Comics are like Ogres
Ogres are like onions, according to Shrek, they have layers. So do well crafted comics.
Great films and great comics share a lot of qualities, they feature interesting and engaging characters, present unexpected plot points and twists, and sprinkle in nuggets for discovery later. Films are presented with a short and finite time weave their wonders, but comics, oh delicious comics, have the potential to be infinite.
Comic creators are given the possibility of infinity.
They are not limited by budget restraints, nor by an audience attention span of 2 hours. Within their monthly allotment of pages, comic book creators have the ability to do anything, but to do it well has some basic requirements. One thing most successful comics share is an interwoven tapestry of characters and events that offer their payoffs in multiple dimensions. What am I talking about?
Building worlds.
The world within a good comic consists of much more than a few main characters and a string of multi-arc story lines. Great comics are filled with traces of the past and hits of the future that, on first reading, some fans might not even notice, gems to be mined at a later date. Because comics have the potential to be never ending stories, creators, writers in particular, have the ability to plant seeds for the future long in advance.
One of the current master gardeners in the comic world is Geoff Johns. Geoff is successful for many reason, but one of the strengths of his writing is his plotting. He plans far into the future and then gradually sneaks in hints and peeks of upcoming twists for the readers almost invisibly. At the time when he found out his first book, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E was being cancelled, Geoff had loosely plotted the next two years of the book.
Readers love discovering these hints and clues and you can find many pages on forums such as our discussing possible meanings for obtuse references injected into our comics. Long time readers seem to enjoy even more when the past appears in the present.
It’s all too easy for a new creative team to come onto a book and simply pick a new direction, throwing away anything that had come before, and sadly this still happens all too often. It is much more of a challenge to build a new creative direction from the groundwork that was laid out in the past. Some comics have over 70 years of history behind them, so no easy task this, but it can be done, even with less than amazing characters.
Booster Gold for example. In the late 80s and early 90s Booster was somewhat of a joke character, his most memorable run being in Justice League as half the comedic duo with Blue Beetle. For the most part he was an idiot. When his series was surprisingly relaunched in 2007, Johns main idea for the character was not to ignore the past idiocy, but to explain why Booster was such an idiot. By taking what was there and putting a brilliant creative spin to it, the series miraculously sold out (sorry Mister Miracle).
For a time, the Mini-Series-In-A-Series was the hottest thing going, and long evolving plots were mostly abandoned for the sales hopes a #1 of 5 could bring in. This lead directly to the collapse of comics in the late 90s. Ok, maybe not directly, but it made books and their stories much more disposable. Readers could easily jump in, but could also, just as easily jump out.
Reading comics is an adventure and some of the fun is lessened if I know all the loose plot points will be tied up in the next issue. Comic fans are fickle and easily distracted, if they know what to expect, or even think they know what to expect they can get prematurely disappointed, deciding negatively toward a book without even reading it.
Great storytelling weaves and bobs like a well trained boxer. And like a well trained boxer, great comics are planning many many moves ahead, waiting for us to let our guard down and then deliver a knock out punch. In comics unlike boxing, when readers get hit with that well planned knockout punch we can’t wait for more, and hopefully bring along some friends to get punched as well.