The part where we talk about comics again
As you may have noticed, Alex and I are working on a project called 'The Hand.' It's coming, I promise. You will love it. I gave the script to one of our friends to read through and critique, and one of his comments was that it wasn't dense enough.
The hell you say.
One of our main goals while writing The Hand was to make the story (our first 22 page comic) as dense as we could. Both in spirit and in pacing we wanted to harken back to silver age style, where a whole story could be told in one issue, and it could be a darn fun one at that. None of this decompressed storytelling for us. I personally don't go in for it most of the time, and given that we have a, shall we say, sporadic publishing schedule, it would be a great disservice to our readers to not give them a full story each time out.
And then I realized: Our friend has been learning comics on a steady diet of 80s classics. He has read, at my behest, Watchmen, Sandman, and Grant Morrison's Animal Man and Seaguy. The only one of these published in the last 10 years is the still going Seaguy. His conception of comic book pacing doesn't include the massive shift that's occurred over the last two decades. It never snapped into such clear focus just how much has changed until now. In seeking to recompress our storytelling we still haven't matched the incredible narrative density of the 80s masters. And thinking back on it, comic narrative has probably been at its densest in the 30s and 40s (when an entire scene was often a signle panel) and then in the 80s (I think actual words have fallen out of my copy of Crisis On Infinite Earths, just for lack of space).
So swing pendulum, swing. For $3 an issue we deserve a hell of a lot more story than we've been getting.
The hell you say.
One of our main goals while writing The Hand was to make the story (our first 22 page comic) as dense as we could. Both in spirit and in pacing we wanted to harken back to silver age style, where a whole story could be told in one issue, and it could be a darn fun one at that. None of this decompressed storytelling for us. I personally don't go in for it most of the time, and given that we have a, shall we say, sporadic publishing schedule, it would be a great disservice to our readers to not give them a full story each time out.
And then I realized: Our friend has been learning comics on a steady diet of 80s classics. He has read, at my behest, Watchmen, Sandman, and Grant Morrison's Animal Man and Seaguy. The only one of these published in the last 10 years is the still going Seaguy. His conception of comic book pacing doesn't include the massive shift that's occurred over the last two decades. It never snapped into such clear focus just how much has changed until now. In seeking to recompress our storytelling we still haven't matched the incredible narrative density of the 80s masters. And thinking back on it, comic narrative has probably been at its densest in the 30s and 40s (when an entire scene was often a signle panel) and then in the 80s (I think actual words have fallen out of my copy of Crisis On Infinite Earths, just for lack of space).
So swing pendulum, swing. For $3 an issue we deserve a hell of a lot more story than we've been getting.
2 Comments:
Well, you know how I feel. If the story's good, I don't care how decompressed it is. I mean, there's certainly some bad decompressed stories out there. Rucka's latest Wolverine arc was about three parts too long, and what the hell is going on in Azzarello's Superman?
And on the other end of the spectrum, compression doesn't necessarily mean good. I mean, Crisis is BAD. I'd gladly take one of Rucka's superfluous issues of Wolverine over any issue of Crisis. I mean how many times can you destroy the Anti-Monitor's latest doomsday machine but still let him get away to menace you next issue without it getting tedious? The answer is none.
I'll agree it's currently out of hand in American comics. I think Marvel's policy of kicking off every new series with a six-issue arc is ludicrous. But then there are a few titles with a big enough cast to support it. Runaways springs to mind, considering it has 18 all-new characters to introduce while still actually adhering to any sort of narrative.
I suppose we can blame Warren Ellis for the rampant decompression, but at least he can do it right (Planetary, Authority), although not always (Ultimate Nightmare is interesting, but reads crappily in issue form). But Ellis picked it up from manga, and manga is DESTROYING American comics, saleswise. I'm at Borders for my lunch break almost every day, and their manga section has grown larger (and neater and more organized) than the graphic novel shelf, and there are always several people of various ages and genders (women reading comics!) poking around the manga. I'm usually the only one checking into Spider-Man. So can you really blame American comics for trying to ape manga's style? (I mean, they'd be more successful apeing manga's varied genres, but the American comics business and audience are nothing if not stubborn.)
Well, I've just come back from dinner (the pizza arrived) so I can't really remember my original point, or if I had an original point at all. I guess the last thing I want to say is that comics, on average are better reading now than they've ever been. So suck it up, man. I do agree that 3 bucks is absurd to pay for one lousy issue. Trades are much better investments. WINK!
-Jeff
Well, now I've just come back from dinner (the pizza had arrived) and I'm not sure what my original point is
I would argue that Planetary is not actually decompressed at all. Planetary is, to my mind, a perfect example of comics pacing. Much like in Sleeper, each issue is an entire story (I think Planetary has only had one two-parter so far) but they all add up to a much larger story over the long run.
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