Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Story decompression

This is a thread for all of the old farts among us.

There were a couple of articles published on the internet recently about story decompression. The first was the latest installment of Stuart Moore\'s A Thousand Flowers , which was followed up Steven Grant\'s Permanent Damage # 106 . They're about how it's taking longer and longer to tell a story, with comics focusing on each minute detail for effect.

I'm with the people who think that comics are bloated. I don't buy comics out of force of habit, and can go months without them. I've all but given up buying new comics because I feel like I'm just not getting the bang for my buck. Simple economics dictate that you're supposed to divide the cost of a product by the number of times that you use it to determine its value. Ten minutes (if that) for three bucks a pop just doesn't do it for me anymore.

There once was a time when I thought that I wouldn't be caught dead paying fifty bucks or so for a hardcover comic book, but lately I find myself spending more and more money on Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives. It's like having cold water thrown on you. The amount of story which you get in one issue is unbelievable. You can actually read an issue twice because there's enough there to spread it around. And the ideas! It's obvious that the ideas came first, then plots were constructed around the ideas, then characterization was structured around the plots. Today I think that it's done in reverse, except that the ideas are all recycled.

So I guess I'm asking a few questions here. First, does anyone feel the same way? Second, has today's audience become desensitized to the lack of plot in comics today? Is is one of those things which was just taken away gradually so that people didn't notice that it was gone? And third, do you pay attention to how much money you spend on comics? Are people today like smokers? Do they buy comics without looking at or caring about the price? Does the price sink in at all, or is it like buying groceries or gas, things which you have to have?

I must have comics price does not figure in for me!!!!!

For books I know I want to get, price is no object. If I'm not sure, then I'll think twice.

I feel your pain, Legion Lad. I've been ranting about the same thing in my Off The Cuff Legion reviews: The story line of "Dream Crime," for example, was extremely padded to make it TPB-worthy. The individual issues just didn't have much substance. To my dismay, neither did all five issues when read as a whole.

This is one reason why I read fewer than 10 comics on a regular basis. (A decade ago, I read more than 30 monthly titles.) Price has a lot to do with it. But I'm also sick to death of ongoing soap operas.

I certainly feel that's the case with the mainstream books, which is part of why I'm buying mostly independents (different tastes, too - some independents can be thin as well).

The book Y: The Last Man seems to have garnered great critical praise, but I dumped it after a few issues - like you said, a 10-minute read, if that. Interesting story, but not for the price.

Has it been gradual? I suspect it has, it's such a qualitative aspect that it would be difficult to go back and trace, year to year, how stories became decompressed. I wonder if the same thing has been happening in TV dramas? In best-seller novels?

Many industries cheapen their product over time. In most cases, sadly, consumers just seem to adapt to the inferior product. There is always a core of people who seek out better quality and are willing to pay the price for it, but the sheeple just take what they're fed. So what incentive do publishers have to deliver a denser, better-written story? The gratitude and acclaim of a few malcontents?

Some creator, can't remember who/where, recently said that maybe comics should go to 40 pages, same story length but more ads to fill up the space, to give people the sense of having more pages for their money. It was hard to tell if he was joking or not.

Price is a factor - I'm not terribly budget conscious with comics and I like to try out a lot of different titles - but I won't keep spending money on throw-away books.

I think that part of the reason why an average selling comic only sells 40,000 copies a month is because that's how many people are left for whom price isn't an issue. Comics used to sell in the hundreds of thousands within my lifetime (no gray hairs yet), so something went wrong somewhere. Newspapers still compete with television (and now the internet), so there's more to it than changing times and competing outlets. I've seen parents put back comics which their children have picked up after taking one look at the price. They're shocked to see the $2.99 price tag when what they remember was $0.75. Unfortunately, a lot of people who are self-absorbed with their comic buying habits just don't get it, and that includes a lot of people running the industry today.

A comic in 1967 was $0.12 (Canada and U.S.). Just applying the inflation rate, that would be equivalent to $0.70 today (I figure Canada and U.S. have had similar inflation rates since then, ours was maybe worse.)

Of course, comics are printed on much better paper, and in fewer numbers - that may increase production costs. However, I doubt people/parents/old farts take that into account when they see the cover price of $2.50.

Actually, I just noticed that, for the last Legion issue, the Canadian price actually - and finally - went down by $0.40!

I'm NOT an old fart (only 28) but I feel like one whenever I complain about too much art getting in the way of a good story. Now I hit my comics-peak reading LSH, New Teen Titans, and Justice League International. While those comics didn't always have a whole lot of substance all of the time, I usually came away feeling a bit satisfied, knowing that something happened that month.

Just to put it in perspective, I bought the first two parts of Geoff John's (one of the worst at decompressing IMO) five-part Princes of Darkness story in JSA. I just didn't have enough interest to buy the next two issues, but curiosity got the best of me and I bought the last issue. I felt as though I didn't miss a thing! Nothing happened in those two issues I missed (well, except the twist with Eclipso, but I figured that out in two pages). I saved $5.00 and still got all the story I needed to follow along. Think I could've done that with the LSH/LSV War or the Judas Contract? You NEEDED every issue to know what was going on. Each issue was important and the writer knew that and didn't waste your time with fluff. The worst part about the JSA story was that Johns couldn't even finish it in the five+ issues given! He had to tack on some silly "coda" for issue #51 to finish the story because too much of the first five parts were useless and pointless splash pages that added nothing to the story. I really felt cheated and disappointed, because up to that point, I really liked the man's work.

I thumbed through JSA #52 in the comic shop to see if it was worth getting. After three minutes had gone by, I realized I had just read the whole thing. Just saved myself another $2.50!

I know exactly what you're talking about, LL. I think I was getting conditioned to it myself, then I bought the final part of Kevin Smith's Green Arrow run (can't be bothered to look up the issue number) in which Green Arrow fights Onimotopeaia. It took me two minutes to "read" the whole thing. I was shocked that I had wasted my money on something so shallow.

Here's the way that I see it. There are two approaches to writing comic books: books with pictures or pictures with words. I think it's interesting that you mentioned Kevin Smith and Geoff Johns, Super Lad Kid, because they're both screenwriters. They obviously think visually, and it shows.

You know what I find ironic? Just about everyone thinks that Alan Moore is one of the greatest comic book writers that every lived, and no one seems to realize that it's because he sees comics as books with pictures, not pictures with words. His stories could be translated into novels, whereas the works of certain other writers could only be translated into pamphlets. Marvel has adopted a de facto policy that all comic book scripts have to be written like they're screenplays these days. Not hard to tell that an artist is editor-in-chief of the company.

Speaking of Alan Moore ... I just picked up the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen TPB and am enjoying it immensely. I have to say, though, that if I were following the individual issues, I would probably have lost interest in LEG, just as I lost interest in Promethea and Top Ten. Even Moore's writing, dense though it is, loses its impact when its serialized over four or five issues, or longer.

DC's Nu52niverse is all about decompression, honey!

Yup, made for TPB. At my lcs, I was talking with the owner and said that I thought with DCNU, DC was quietly making a switch to longer story arcs that are made for TPB's, and that at some point, there might be little to no ongoings, that they would basically all become mini's that could easily be collected for the tpb format.

He started to hyperventilate and asked me where I heard that. I told him it was just speculation on my part, but that it made sense since they were dumping numbers on books like Action comics, etc.

The discussion went on a while, and it didn't play well for Didio and company, but it fit the decompression stuff to a t.

As I said a while back in another thread, I believe the real motive behind the 52-boot was for DC to move toward publishing their ongoing titles in a digital-only format, with the most popular titles eventually seeing print as TPBs. Those TPBs would be mainly available through online stores such as amazon, leaving the local comic book store to fend for itself.

This parallels what has happened in the music business, with CDs giving way to digital downloads, resulting in the virtual disappearance of the local record store.

What it comes down to is that we are all spending more and more time interfacing with our electronic devices and, unless some disaster tosses us back to the stone age, I see no reason to think that this trend will not continue.

Maybe the world envisioned by Mark Waid in the threeboot is not as far off as we thought.