a eight months and then waiting three or four months between issues. It's hard to keep myself invested in monthlies that way.

Although to be completely open, I don't think Wheatley's art is as transcendentally amazing as everyone else here seems to think.

To be fair Legacy got around that by using other artists, Jan drew the bulk of Legacy, but not all of it. The big difference is I'd say Wheatley is the Dark Times artist now, I don't see anyone else in the role, just as Colin Wilson is the same for Invasion.

On art and delays, my take is the art produced at the end has to justify the delay, Wheatley's work generally does that in my eyes. I think we're past the days where artists are deemed to be interchangeable, fans are more attentive to styles and will respond to an abrupt change, Legacy had a quite noticeable general style in effect. What this means is that an editor's latitude to hire and fire is reduced which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I'd agree about the soliciting and planning, that is an area for improvement though, at this point, I'm only buying TPBs so I'm not that bothered about the monthly schedule!

What you say kind of ties into my point, though. Other Star Wars series routinely add in replacement artists when the original artist gets behind. They all do it. Dark Times is the only ongoing series that I can think of that doesn't do that, and it's also the only one written by the Dark Horse Star Wars editor. And that's great that it doesn't bother you because you don't read monthlies, but it I do and it absolutely bothers me. At this point I would absolutely rather get an artist who can keep to a time table because whenever I do end up getting a new copy of Dark Times, it's long enough that I've forgotten what's gone before.