Highway 62

Inspired by this post at Speedforce.

Wherein the reader comes to the conclusion that if you judge a serialized story by its first half, you may be missing out on some good stuff.  The instance they bring up is THE ILLUSIONIST, which I haven’t seen.  The writer notes that the first half is awful, dominated by Characters Behaving Badly, but that the second half of the movie redeems itself and makes the whole of the experience worthwhile.  But if they’d been reading a serial form, they wouldn’t have watched/read past part 1.  Presenting in a whole package, however, allows for the whole of the story to be experienced (tautology is your friend.)

This is all pretty obvious stuff.  But sometimes even the obvious needs to be drilled into our heads when it ceases to be.

Now, how does this apply to comics?  Not as well as you’d think.  I’m going to break some bad news to you here.  Most serial comics aren’t really telling stories.  They’re giving the readers plots.  Some are immensely entertaining, some plod, some are repellent, some are simply dull and have no defining characteristics at all.  See, stories have ends.  They cease.  They conclude.  Plots end too, to be sure.  But then it just leads on to another plot and pretty soon, you’re just on a treadmill constructed of plots sewn together and you’re telling Jane to stop this crazy thing.  But you’ve got the plots ending and starting to make you think that there’s progress going on.  Ultimately, though, you’re not going to be able to tinker with the characters at the center of the plots too much, because if you do, then you’re going to have to start spitting out different plots that make sense for the characters involved.

In other words, the goose that lays the golden eggs is not going to get cooked.

This can be worked around.  For instance, and here’s a big secret that I’m not supposed to tell you, but I’m going to anyways.  You know why LAW AND ORDER works? (or used to, haven’t watched in many years).  It works because it cheats.  It tells stories about the defendants, stories that wrap up and conclude, but the major characters, the cops and the lawyers (I always thought Ben Stone was ten times the lawyer that McCoy was) do not really change.  You can get the best of both worlds this way.  You can have characters that are crushed or uplifted, but are essentially new every time, but you can surround them with familiar characters that anchor things.

Oh, yes, I use this.  The primary story in MURDER MOON comes from Rale, the wolf.  Collins is a big actor, and he’s on the page more than the werewolf, but he doesn’t really change.  He makes some realizations, and hopefully remains interesting enough that you’ll want to tune into his adventures in THE THIRSTY and continue his story.  But I have to dole those changes out pretty carefully if I’m going to have his story play out effectively over the length of the series.  The other characters surrounding Collins go through big changes and transformations (some more fatal than others, literally and figuratively), but Collins can’t, not immediately.

Superman and Batman can’t either.  They can be filtered through different voices, some more interesting than others.  But they’re never going to fundamentally change who they are.  Over time, sure.  The Batman of 1980 and the Batman of 2000 are different, some of those changes good and some are just really monotone and dull.

So applying the unit of story measurement, or even attempting to, in longform serial comics, is a pretty tricky thing.  How patient are you?  I’ll tell you, there usually isn’t enough story value in a single issue of *any* comic to make a snap judgement on that.  You have to get through a trade to get anywhere substantial now.  This isn’t a whine.  This is a fact.  I’ll buy the first issue of a series to test it out and see if I’ll want to come back to the trade later on.  Yes, I know.  I killed MYSTERIUS THE UNFATHOMABLE like that.  Sorry, Jeff and Tom.  This is even slipperier with franchise characters, who by their nature are Golden Geese and exempt from the rotisserie.  Creator owned books are usually easier to get a bead on, or any book with a strong authorial voice (sometimes a good thing, sometimes makes me want to run screaming for the hills).

Now, can you tell if a plot is going to be any good in a single issue?  Dunno.  Trickier question.  First one is usually set up, and is often pretty slow.  But I’ll be darned if I’m going to buy two issues of a six issue story that I’ll just want to read in a trade later.  It’s great that I have this choice of formats, but it’s also terrible.  I guarantee you if I buy a story in single issues, I’ll never go back to re-read it.  Ever.  Maybe if I had them on digital files I’d revisit them.  Now, is this a tragedy?  Some stories only need to be read once.

For me, this issue more than anything else is at the center of “mainstream” versus “what everyone reads” in comics.  It’s also the heart of the singles/trades debate, though it’s usually not framed as such (often more uselessly as “You just hate comics and want them to die!”, which I’ve had said to me more than once.)