Re-compress the Storylines

June 20th, 2004

Filed under: Comics

I am really getting sick of “decompressed” storylines. First of all, what does decompressed mean? Were the previous stories compressed? I suspect it’s just a fancy way of saying “padded out for at least three extra issues.”

I have nothing against multi-part storylines. Suddenly, however, every mainstream comic seems to be churning out stories in five- and six-part story arcs. The trouble is that the storylines can’t support that long an arc. What would have been a great two- or three-part story is stretched and padded so much that the readers lose their interest part way through. I find it hard to justify spending my hard-earned money on books that go nowhere fast.

Some books can handle the longer arcs better. Sandman could pull it off, and Fables handles it well. Most other books don’t.

I’ve been getting more and more irritated about these long storylines, but what brought it to a head was Supreme Power #10. It took 22 pages and $2.99 to say “Princess leaves cave, goes to Hyperion. Doctor Spectrum wakes up in cocoon, talks to naked finned woman; then he leaves.” Three bucks for that? There was more story between commercials in Babylon 5! Sure, there was some nice art in the issue (and lots of fan service) by Gary Frank, but that still comes nowhere close to salvaging the issue. My money and I are going elsewhere.

5 Responses to “ Re-compress the Storylines ”

  1. Mark
    June 21st, 2004 at 12:43 am

    “Princess leaves cave, goes to Hyperion. Doctor Spectrum wakes up in cocoon, talks to naked finned woman; then he leaves.”

    You know, I’ve got a few Bob Haney comics off eBay, issues of The Brave and the Bold, and more than that happens on ONE PAGE. There’s one where, I swear, Batman finds out some kids are holding Gotham hostage with a nuke, he tells the kids he won’t involve the cops, he goes to inform the police, and then TO THE WHITE HOUSE to tell the president to STAY OUT OF IT, and then, bam, next panel, back in Gotham. The speech balloons coming from the White House are the best.

    Just think how long a hostage situation like that in Gotham would take these days…!

  2. Matt Rossi
    June 21st, 2004 at 1:58 am

    Yeah, the Weisinger era Superman was even more compressed. He could fight a Kryptonian flame dragon on page 2, go to ancient Troy on page 3, and be back in the Fortress on page 4. There’s a page in the original Luthor/Brainiac team-up where they travel to a planet inhabited by living ships, another planet where Brainiac shrinks down the fearsome Tri-beasts, and then they actually stop at Lexor where Lex gets a hug from Ardora, his future wife… this all takes place on one page.

  3. Legomancer
    June 21st, 2004 at 7:58 am

    I hear you. I have no problem with a six-issue story that actually needs six issues to tell, but too many comics these days just meander on aimlessly. I’m told it’s a symptom of trade paperbacks…one story = six issues = one TPB, but that misses the point of why people love the old 80-page giants and such. It was not because you got one drawn out Superman story, but because you got four or five of them!

  4. Shawn Fumo
    June 22nd, 2004 at 10:43 pm

    Yeah.. you can get to extremes on either end. And despite people complaining about manga starting the whole decompression trend, I’ve found many of them really aren’t that bad. Even stuff like One Piece usually has something happen in each chapter and usually a cliff-hanger.

    A while back someone compared decompression of story to decompression of artwork, and I think that is a valid thing. You can do something like take multiple panels to zoom into someone’s face to emphasize it in a film-like way as opposed to a single panel with a big exposition text balloon, while still advancing the story itself at a decent rate. Thinking in terms of movies, you could have all kinds of things happen in one continuous shot, or you could have a simple conversation at a table that had many quick cuts in it…

  5. Jamesmith3
    June 23rd, 2004 at 1:56 pm

    You’re not talking about “decompressed” stories. You’re talking about slow stories. No one was giving it a fancy name when Frank Miller was doing it on DAREDEVIL back in the day, but everybody thought it was cool. There are moments there, and later in his BATMAN work, where Miller would break a moment into several panels. This is one way of extending time on the comics page. Another way might be to use large panels, even for minor moments, encouraging you to linger on that panel.

    Decompression is a tool, used like any other. A film may have a montage in the middle of it– very rarely are whole films composed of a montage. A pop song will have a bridge– the bridge isn’t the entire song. Somehow (personally, I blame Mark Millar) “decompression” got confused with “slow” and what everybody’s really having a conniption fit over is the fact that the economies of the American market are changing. Trying to satisfy both the periodical and trade readership with the same material is putting unnatural stress on the writers. And, apparently, the readers.

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