Comics Today

I just put down the latest issue of Warren Ellis' Planetary comic, a series that both dissects comics (and sci-fi, and pulp stories from the '40s, and more) and yet tells a really interesting story. It comes out, unfortunately, very infrequently. I realized as I finished it, that reading this comic is like watching a really good movie, five minutes at a time, every few months.

It's not an inherent comic book problem. Years ago (okay, decades ago), writers put entire stories in a single issue. Sometimes, more than one entire story. With the success of great writers like Ellis, Brian Michael Bendis, and now Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Firefly) in recent comics, though, the entire method of comic book storytelling has changed. Now it's common to see a scene where one character says something in one panel, and then another showing another character's reaction, a third with the second character's retort and then another with a reaction shot of the first character. In a 36-page comic (and that's with 12 pages of ads) like that, not a whole lot happens before you reach the last page.

In comics, it used to be that, panel after panel would be fight scene after fight scene. Each punch or ray blast was carefully shown, perhaps to remind the reader of the amazing powers the characters had. If there was too much "story," a fight scene was thrown in for good measure -- the archetype of this was Spider-Man running into a mugging on his way home from work and beating up the bad guy(s).

Most comics aren't like that anymore at all. Story has taken precedence over fights, and dialogue has become more important than character powers. The details of most fights are glossed over. We know that Superman is tough, and so we're not shown every move he makes. We see the X-Men crashing through the window to get at the terrorists in one panel, and the terrorists have all been dealt with by the next. And I'm not complaining.* But it's an interesting switch. Gone are the days of villains attempting to rob banks. Nowadays, the villains are super-soldiers created through the government's genetic engineering, trying to steal a sample of a retrovirus from a megacorporation that seeks to frame the heroes by... well, let's just say that it's all a lot more complicated.

But with such involved stories, many plot twists, complex characters with realistic relationships, and involved conversations with witty dialogue, not much happens in a given issue. The stories take forever to tell.

Is this a criticism of these writers' work? Not really. I wouldn't change their writing at all. What I would change is this: Comics, as a medium, needs to evolve. The books need to get longer. Maybe the 36-page comic needs to go away entirely. It had its place when these books cost 25 cents (or far less), but most are in the neighborhood of three bucks now. Back before they got so expensive, you could put them on a newsstand and passersby might casually buy an issue the way they'd buy a newspaper. And they'd get a complete story, or at least an enjoyable chunk of one. But I've got to think that that happens far more rarely now. Now you really need to be involved in a comic to buy each issue, and you've got to buy five to six of them to get a whole story.

It would be a more satisfying purchase for me, the consumer, to buy ten issues all in one book for $15 to $20. (Being in publishing myself, I know that one comic 10 times as long does not need to be 10 times the price to be profitable.) Then I'd get a whole story at once. They publish such collections, of course -- and I often buy them rather than individual issues. I wonder whether the natural evolution isn't toward publishing only the collections. That way, the writers aren't confined to writing the story in 36-page spurts but could just let it all flow naturally within 360 pages.

Just a thought.

*Although I can think of some really great older comics that showed every move of a super-hero battle. The Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer versus Tyros the Tamer and Dr. Doom in John Byrne's fantastic run on the Fantastic Four comic comes to mind. So does the confrontation between the X-Men and the Hellfire club in Central Park back when Chris Claremont wrote the book. And Walt Simonson's run on Thor was filled with such fights. These were all the comics I cut my teeth on in the early 1980s, when I really became a fan.

 

Back to Line of Sight Archive Page / Back to Monte's Home Page