I'm sitting at my desk next to $40 worth of comics. For that much money I could have bought a flash drive. Oh well.
I haven't yet found a way to explain the difference between reading comics once a month (or twice a year, if it's Moore or Ellis), reading comics in great piles all at onces, and reading them in collected editions.
When you read Transmet by the trades, you get a sense of theme, of narrative structure, of internal references, and of the arc of the whole story.
When you read them one-by-one, though, you're in the story in a whole different way. You live these narratives in, not real time because six issues can take a year but still only cover a few days in the story. Instead, you experience magnified time. Every little thing, ever subtle nuance, is more important, more (oh gods I hate this word with a pasion) 'impactful' (oh I feel dirty for even typing that).
I'm currently in the middle of at least dix different, on-going story arcs in Spider-man, Fantastic Four, Supreme Power (the JMS books), Planetary, Jack Cross, JLA: Classified (the Ellis books), and in Powers and Ultimate Spider-man (Bendis), X-Men and Serenity (Whedon), and finally Neverwhere (adapted from Gaiman).
Holy shit, that's a lot of comics. That's not even the full list. That's just off the top of my head.
Some books are better than others at sticking in my mind. Partly that's because the artists actually stick to their schedules, and some take six months to produe 24 pages because they bite off way fucking more than they could ever hope to chew at once (I'm looking at you, scary British men with scary hair! You know you who are!).
The point is that all of these stories are in the 'present' for me. Comics are told in 'real time,' like movies. I don't mean like 24 is told in real time (and boy is that show unwatchable now. Should have quite after season one). I mean that the events in comics are not depicted in the past tense, like prose. I can think of one that was, Rising Stars, but that's specifically because the events are the re-telling of Poet, and the story does, in fact, meet Poet back in the 'present' by the last issue, which made me cry. Damn you, Straczinski!).
Maybe that presentness (as opposed to 'presence'?) is why I can jump back into them so easily. If introduced well, a story I haven't even thought about for months can leap back into my mind, almost fully formed, at a moment's notice. It's pretty cool, actually. Capitalising on that presentness might be how some writers manage to stick in my mind better.
The 'recap' pages in Marvel's comics, however, are stupid waste of paper. Mark Waid's Flash books spent two panels explaining what was happening through the device of Wally West's narration boxes, and they contained new action, too. So, hey you! Marvel! Blow me. The intro pages are stupid.
Okay, I'm officially rambling now, so I'll just stop.
Posted by orion at September 1, 2005 2:26 PM | TrackBack