I’m edging up against a few deadlines, so today’s thoughts are going to be a bit more open-ended. (The first draft said “shorter” too, but, uhh…) I want to stick to a regular Thursday post, and I think it’s a healthy habit to gather some musings each week, but paying gigs take priority.
My boyfriend and I spent last weekend at KatsuCon in Washington, D.C., showing off his most recent cosplay builds (omgitscosplay on Instagram!), which was a breezy, unusual experience for someone almost wholly sequestered in western comics. Conventions centered around American comics and comic-related media are an awkward mix between fan expo and professional networking event, and always feel like they have a hierarchy built in between publishers, fans, celebrities, etc. I’m sure KatsuCon has a degree of that, with Japanese industry guests, voice talent, and well-known cosplayers, but it felt way more like a nerdy (very queer) prom. The focus seemed to be dressing up, seeing other people dress up, and just having fun.
Of course, that fun takes a lot of work beforehand, and my man had been toiling away night after night for weeks on his armor. Now that he’s between builds for a bit, I’ve been persuading him into movie marathons, starting with One Cut of the Dead, a recent Japanese zombie movie. I’d encourage you to check it out (exclusively on Shudder in the U.S., it seems) knowing as little as possible—One Cut of the Dead is a total blast, but works best if you don’t know anything going in besides the fact that it does have a twist.
I say that it’s helpful to know the existence of said twist because the first half hour of the movie may lose you otherwise. It’s hard to explain why without giving too much away, but there were definitely moments where I didn’t understand how so many respected horror fans recommended this film. But...we stuck with it, and once the film revealed itself, it answered my previous doubts and was nonstop fun until the closing credits.
This aspect of One Cut of the Dead sort of dovetails into a lot of the thoughts and frustrations I have about monthly comics and the conversations around them. The movie requires that you sit through a questionable 30 minutes before you really understand where it’s going. That’s a full third of the film, and way more time than the average streaming viewer is going to give something before bouncing. If I didn’t know that OCotD revolved around some sort of twist, I’m not sure I’d have stuck it out either.
We see this problem constantly in comics, and I worry a lot about what it’s doing to the artistic side of the medium (not the actual art, but comics-as-art). But the most frustrating aspect might be how easy it is to sympathize with both “sides” of this debate.
Comic shelves are full to bursting with options, and, as my pal James Tynion IV’s latest newsletter framed it, each new comic isn’t just competing with everything else coming out this month, but with every comic that came before it that’s still popular and in print. To some extent, we’re all up against Alan Moore’s and Grant Morrison’s greatest hits forever, as if there wasn’t already enough pressure in this business.
Approached from that angle, it makes sense that the average reader doesn’t have the equivalent of a half hour of runtime to give to comics that take a while to get to the point. It’s part of why we see so many books sold on their “high concepts” alone—get the reader to grab the issue based on the elevator pitch, and hope they like the characters and setting and storytelling method enough to stick around. Especially as comics climb in price, and established publishers do everything they can to make you feel compelled to pick up their entire interconnected line, Joe or Jane Comicfan may not have the budget, will, and/or time to read an entire arc of a new series to see if they’re into it.
From the shrewdest of financial angles, I get why rushing that first-issue hook makes total sense. From a storytelling standpoint, though...I can’t help but wonder how many comics are getting screwed over by this impulse. Without naming names, how many creator-owned comics have you picked up that lead with a heavily front-loaded, hook/twist-driven first issue, and then just...peter out? How many times have you gotten to the second or third issue of an original series and struggled to recall character names or motivations, because so much of the first arc revolves around that initial conceptual hook or twist?
Or, how many times have you seen a first issue, either original or corporate IP, that’s heralded by comics press and fans as the hot new item, only for future issues to be largely overlooked as they settle into a more sustainable rhythm? It doesn’t take a drop in quality to prompt a drop in attention—the periodical nature of the business is so driven by the Next Big Thing model that long-form stories feel like the exceptions these days, not the norm they were in years past. A book can stay really heckin’ good for a dozen issues but lose its “moment” because 15 other hot new books come out in the meantime, and we only have so much time, attention, and hype to throw around. There are counter-examples to be made: Immortal Hulk, for instance, is the rare case of a book just being consistently great and surprising enough to rise to the top without any gimmicks. It has regularly reinvented itself, but always in service of the same story Al Ewing and Joe Bennett started in issue #1.
I can’t help but wonder, though, how many beloved runs may never have existed if creators weren’t given sufficient runway to launch. Grant Morrison’s Animal Man doesn’t really come into focus until after its first arc. I’m in the camp of readers who enjoy the first volume of The Sandman, but I understand the frequent line that it doesn’t “get good” until its second storyline. Transmetropolitan is one of the most relevant, most prescient comics ever published, but I can’t blame anyone whose takeaway from the first issue alone is that Spider Jerusalem is too much of an irredeemable ass to stick with for 60 issues. And these are just verified classics we’re talking about here, let alone the could-have-beens that don’t instantly come to mind.
The current X-books are another interesting case. I was glued to X-Twitter while House of X and Powers of X were coming out on a weekly schedule, and watching the shift some readers experienced from HoXPoX to the Dawn of X ongoing-series rollout drove me crazy. When HoXPoX was weekly, a high percentage of readers could weather one or two issues that didn’t do much for them, or didn’t seem to move the plot along too substantially. But when DoX started, even on the initial accelerated shipping schedules, a portion of HoXPoX readers bounced almost immediately. It didn’t matter to them that Hickman’s goal was always to set up a new status quo that will play out across the line for a few years and open up the sandbox to other creators—they wanted the central story/mystery and they wanted it ASAP. For those readers, the ideal Hickman X-era may well have been just another six or 12 issues to finish HoXPoX like one mega-event, rather than a full line as intended.
That’s not to say that those fans were the majority. The DoX books are doing well across the board, and are even gaining readers in some cases. Two of the ongoings, Excalibur and X-Force, leaned into the goodwill earned by HoXPoX to tease out their premises over several issues, rather than arriving at the pitch in #1. X-Force #1 does end on a big cliffhanger, but it takes three full issues to really assemble the titular X-Force and give the team its marching orders. Ben Percy could build that pacing out because Hickman hooked enough readers to lower the attrition risk, and because Marvel committed to getting the DoX books out on a biweekly basis at first. Had X-Force launched on its own during a different era, with rising talent like Percy and Joshua Cassara, taking three whole monthly issues to get to “the point” could have been a death sentence.
This month, the DoX books are beginning their second arcs, and already I see readers giving up and declaring the whole thing a bust because it’s no longer a single puzzle unfolding weekly, but an ongoing playground for a wide array of Krakoa-related stories. From my perspective, HoXPoX was always a launch pad, and as invested as I was in the 12-issue setup, I was in it for the long haul. For others, though, HoXPoX was Hickman’s allotted 30 minutes, and the fact that DoX didn’t immediately replicate and increase the constant dopamine hits of HoXPoX means that 30 minutes is up.
There are no easy solutions here—I promised an open-ended question, and that’s what you’re getting if you’re reading this—but it’s something we could all stand to think about. Who gets a runway and who doesn’t, and what are we losing as creators and as readers when we take that runway away? Someone of Hickman’s standing can afford to lose impatient readers, but newer talents haven’t built up that cushion yet, and may have to choose between risking reader attrition and comprising the best format and pacing for their stories. The former seems like the more immediate danger, but how much long-term damage are we doing when we force books into that quick-hit format? And how do those of us in the beginning stages of our careers get readers to give us that 30-minute window in the first place? As I work on some of my first multi-issue projects, these are the big thoughts hanging over my head. Well, and how awesome One Cut of the Dead was, anyway. Seriously—Shudder, stream it.