Head In the (Story) Clouds
Apr 06With 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 -Â 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.
The Bin – 4/2/10
Apr 02
Have you heard about this? This “Bin” thing? There’s this thing, see, it goes on computers and it comes from the wall. Well, not from the wall, from a cord that comes out of the wall. I think it’s electric.
So you plug in this cord or sometimes it just floats around, this stuff that goes into computers; it floats around you in the air. It puts stuff on your computer. This internet stuff. And these people, they like things and they put it on the internet because I guess they have nothing else to offer the world? And they call it the Bin.
Reconstruction of the Fables
Mar 29
(WARNING: If you haven’t read Fables yet, and hope to someday, and you would NOT like spoilers for your reading, please surf elsewhere. Thank you and godspeed.)
There’s a great old Alan Moore essay, the foreword to one of the myriad editions of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, where he talks about how DKR is so great because it gives the Batman mythology an ending. Maybe not the only ending Batman will ever get (and as we know, with Dark Knight Strikes Back Miller essentially took away the very ending he gave the character), but an ending nonetheless.
Myths require an ending, Moore says, to truly resonate. Robin Hood has the lone arrow marking his grave; the Norse gods have their Ragnarok. Thanks to Miller, and even in spite of his own sequel, Batman will always have that hand around Superman’s throat, the quiet tick of a heart reawakening in the grave, and a new empty cave full of heroes and potential.
I think about this essay often because unlike the world of endless corporate superhero universes, more and more comics are giving us stories with endings. Not just miniseries or graphic novels, but long form stories in the tradition of Sandman, perhaps the first modern comic to adopt this template. Eighty issues, many stories and characters; spinoff miniseries and graphic novels and one-shots. But eventually, an ending.
The Bin – 3/26/10
Mar 26
God, here we are again. Every week we gather up the leftover grease from what our brains have been cooking and we use it to create something new, something special, something that smells only as stale as your dreams. We call it the Bin.
Acceptance of a Higher Power – LOST 6.9: Ab Aeterno
Mar 25The metaphor of The Island as a stoppered bottle of wine containing uncontrollable evil has me in the mind to think of LOST through the lens of AA – and, as we have a few characters with drinking problems (and a few actors, too), why shouldn’t it?
What has this show been if not an examination of broken, powerless people being given a second chance to accept a higher power and make amends for their past misdeeds and missteps? In Sawyer, in Jin, in Jack and most recently in Ben, we’ve seen redemptive arcs come to fruition. The Island makes the lame walk, brings estranged spouses and fathers and sons and siblings back together, allows the haunted and unlovable to find love. But it always allows for the choice to reject it, which we saw Sayid do in “Sundown” – no strike that, as far back as season 4 when he chooses freely to become Ben’s hired gun.
That this is exactly what Jacob’s agenda is (at least, as he describes it to Richard; Mark Pellegrino’s Jacob is as mystic and inscrutable as ever; he’s not a liar, but he rarely says everything) is a welcome confirmation, but hardly a surprise.
Redemption is a major theme in “Ab Aeterno” (which literally means ‘from eternity’ and colloquially means ‘for a really long time’). Instead of parallel-world hijinks that we still aren’t sure are relevant to what has been a disjointed and lumbering (if still highly enjoyable and packed full of Moments) A-plot, instead we get a taste of LOST’s old bread and butter – the flashback. In it, we see Richard (who might also be Ricardo, Ricardus or Rick Astley depending on who’s addressing him) wrestle with his own inadvertent damnation and his struggle between TMIB’s easy path to salvation (which involves stabbing someone to death) versus Jacob’s eternity of service pitch.
In the present, not much happens beyond a frame to enwrap the flashback, at least until the end of the hour, where Hurley comforts Richard by acting as an intermediary between he and his dead wife. I am going to resist making a Ghost joke, because I’ve already seen like five thousand of them in regard to this scene. This finally helps Richard to get his head on straight after a moment of shouting-at-the-jungle doubt. And it’s an understandable doubt. As has been pointed out about Avatar, religion is not faith on Pandora, but rather fact. It is the same on The Island, especially for those like Richard who have had a close relationship with its primary inhabitants. With his god dead, his people scattered or massacred and his life dependent on a snarky-ass interloper like Jack Shephard, what else can he feel but despair?
And thus, with 9 hours behind us, we move into the second half of the final season. Team Jacob’s can do spinal surgery, talk to dead people, stare creepily and have impressive eyelashes. Team Flocke has Zombie Sayid, Kate, Clairzy (Claire + Crazy) and Cindy the Stewardess. Sawyer’s running his own game. Jin’s been bear-trapped into uselessness. Real Locke is still dead and buried. Widmore is back and has a Flocke-proof fence set up. We’re moving inexorably toward a showdown and the outcome is still anyone’s guess. Will it be Lostie vs. Lostie? Will the good guys keep the wine in the bottle, or will evil overdramatically smash the hell out of it? It’s too close to call, but it’s going to be a hell of a ride.
