So, I have a question. Are monthly comics really monthly comics or are they just chapters of larger books? I suppose you could boil this down to the “writing for the trade” versus “writing for the issue” debate. But it seems like there’s a little bit more to it than that.

Let’s rewind a bit. Forever and ever ago, it was that the only way you could get your comics was to get them in single issues. There were no trades, unless you counted the odd collection that showed up in bookstores or the like. Marvel did several of these through the seventies and eighties before the age of the trade collection even started. And, truthfully, it was one of the ways that I found myself primed to be turned into a Marvel zombie when I hit comics around 1980 or so. ORIGINS and SON OF ORIGINS and BRING ON THE BAD GUYS all served as my basic Marvel primer, and really you could do a lot worse as an introduction to Marvel comics of the time.

So, as a result of that, comics were written to be 16 or 22 page long comic stories. Sometimes they were done in one, oftentimes they were two or three issue long stories (but constructed such that you could leap in even at the last chapter and be more or less up to speed.) Once in a while, you got an entire run which interlocked (sometimes gracefully, sometimes not) into a long story. DOCTOR STRANGE went on like this, after a few rough starts, to form a huge epic. Go read it if you don’t believe me. There’s an uninterrupted story that runs for most of the duration of ESSENTIAL DOCTOR STRANGE v.1. Most famously (at least for myself) was Chris Claremont’s run on UNCANNY X-MEN, which made a long story that you could argue ended at X-MEN #138, though you could easily take the stance that it’s still ongoing. I only had patience for the next hundred or so issues (and momentum played a role in that.)

These are far from the only ones, but they suffice for example’s sake, and at least one of them is fresh in my mind, having spent a good chunk of my recent reading time with the iPad and UNCANNY, issues 94-142, which is what, six years or so of material? And while there’s major digressions in the Claremont/Byrne plot, those issues do form a fairly coherent whole (though the end of it was quite definitely made like a sausage in a bloody and grinding process). Yes, there were plenty of sub-stories or arcs that went on for two or three issues along the way, but even in those, there were constant callbacks to the over-arcing plotline and developments there. New characters were introduced mysteriously and sometimes payoffs were years in the coming. For all of its problems, there’s plenty to learn about longform storytelling there. There’s also an insane amount of information packed into those pages.

And those single issues were the only way to get that information. Which is why I tracked down all the issues I could afford as a kid. I wanted the story (but when you start talking about twenty bucks an issue in 1980 dollars, then I lose my strength of will.)

Now there’s ESSENTIALS and OMNIBII and regular old trade collections of a lot of this material. Completely unthinkable back then. At least it was unthinkable until later in the age of the direct market, and in particular, a little book called SANDMAN, which was one of the first books that you could collect the entire run of *without* getting a single issue off the newsstands. Granted, that wasn’t an instant process. It took a long time for DC to get all the books out, but not that long. In fact, by the time of the third or fourth collection, SEASON OF MISTS, hardcover versions of the comics were being offered within less than a year of the newsstand publication. Now this is as memory serves me. I might be mangling some facts here.

However, there’s no doubt that you could get all of SANDMAN as hardback books within a short time of the series itself ending. This was a very big deal. And it was also exceedingly unusual.  SANDMAN was also unusual in that it was a discrete whole (argue about how successful a whole it was somewhere else, please), sixty-five or so issues coming together as a single work.

In 1994. Not so much today, where it’s unusual that a book isn’t collected, no matter how poorly it ended up doing on the stands. We can talk about leading market expectations and double-dipping all we want to. I’m a little more interested in the changes to story construction. See, another innovation of the early Direct Market age on comics was the introduction of this thing called the mini-series. This allowed for characters to do offbeat stories that perhaps didn’t fit in the larger soap-opera narratives that drove most superhero comics back then (and let’s be clear, most of my knowledge of this era is intertwined with that genre). Now, this isn’t really a good thing if you look strictly quality wise. For every ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, you had a thousand generic and dull minis taking up space.

However, the miniseries did begin to get people thinking about single issues not necessarily as a single issue, but as a chapter of a larger story. Maybe it’s a fine distinction, but it seems like a pretty real one. Mini-series also accustomed readers to expecting a “real” story to be a kind of discrete unit of multiple parts. Mini-series also, by and large, lended themselves to collection more easily, at least the solidly-constructed ones did. Now, we can argue about the portability of say a CAPTAIN AMERICA story of that time, in that there was so much information that needed to be covered to make the character’s motivations understandable in that short amount of story space, but let’s leave that aside for now.

So you have two developments. One, stories being planned to be four or six issues and to stand on their own, separately from the main line that spawned them. Two, books of about six or so issues of material becoming collected and available on their own. Around the turn of the century (yeah, I can say that now), you see a big upswing in the number of collections being offered by the major publishers. Some of this is classic material, but a lot of it is simply every time that the next six issues of whatever series comes out, so does a collection, assuming a story that fits in that slot.

Oddly, a lot of storylines in the monthly comics began to fit into the timeframe of about six months. And here’s where I began to get the feeling that instead of getting a monthly comic, I was getting just a chapter of a story. I suppose I shouldn’t denigrate that, but if the intention is to tell the story over six months, then what’s my impetus to get the latest chapter once a month. Instead, I began to wait for the collections to come out. The wait wasn’t very long, as these things went, and the whole thing would read better for it.

Sure, I made exceptions. I rabidly devoured Grant Morrison’s run on NEW X-MEN as it came out. Same with THE FILTH. Same with SLEEPER. Same with CATWOMAN. Same with several other books, I’m sure. I also ended up getting all of those in trade collections, since they’re a lot easier to re-read that way. Looking at the books that came from longform works, there’s still individual chapters there which are great single issue stories, done in ones, as they used to be called. That’s not so much the case in the collected mini-series, which really are just single chapters.

I guess what I’m getting to is that the single issue really isn’t that. It’s a chapter. It’s not necessarily a little tidbit that’ll pay off in a year or in six months. It’s an act of a story that will be collected in a couple of months. The only reason I’d want to read it RIGHT NOW was so that I could converse about it online, I mean, aside from obvious issues of story quality and the like. And really, I don’t talk about comics on fora online much anymore. The story is being written for the larger collection, so I lose nothing waiting for that collection. The impetus to have it now has cooled to arctic temperatures, for a variety of reasons, but primary among them is that the reading experience won’t be lessened if I wait.

People often puzzle around the question “How do we make monthly comics attractive again?” Part of me thinks that’s an insane question. Why would you even want to, would be my reply. Then my next reply would be to say that you’d need to make comics that demand monthly attention. I have to say, even the comics that I love, I don’t rush out for every month. KING CITY, which is as good as anything that’s coming out now, has become something that I’m waiting on. Yes, I’m a bad fan and I’m killing comics by not rushing out and getting the monthlies. I’ve heard it before. Repeatedly. It was old seven years ago. It’s older now. So maybe it’s impossible for you to devise a comic that I’d rush out to get every month, unless it was something on the quality level of Morrison’s run on DOOM PATROL.

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath for that.

Honestly though, even a book like SCALPED, as good as Jason Aaron and R.M. Guéra make that book, and even as surprising and shocking as the single issue standalone stories are, even that book is something that I wait out on trades for. I dunno. Something snapped somewhere. It’s a strange equation, but I’d rather pay twenty bucks for a whole than three bucks for a chapter. I’ll never go back to that chapter again, that single issue. It’ll get read and put in the box. But I’ll read those trades over again from time to time.

The funny thing? I want a book to grab me like that, grab me so hard that I don’t want to wait for it. It hasn’t happened yet. Not lately. That’s probably more a statement of my reading tastes than it is an indictment of quality of the books out there. But wouldn’t that be amazing? To be swept up in a longform epic that didn’t feel like a trade collection waiting to happen? To get that single issue that perfectly illuminates a corner of the book’s world? But I suspect that very construction was due to the newsstand form and now we have a new paradigm for this new market.

And please, let’s not think I’m excusing my own work from this critique. The single issues of STRANGEWAYS would, by and large, not be compelling single issues. They are chunks of a larger whole, since the book was written that way. But I’ll march out and say it. When I hear writers say that they’re not writing for trades, I usually roll my eyes. There are writers who make great single issue comics (which is much harder than you’d think), and great artists to draw them. But stories now are constructed from these chunklets into these chunks. And the chunks are something that I can wait on just fine. The chunklets are something I bypass altogether.