CBI Archive
Comic Book Dictionary - Formatitis
Sunday, May 21st, 2006 at 12:38 AM EST
Updated: Sunday, May 21st, 2006 at 12:38 AM EST
Formatitis is when a comic book story suffers from being forced to commit to a specific format.
Notable examples of Formatitis include:
A. Stories written for serialized anthologies (the short length and constant need to recap can rob the story of some impact)
B. Stories written for “the trade” (when a 3-part story has to be stretched to 6 issues. A notable example is the Geoff Johns issue of Avengers that was rejected, as Johns was told to split the story into two issues - both issues seemed a bit sparse).
C. Stories written for longer story pages without deserving the longer story pages (leads to a lot of padding)
D. Stories written for short story length that deserve more (story ends up feeling as though an opportunity was missed).
Any other examples of formatitis that you folks can think of?
2 Comments
Pol Rua
May 31, 2006 at 1:33 am
I tend to get a Option D quite a bit from the prestige format Elseworlds. From ‘Gotham by Gaslight’ on, in many cases, you had a pretty neat story which ended up shoe-horned into too few pages.
In fact, I tend to think most of the prestige format books I’ve read have either read as rushed or needlessly padded.
Except for ‘Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow’ and ‘The Killing Joke’… hrm… odd that…
fanboy d
July 30, 2006 at 10:36 am
*ahem* wasn’t dkr 4 prestige format books? those were awesome Pol Rua.
I say i see B the most. Everythin is a six or seven issue arc…i loong for one shots, two parters etc.