Hi I’m Sean and I’m obsessed with format.
And the format in question is – 12/13 episodes per season, multiple stories all driving towards a specific set of themes, and very real changes for the characters and their status quo from season to season. It’s become the definitive serial format for me. It also seems to the perfect format for comics – tracing character development and building worlds for them to live in just works in a way it doesn’t in other formats.
It also clearly forces the writer to work within a structure. You don’t get the aimlessness of 22 episode television series or endless ongoing comics – you only have enough room to show the important things. But at the same time, there’s space. You can show character moments outside of the overplot, you can lay out the world without being expository, for some reason it just works.
You know what I hated most about the early-00s commitment to the 6-issue arc and decompressed comics? That the writing didn’t become amazingly tight in every book across the board. People didn’t adapt to the structure, bringing in manga pacing or go all Casanova/Fell hyperdense on us. People just started writing the same crappy stories slower.
12/13 episodes? In comics, that’s a year. In tv thats the perfect season. I think you can really separate “episodic” stories and “serialized” stories here, simply because with serialization theres a definitive end in mind. Even if the story keeps going after the first season, there is an end and a noticeable difference between seasons. Whether it be time passing, a status quo change, or even just refocusing from the previous season on different characters and themes.
Sleeper is brilliant, but the difference between the first twelve issues and the last twelve issues is what makes it truly great. You can’t get the pushed-past-the-edge Holden that you see in the final issues without Lynch waking up at the end of the first year.
Cowboy Bebop is a lot looser, but the principals remain the same – the first and second series have a kind of symmetry to them. Ed and Faye arrive and leave at opposite points in seasons 1 and 2. But without an overarching plot, the series is a series of one and done adventures. We get mentions of Julia and Vicious and it’s clearly Spike’s story, but for the most part we just spend time watching these characters grow.
Deadwood and The Wire? The Venture Brothers?
Each show is a masterpiece, but more importantly, each show is built on a 13-episode unit. All three of them somehow manage multiple storylines without ever resorting to a “b-plot”, huge casts that actively progress, dense idiosyncratic language, consistent by-season themes, and multiple layers of meaning. And they are, on the surface, comedy, three drastically different shows. Deadwood is about community. The Wire is about the collapse of the American Capitalist Empire. The Venture Brothers is about failure. But they share – aside from the best writing American television ever produced – a 13-episode seasonal structure.
And it works in comics very well – The Filth is probably the most complex thing Grant Morrison has ever written, profoundly entwining the decadence of the superhero comic, the designs of 70s science fiction, post-millenial self-disgust, body horror, and autobiography into a profound synthesis. Plus it was drawn by Chris Weston, which never hurt anything. And it’s opposite, Millar and Hitch’s Ultimates vol.1+2. It’s just straight up triumphant superhero fight comics, done better than anyone at Marvel and DC ever did them before. And they are both based on the same 13-per-season structure.
And thats me going around a point half a dozen times without ever coming to it.
Essay no. 4 is coming next, probably tomorrow. You won’t like it.
6 comments
09/09/2008 at 3:19 pm
David Allison
Great stuff so far Sean — keep the essays coming!
Wish I had more time to reply, but yeah — good work.
09/09/2008 at 9:02 pm
Mark Kardwell
I won’t like it? Is it “why Bad Librarian is a fuc*ing prick”?
09/09/2008 at 9:02 pm
sean witzke
2 More coming up tonight and tomorrow. Also – totally inspired by your Filth pieces.
09/09/2008 at 9:04 pm
sean witzke
Mark – no, that’s coming later. You might like this one.
09/12/2008 at 12:10 am
pillock
“You won’t like it.”
Excellent!
This piece made me think about a time a few years ago when I was all obsessed with writing TV scripts — which is way easier than writing
comic scripts, by the way — because I noticed that on BBC (and to a lesser degree on CBC — I think they were influenced by what the Brits were doing. Australia’s ABC had a few of these too, that I was seeing around this time) there were suddenly a few more serials being made, of high quality but really short duration. Four episodes, six, nine — all that was really missing was the abandonment of the regularized half-hour/hour run time. These seemed like straight-up adaptations of short stories or even short novels, except they weren’t: they were made for TV. You couldn’t even call them “miniseries” in the conventional sense, really — it wasn’t about someone’s idea for remaking Gone With The Wind or adapting Shogun — it wasn’t even I, Claudius. There was no buzz; these weren’t prestige projects. Sometimes they weren’t even long enough to achieve any sort of big finish, but were forced to have more modest aims. “Made In Canada”, for example, was a show that came out here, whose first season was about six half-hour episodes, and it was basically Richard III set in the world of Alliance/Atlantis Films, and played for laughs. After the first year, it got picked up and turned into an ordinary (if good) regular-format series…but it could just as easily have been left as it was, and in fact tacking another six episodes onto it, though these episodes were just fine, but didn’t add anything to the show. So, not a movie spread over six hours or anything, just a show with a modest start, middle, and end, more like a “pilot season” than anything else. And, unusually for that time in Canada, made for a domestic audience rather than an international one.
Aha, now who’s going around and around his point?
With all the talk about how if you were “writing for the trade” for real you’d be able to dump wasted pages of exposition, etc., what gets lost (not around here, but elsewhere) is that a trade is still not necessarily a, whaddayacallit, a GN. A term a lot of folks don’t like, but I think it’s useful here to point out that there’s a big difference between a subplot and a main plot, and even if you pump a long-running subplot up on steroids you’re still writing episodically, not making integrated chapters in a short serial but cluttering up whatever it is you’ve got to say with a bunch of slow-moving crap no one really wants to know anything about. So this is what you get with all the
decompressed six-issue arcs collected in TPBs, a case where the subplot’s needlessly compressed in order to distract from the fact that the main plot’s needlessly elongated — and just about nothing of any importance happens anyway. Six slow-moving fight scenes designed to all add up to the message that Spider-Man loves Mary Jane is like eating a tub of ice cream flavoured like spaghetti and meatballs with a knife and fork, and then having a bowl of hot orange juice for dessert — technically it’s food, but it’s all so thematically garbled it doesn’t count as a meal. Like what you say about shows like the Venture
Bros. not ever having to resort to a B-plot — an amazing accomplishment! — but in the conventional decompressed trade arc, there still is a B-plot, but usually there’s no A-plot worth talking about, so the B-plot has to carry all these expectations it’s not made for (or good at), and it ends up crawling on its hands and knees to a finish line arguably not worth crossing in the first place.
Oooh, I’m feeling ranty!
So, the TV thing: I just re-read, of all things, Batman/Grendel…and you know, it was much more fantastic than it probably had any right to
be, because it was just the right size for its themes, and not a page longer. But it wasn’t adaptation of story to form, it was just story told in form, and I think that’s what makes the difference. Underneath a lot of even shitty TV shows is something like an assumption of seriality, that usually goes out with a whimper somewhere around the end of the second season max, and then the thing starts to limp. When the first round of subplots get exhausted, suddenly it’s apparent that the A-plots never did anything more than reassert tone — but without story, tone’s not enough. This is the difference between the Marvel comics of my youth, and the six-issue decompressed trade of today: it used to take twenty-four issues for the B-plot to metamorphize into the A-plot, for the separate lives of the character and his costume to fully collide, instead of dancing around one another. Now that happens every other minute, and the B-plot is all there is, so now the B-plot isn’t any good either because it never gets to build any tension, and anyway outside of it there’s not really much going on. So those stories, if anything, really need to be held to a longer format, because there’s probably a theoretical limit to decompression after which nobody will fucking put up with it at all. But in a lot of TV what’s probably needed is rigid adherence to a shorter format, so that when you run out of story to tell it just ends. Because decompressed trades start limping from the beginning, but TV shows start limping from the middle. Crush ‘em down enough, and no one will be able to believe a Made In Canada ought to run twelve episodes — they won’t know how to think it could be done. Stretch TPBs out enough and they will damn well have to become “GN”s.
But it’s all conditioned by your “perfect” size — if somebody does it right from the beginning, 12 issues ought to be all they need. Crushing down TV shows and exploding TPBs up into super-size would just compensate for somebody not doing it right. It would be like orthodontia for serial storytelling.
So…”broadly agree”, is that what I’m saying? I think so.
09/12/2008 at 12:11 am
pillock
That was all basically what I wrote before, but didn’t post, by the way.