Geek Time

(2) of a certain writer who enjoys to take years with plot points to unfold. I feel with your responses on here that you rather have people get trades or go digital if they can't afford paper books but a lot of people including you love how a comic feels in your handle and the ability to flip thru pages. Also when I buy Trades I usually order them before release thru Amazon which means my LCS gets snubbed If Marvel Editors control so much why not HELP writers with plot length? Thanks for ur time

Anonymous

When you say “help” here, what you’re really asking is why editors don’t force the writers to truncate their stories to a length that would be more to your liking. And my response to that would be that the editors in question are likely just as happy with he length and the development of the storyline as the writers are—everybody works together, of course.
As we’ve talked about in the past, all stories are different—there is not some one-size-fits-all length that works for all things. And if you find that a particular story or plot is taking too long to resolve, you can always walk away from it. But forcing writers to do Reader’s Digest versions of the stories they’re trying to tell doesn’t seem to be a good way to get the best work out of them.

I personally prefer writers take the long route with their plots when I know they are going to do a multi-year run. I like it when they have envisioned their stay on the title as a tiered arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. Specific themes are addressed, and resolved (as much as these things ever are), bookending it like a long running TV series, similar to Breaking Bad. These are the runs that tend to stand out the most for me, and say the most as a single work in themselves.

Within these macro arcs, the reader is given smaller stories, but they all build on what has come before and provide a bigger view over what the overall picture is going to look like. Joss Whedon & John Cassaday’s Astonshing X-Men would not have been anywhere near as good, or have the lasting impact it has had if editors “helped” him clip stories down to more bite size pieces. It was so good in large part because it was a 25 chapter story. It is the difference between the “adventure of the week” in the original Star Trek, and the epic the Depp Space Nine became. I love Kirk’s crew, but Sisko’s story holds a weight with me that the old school stories never will, especially now that they have moved to summer blockbuster phase of their life.

Now I appreciate that for many people this is going to push them in the direction of collected editions, and I am quite frankly OK with that. These stories go on forever, with no end in sight as long as sale permit. I have read comics for a good many years at this point, and for me at least, it adds more value to my dollar. If you have a canvas that never ends, I want you to create to scale.