About a third of all the books Comico published were Elementals comics or Elementals spinoffs, so I guess you could say it was successful.
But it’s also just such an odd series of books, and much of the oddness comes from the way it was made.
Bill Willingham introduced the team in a Justice Machine annual (at a previous company), and then took the series to Comico. Right from the start, Willingham had problems with the publishers. He was apparently paid late for the first couple of issues, and went gung ho to the offices to get his money… but then they made up, and Elementals appeared regularly for a while, with Willingham sometime doing the artwork (very nice artwork, by the way) and sometimes just writing the plot.
The Comics Journal #278, page #77:
DEPPEY: Now, you stated that you really didn’t
have a concept for The Elementals. You really
didn’t have an idea of what the book was about
in any kind of specific way when you first started
working on it. Did that just develop on the fly, or
did you sit down at some point and say, “OK,
I’m going to do a book about this and it will
have this bubbling in the background”?
WILLINGHAM: I suspect it was a little of both. I
mean, literally, when I sent out the sample
pages, I only came up with group just to have
an excuse to show that I could draw page-by-
page sequences of someone. So that’s all I
knew. It’s like, “OK, I need a group, a super-
hero team, how about the four elements?”
He introduced a lot of characters, and so many different conspiracies — but then seemed to lose interest, and Jack Herman would take over the writing — and those issues would introduce other, new things, and nothing would ever be resolved.
So you can easily understand why nobody has published a collected edition of this stuff. I mean, it was a popular series, so you’d expect somebody to at least attempt to get it back into print. But reading the books is just frustrating, because nothing comes of anything.
Anyway, this went on for many years until Andrew Rev bought the Comico after a Chapter 7, and then Comico would just put his name on things without him actually contributing anything:
So… Reading Elementals is a frustrating experience because any given plot strand is always left hanging.
But there’s some entertaining issues here and there, and when Willingham does the artwork, the books are nice to look at, too. But even when Willingham does the book, his primary storytelling instinct seems to be to shock the reader — but without much thought behind it. So whenever a reader writes in to say “err, that’s pretty skeezy”, Willingham would respond with a page of calling the reader stupid, moronic and evil. The funniest example of this is with the first Elementals special, where he did an issue about child sexual abuse and sent it off to a person who works with sexually abused children to get a guest editorial, obviously fishing for something like “ooh, this is such a deep, important work”, and that person responding with (and I paraphrase lightly) “GET AWAY FROM ME YOU FUCKING FREAKS”. (Willingham, of course, responded to that with a butthurt page of text.)
I’m just saying — we’re talking about a pretty ridiculous series, even the best stretches. But, oh, how awful it got once Willingham left and Jack Herman took over the writing completely…
