Five Random Thoughts about Format.
In list form, because that's how I sketch out my notes more and more lately.
- I really love the format in some of the early stories presented in the Showcase Presents: The Unknown Soldier collection that came out this week. There's an opening splash, sometimes using photos as a backdrop, that effectively brings you up to speed on the story...
The lives of ten thousand fighting men sit in the hands of this one man...as he floats down over Nazi-occupied Holland.
...and after that, a double-page spread that gets right into the action of the piece. It's not like any other war comic from the period and those stories start with with an immediacy that's gripping. I wonder how much of that is Haney and how much is Kubert, but I really love the idea of just diving in. They had twelve pages, and by god, they were going to use them. - Warren Ellis's Stormwatch is a near-perfect superhero comic template. Introduce threat, use team, add character bits that build from issue to issue, get stories done quickly. Most of his run consists of single issue or two-issue arcs, and I really like the compactness of the format. He's carried over a streamlined version of this to Nextwave, where format greatly informs how his plots work. Most of the first parts end with the Nextwave team meeting their enemy face to face for the first time after engaged in combat with lesser minions, and the second part consists entirely of brutal combat.
- Story is almost nonexistent in Nextwave, using the McKee or Rogers definition of the term. In fact, when given the chance to learn lessons or experience personal growth, the characters specifically shun such actions. This is a very, very tricky thing to pull off. Outside of Nextwave, the only title this can really work with is Ennis's Punisher book on the MAX imprint, as his version of Frank Castle is an engine of destruction more than a man. Both titles mentioned are comic in their own way, the latter operating with a blackly funny streak that's buried most of the time.
- Ennis's deliberate pacing in his series is a very distinct thing compared to people working with arcs of a similar length. While his first issues are almost entirely setup, they're information-dense to the point where the rest of the story can domino from that point perfectly. The best example of this is the brilliant, brutal Up Is Down And Black Is White, where Castle doesn't discover the awful, awful thing that Nicky Cavella does until the last page of the first issue and the rest of the arc is his cold disassembly of Cavella's organization.
- Modern storytelling dictates that the reader wants more information and "depth" to begin with, but using the first issue to tell the first 10-20% of a story actually goes back to the 12-page story format Haney and Kubert used on The Unknown Soldier. Inside the rest of the story, there may have been brief flashbacks to flesh out incidents a bit more, but the formula was adhered to pretty rigidly, to good results. Working with a set structure really succeeded for them, unlike most of the Gardner Fox JLA stories from roughly the same period, where the prefab structure became formula in the worst sense of the word.
