"The End" Week: The Intimates #12

Traditionally, the last week of the year is pretty slack in both new comics releases and the comics blogosphere-thing, but not here at Random-Happenstance! ("The Blog that doesn't care if you're there...") All this week, we'll be looking at last issues of various series, then on the first we'll have the Fourth Annual Year in Toys! Now, some books we're going to look at were Marvel-cancelled, as in cancelled then restarted with a new first issue (in some cases, almost immediately) but we'll start out with a book that was cancelled and stayed cancelled: the Intimates #12, written by Joe Casey, art by Ale Garza and Carlos D'anda.

Casey, Jim Lee, and Giuseppe Camuncoli created the Intimates, and for some reason, I thought Lee did some random panels for this issue. Specifically, the Boss Tempo panels, the comic-within-a-comic that Punch is lamenting the cancellation of. (Lee definitely did on earlier issues.)

Ostensibly, the Intimates is about young potential superheroes attending a mysterious school called the Seminary; but then again it's really not. I've read most of the series (from the quarter box...) and off the top of my head, am not really sure on the kids' powers. But that wasn't important. Likewise, the Seminary's conspiracy (involving mind-control and bad school food) doesn't really matter either. The book was more about teenage life, fitting in, not fitting in, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of your life, pretending to know what you're doing when you're absolutely clueless, and screwing up a lot.

The Intimates is a poster child for comics' noble failures, or maybe for books doomed from the start: even Jim Lee's name and involvement couldn't keep it going for over a year. Which isn't that surprising: the state of the direct market in late 2005 wasn't that unlike now. If Jim Lee said tomorrow that he had a full year of WildC.A.T.s or Gen13 ready to print, figure there'd be the usual hype for the first issue, then spiralling sales. If that. But if Lee said he was going to draw the next twelve issues of Batman, sometime between now and 2016, the crowd would go wild. The comics reading fanbase, or at least the direct market, just doesn't seem to want anything new.

And I'm probably as guilty of that as anyone, but I'd at least pick it up out of the quarter boxes.

Although the Intimates was seemingly set in the Wildstorm Universe, if there is such a thing, they haven't appeared since: on the info scroll on the second-to-last page, the kids are "Teleported or disentegrated? U-decide!" Maybe someday they'll be back, but I wouldn't bet the farm. There's a bigger write-up of the book at CBR's Comics You Should Own, and as they advise, you should be able to dig it out of the quarter bin easily enough.