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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Shortcomings
John Siuntres always puts on a good show with Word Balloon and his chat with Richard Starkings is no exception. Near the end of the two hour interview Starkings says that the main difference he sees in genre comics now as opposed to when he grew up is how much slower the story telling is. I heard that and I thought "sheesh, he's right on the money."
I know that Starkings is doing what a lot of comic book fans do which is compare what's coming out now to what he was reading when he was 11-years-old. No matter what's actually happening in comics it all makes a perfect kind of sense in your brain at that age that everything afterwards can't compare. But the man behind Comicraft is making some good points. He grew up with British reprints of '60s Marvel comics and 2000AD. Creators would have these long soap operas serialized in the story but within the confines of a ten page Judge Dredd or 22 page Spider-Man story you got a good chunk. That really is the term I think is best to describe what I read in these older comics. I'm going through the Essential X-Men volumes. That book started out with 17 pages a month but Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum filled every panel with multiple ideas. Certainly Claremont's prone to verbiage but at that point in the run it isn't bothersome. There's real content to back up the posing.
Mentioning Claremont (I'm writing this as I go along, nothing's planned on the blog!) made me realize that how in terms of story pace writers were really fighting against the form. Writing about Steve Gerber a few weeks ago I realize that, even though I know this didn't make creators very happy, I like the tension that comes from writers and artists trying to fit in an expansive consciousness about the medium when the conventional wisdom had such a minuscule view on what comics could be. Trying to tell a story with a rigid page count and firm expectations as to what will happen by the end puts demands on the creators that can be a catalyst for creativity. How do they fit in what they need to when they know 22 pages have to be filled every month? I'm not a fan of number crunchers telling artists how something has to be done. But I do believe that great art comes from having clear limitations and doing everything you can to work around them. It creates problems that your brain has to stretch itself to solve. More and more I've found that's what storytelling is. You have a concept in mind and then you're on way to solve various problems getting in your way of you telling the story in any effective manner.
Someone doing superhero books now doesn't have to push against the boundaries as much as those who came before him or her did. Believe me, when I heard that Marvel's editors let Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker let the last issue in their Seven Cities of Heaven arc be double-sized I was happy. The story's great and I want them to tell it how they want to. But time and time again, especially with writers coming from mediums beyond comics, I see stories that have as much content as what would have been two issues of a book in 1968 but is now told in six issues. I imagining the writers working with editors on story beats, realizing that six issues you have a three act structure that works very well, especially if you follow the Act 2A and Act 2B rules. But I think it's taking advantage of the medium better if you cram as much content into a small container. Some stories need to take their time. But if your aspirations are a modest hero vs. villain idea you can add some psychic weight to it by compressing everything. The reader will be in such a dizzy from getting so much information so fast there's an added feeling of urgency to the proceedings. Of course there's also the danger that the story could be a confusing mess.
It's a bit bizarre of me to do a rambling, unplanned post hailing the economic story craft. I didn't even get to the good examples of writers telling a story in 144 page books. Hey, I think Brain Bendis and Alex Maleev's Daredevil books are some of the best superhero comics in recent memory. I hope to add to and refine my point as opposed to, well, contradicting it.
What I'm basically saying is: read Casanova.
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