Head In the (Story) Clouds

Head In the (Story) Clouds

Apr 06

With the Irish wake that Marvel (with the “seven years in the making” Siege) and DC (the sprawling, obese baby that is Blackest Night) are giving the “event comic”*, I have been thinking about how the impact of these projects is felt across the line and how the ripples that come out of them affect a title’s normal continuity.  This is partly because I think too much about comic books and partly because I’m devoting some serious thought to writing them right now and, as such, trying to crack the nut of what exactly makes the whole “Worlds Will Live. Worlds Will Die”, “Nothing will be the same”, “Break the Internet in half” kind of thing work (and it does work; I’m a sucker for it, even if I end up being disappointed).

Last night, Marvel editor Jordan White (whose handlebar mustache may be the most intimidating facial hair I have ever seen in person) was tweeting about his feelings on Blackest Night after reading thirty-eight parts of the eight part series in one week. In talking about the disjointed structure of the story within its own self-contained titles (Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, and the Blackest Night miniseries) he referred to the whole thing as a “story cloud.”  He defines the term like so:

It was not written with each issue being its own story–clearly each issue was only part of a greater whole. You don’t get the full tale.

BUT–it was not written for the trade, either. Even a trade won’t have the full story. The GL trade will be missing a lot of story.

Even the “main” Blackest Night book is going to be a lot of other heroes reacting to things that are REALLY spinning from GL’s book.

The story cloud has been a trend that has become more pervasive at Marvel and DC over the past 5-7 years, what I think a lot of fans will recognize as the beginning of the Johns and Bendis dynasties.  Both publishers invested some of the revitalizing momentum they were building up into annual events that involved the casts of several of its flagship books and promised vast changes – no more mutants, mustache-twirling government shill Tony Stark, Aquaman is dead/Aquaman is alive, et cetera ad infinitum. The rhythm that both DC and Marvel fell into was one of replenishing the story cloud.

The difference between the two -  one I’ve written about before but not one I’ve been able to articulate well without a name like ‘story cloud’ to give it – is that while DC’s events are the story cloud, Marvel uses its events to create the cloud.

On one hand, you have Blackest Night – it’s a story cloud.  It has 6 miniseries that tie into it, an arc in nearly every ongoing that DC is publishing and each of the ‘resurrected’ one-shots that were released in January.  With CoIE, the cloud started with all of The Monitor’s shadowy appearances in books like New Teen Titans a year before and continued through the event and its various ‘red sky’ tie ins and into the relaunches of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and the Justice League in the aftermath. But then a regular status quo reestablished itself until the next big event came along.  This is great at ramping up the ‘need it’ factor of an event, where the fans’ loudest complaint is that they only want to buy the books that are absolutely necessary for them. In the case of Blackest Night, that was the mini itself and the two Green Lantern titles – 18 issues at the very least over a 9 month period.  The story is written in such a way that you have to read each of those to get a reasonably full picture of what happens – events that start in one are resolved in another or bleed through all three.  Some important beats get doled out in issues like the ‘skip month’ Atom and Hawkman issue or Adventure Comics.  When fans say they feel like they “have to read everything” this is what they are talking about.

Siege, on the other hand, and Civil War, Secret Invasion and House of M before it, are mostly self-contained events. There are plenty of tie-ins, but none of them have a major plot impact on the stories, although some of them (the Pulse tie-in to House of M is a good example) have emotional resonance that can frame the story in a certain way. The example that I gave, though, is a Hawkeye story and if you don’t like Hawkeye, it’s easily skippable.  In my experience, there hasn’t been a vital tie-in to any of Marvel’s recent events that has changed the essential fabric of the larger story.  With these events, the line-wide plot contracts around one title for a few months and then expands out into a new story cloud – a massive status quo change like the passage of the SHRA and the Initiative or the rise of Norman Osborn – big developments that steer the direction of the overplot for the next year and beyond (this summer’s Shadow Land story – which presumably spins out of Daredevil – has its origins in things that happened during Dark Reign) and its umbrella covered everything from the Avengers to the X-Men to the Agents of Atlas.  In that atmosphere, readers really can pick and choose what they want to interact with without feeling like they’re missing something vital to their reading experience.  That’s the vital distinction that I think gets missed sometimes – it’s less about keeping up with ‘the universe’ as much as it is keeping up with the reader’s universe, the one that contains the characters, creators and titles that he or she follows.  So much of what con-goers tell panelists is the feeling of being ‘forced to buy’ comes from a storyline trying to steer that reader out of his or her defined comfort zone.

Story clouds seem like they’re here to stay on a macro level, at least until the next major shift in the way we consume comics. At their best, they can be incredibly engaging and at their worst they’re irritating cash sinks, but are they inherently good or bad or is it all in how they’re executed?  What do you think?  Do story clouds work for you or would you rather see them go the way of the holofoil cover?  Let us know in the comments.

*The event comic itself is an artifact that is still less than 30 years old if we’re going to point to Crisis on Infinite Earths as the first true event comic.**

**A self-contained story that effects the entirety of a shared universe whose outcome changes that universe’s status quo, usually through the abrupt addition or subtraction of characters or concepts.