Comics: Then And Now

(This is an expansion of a passing remark I made back in January about comic writers diluting their scripts.)

I've said it many times: This is a great time to be a comic fan! There's all kinds of variety to be found out there for those who don't like their comic book characters to wear their underwear on the outside, and some pretty impressive superhero titles for those of us who do! In fact, with the Hollywood attention comics are receiving right now, we're probably in the midst of a second Golden Age of Comics, and just won't know it until it's over.

Within my own particular corner of comics - the aforementioned superhero universes - there have been some amazing strides made over the past decade. The paper quality is generally much higher than the newsprint stock we grew up with - although crinkles in the pages seems to be a worse problem than ever before, making the selection of my comics each week a harrowing experience - and the colouring on those pages is amazing! We have artwork that's allowed to bleed right up to the edge of the page, instead of being contained to the panel borders like it use to be. And while there are still bad artists showing up occasionally in the titles I read, more often than not I'm treated to a level of art that would've popped our eyes out of their sockets twenty years ago. Series like Planetary and Starman and maybe even Preacher will be cited for years to come for their consistent excellence and revolutionary contributions to the genre. While it's hard to imagine any period as influential as the mid- to late-80s ever coming around again, what with Maus, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and the start of Sandman, the last ten years have definitely been no slouch!

But having said all that, there's one aspect of current comic storytelling that's really wearing thin on me of late. It's known by various names, but one I've seen that works as well as any other is "decompression." The name stems from the belief among many current comic scribes - most of them very good writers! - that comic stories were historically too compressed in order to fit into their artificial framework of 22, 24, or 32 pages. In other words, among the newer generation of authors working in the field, there's a general eschewing of the need to tell a whole story in the confines of one single issue. The growing popularity of trade paperbacks - collections of a half dozen or more issues into a single volume - has fed into this development as well. And, if that were all there were to it, I'd have no axe to grind. I like extended stories, as shown by my love of the TV shows like Babylon 5, Lost and Heroes, where stories develop gradually, over many episodes or even seasons.

But where comics seem to have gone off the rails in this regard is in how much of their content often reads like filler these days. There are a couple ways I measure this, neither of which are particularly scientific, I'll admit. The first indicator for me is how long it takes to read a comic. Clearly, a long read is not necessarily a good read. I've had to slog through some awful writing, over the past nearly four decades, that's required almost twenty minutes in order to get through a 32-page comic. So I'm not suggesting an automatic correlation between the time a comic takes to read, and its quality. But on the other hand, when I spend $3 and can read the damn thing in less than 5 minutes, I start to wonder if it was really worth the dough! Not to mention, I scratch my head as to just how long it really took to write! More on that shortly.

The second clue as to how under-written many of the current comics are comes over me anytime I take a few minutes to recap the events of one to Vicki, or someone at work, or even right here on this blog. The reality of this period is that, in a typical superhero comic: not much happens! There are lots of splash pages (full or double pages with only one scene, or panel, included), tons of panels filled with people talking about minutiae - often at the same 'deep' level of the Big Mac discussion in Pulp Fiction - and no shortage of pages dedicated to capturing characters moving from Point A to Point B (because there's nothing quite so interesting as watching someone leave an office, walk down a hallway, get on an elevator, ride it down to the lobby, get off the elevator, and exit the building, and God knows you couldn't have simply put a caption that read: "After he left their offices, Tony Stark headed back to Avengers Tower"). To me, as a writer not nearly as talented as any of the people crafting comics today, it seems like that's not the stuff I'd focus on if I were trying to entertain tens of thousands of readers. Or, rather, I'd show it once in a blue moon, as a change of pace, or to provide a brief respite in the action. What we often get, though, is very nearly a steady diet of that sort of thing!

So is this approach a valid tack to take in decompressing comic stories? What I'd hope for would be actual longer stories, with bigger arcs and a greater sweep to them. Instead, I interpret what I'm seeing as being a case of taking what used to fit within a single issue, and simply stretching it out to fill several. In other words, imagine I wrote a short story that told a lovely little tale in five thousand words, and you asked me to keep the story the same but make it twenty thousand words long. I'm sure there's a way to do it such that you'd actually get a better experience than the shorter version; and then there's the method that just pads it out to four times its original length by adding in filler everywhere! I fear we're seeing more than a little of that in the comics being published today.

Why do I think this is happening? Well, for one thing, I'm sure I've read it somewhere, even though I can't think where right now. Plus it makes a certain amount of sense, for a number of reasons. If you're a writer with an idea for a kick-ass Batman/Two-Face tale, and you can easily stretch it into five issues, instead of one or two, you're going to make more money off that one plot. Sure, to sell all five scripts you need to fill it out with stuff that you wouldn't bother with if it were only 22 pages long, but that's easy! Throw in some full-page spreads, and several pages of Bruce Wayne and Alfred bantering about the relative merits of reality TV as a social barometer, and you've just made enough money to buy your own bigscreen! Along similar lines, there've been rumours for awhile that artists were imploring the writers to include less and less actual story in their scripts, because lots of things actually happening slows down the drawing, compared to repetitive shots of talking heads - where sometimes you can even copy one panel many times! If you can skew the plot the right way, it increases the number of pages an artist can crank out (and be paid for). I don't know if there's any truth to that theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if at least some of that were happening.

And of course there are great comics coming out today that don't fall into this trap. Kurt Busiek's Astro City continues to be a joyous - and not quick! - read each time a new issue comes out. Joss Whedon wrote for TV for years and presumably gets the need for making each installment special. The same is true for JMS, although both gentlemen have seemed more inclined to work in a slightly more decompressed (diluted?) manner of late. Maybe their artists have finally gotten to them... :-)

Anyway, in the final analysis, I still love the state of comics right now. I wouldn't want to go back to the days of densely-written crap, thousands of examples of which are filling boxes in my basement. I just wish more of the current crop of authors would read their own product, and ask themselves, "Was there enough actual story there to make it worth $3 or more?"