quote" We3 used a simplified visual lexicon and some very innovative inset panels to tell a lot of story in comparatively little space. One standout sequence to my mind is 2’s razor-projectile assault on the soldiers. Rather than giving us one vast panel of compressed carnage, or endless panels of the shots hitting, Quitely employs the inset panel to have both at once — compressing the action to a 2-page spread, but expanding it into countless panels at once on those two pages."

thanks!!!

With that, I agree with those who say there ought to be a balance between compression and decompression in such a way that a story maximizes the advantages and strengths of each approach. When we're rushed or slowed down, it still feels right in the context of the story. And, overall, it gives us our money's worth.

Entertainment has to be worth our hard-earned money. And when we spend hard-earned money, we are entitled to something of substance. We have the right to it. We need to be wowed beyond "cool art," and "cool character," and "kick-ass writer and artist." If I pay $15 to $20 for a graphic novel, I need it to feel like going on a mental and emotional roller coaster ride. I'd like to feel the richness and depth and scope of a prose novel.

And this is what I feel is lacking in a lot of graphic novels/compilations nowadays. There's little effort to get down and dirty with the intricacies of plot.

So let's have the compressions and the decompressions, whatever the story requires. But it better be a good story, one that would convince me to plop down money and never look back.

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If you look at the best Fantastic Four period from the sixties, there was basically one continual story that ran from issue #35 right through 67, including three annuals along the way. In #35 Reed and Sue announce their love, and in #64 they’re still hunting for a honeymoon spot. Along the way the Frightful Four, the Inhumans, Galactus and the Surfer, and the Black Panther are all introduced and provided a myriad of meandering subplots.

I suppose that is a good example of what Omar described above - a history that is both compressed and decompressed. Having a continuous plot can be good, but as you point out, it's not like the reading experience did not offer secondary (or not-so-secondary) joys along the way.

I don't think that is really optional either. The 22-page limit may be arbitrary, but no more so than the six-issues-tale. The simple fact is that a reader who has to spend about eighteen dollars and half a year to get some significant emotional payoff from a story is just not as likely to do so as he would be in the days of done-in-one (actually, mostly done-in-two) stories.

There is nothing wrong with having long-range plots, quite the opposite really. But that is no excuse for making individual issues feel like padding. Over-reliance on the art, for instance, is padding. I like full-page shots, but not if they consume more than, say, 15% of the total space of the story I am reading.

At the same time in Thor Kirby and Lee were also letting their storylines roll from issue to issue, continually introducing new subplots and characters that would explode into climaxes a few issues later, even as even newer menaces and cosmic concepts were emerging.

Any new reader at that time must have faced a huge challenge in understanding what the hell was going on.

I don't think so. Lee and Kirby were rather good in this respect; pretty much every issue was a good jumping-on point.

Amen!

So you hardly defend decompression or anything else by saying good writers can get away with it. The fact of the matter is that since so many good writers of the past few years favor a decompressed style, and many comics readers have low brain capacity, the perception has arisen among the sorts of fans unlikely to post around here (and, I suspect, many editors) that decompressed writing is inherently good and compressed writing is inherently bad.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out the general faults of decompression in the hands of mediocre-to-bad writers... since, by definition, most writers aren't going to fall short of "good" and end up in that spectrum. There are some writing tricks that can elevate mediocre material into the appearance of substance, and right now decompression is perceived as one. But it's not, no more than compression is, and it's very beneficial to everyone to point out why this is so. Someone in a position to make a writer try a different style might see it and reconsider his position.

But I can also see in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men; I sat down and reread "Danger" and "Hellfire" in one sitting, and both stories still seem to have a lot of fat for the trimming. It isn't the bimonthly and decompressed storytelling that's doing that, it's the way in which the story structure is out of sync with the (rather modest) storytelling goals in general.

The problem is not in the plotting thats the problem, its all the s**t in between that does nothing really to serve the story. Why get a 22 page instalment of a story thats going to take 6 months to finish, when that particular issue does nothing to move the story along? It doesn't leave you with a sense of anticipation for the next issue (like serialised art should), more likely dissatisfaction with the realisation that you've just wasted $3-$4.

At the end of the day, there are still a lot of good things to read, however because of this 'decompressed' story telling there is no real point in getting it on a monthly basis (unless like Greg and his mini's, you wait for it to finish), and should just "wait for the trade".

It very, very rarely is a helpful or accurate way to look at anything.

(Alternate posts: These people that only see in black and white are idiots! The rest of us that see all the shades of grey are awesome!)

Scavenger mentioned Dark Phoenix Saga- the first X-comic I bought was a reprint of part 3 in Classic X-Men. I only knew about the X-Men from cartoons, but I could at least at the gist of who the principals were and what they were doing. From there, I could decide whether or not to keep buying. Now, I feel like I have to start with issue 1 or I'll be lost.

Compare that to, say, House of M.

At the same time in Thor Kirby and Lee were also letting their storylines roll from issue to issue, continually introducing new subplots and characters that would explode into climaxes a few issues later, even as even newer menaces and cosmic concepts were emerging.

Any new reader at that time must have faced a huge challenge in understanding what the hell was going on.
I think this was the sort of "padding" that DC letter writers were complaining about.

“I already don’t buy it, and 800,000 people just like me don’t buy it anymore either. Do you think that’s still a viable publishing strategy?”
Out of curiousity, John, where did you get the idea that less people buy decompressed comics? Is there any evidence to back this up? Because it kinda seems like the decompressed comics are the big sellers.

I agree with Graeme Burk- the whole "decompression" argument is incredibly reductionist, IMO. It's just one way of telling stories, and it's not really as simple as this post would seem to indicate.