Waiting For The Trade Part 2

Last time on “Waiting For The Trade”, Idabbled in self-indulgence about why I’m so special and awesome talked about some of the differences between a monthly comic and a trade paperback, and some of the differences I, as a reader, experience going into them. Last time focussed mostly on the artifacts themselves, whereas this time is going to be more about narrative.

THE FINAL CRISIS TRADE

Comics have a weird relationship with narrative structure. Most comics are designed and intended to act as perpetual series’, rather than being conceived in the traditional manner of having a beginning, middle and end to work through. The heroes have an origin, they fight crime – and they keep fighting crime. There’s no real ‘end point’ here. Problems keep coming up to be solved, villains keep escaping jail or returning from the grave to menace the world once more! Even the death of the hero does not draw the story to a close, since they invariably return; I think by this point the list of comic book characters who have stayed dead is shorter than the list of ones who haven’t. Essentially, as long as there’s enough interest in the story to justify the title’s existence, it’ll exist.

That sounds rather cynical, and I suppose it is; the business side of the industry means that in order to sell books, popular characters have to stick around so readers will pay to see their exploits. But that’s a little grander on the scale of what I’m here to look at today. I want to focus more on the narrative differences between a monthly issue and a trade paperback.

A trade is a collection of a story arc, usually six issues worth, from an ongoing monthly series. In other words, the story is the same. But the experience of the story is not, in my opinion. The techniques that writers use don’t necessarily work so well when put together in a trade collection, or the way they approach the story might work well in the monthly series but not in a collection. Final Crisis is probably my favourite talking point in terms of modern comic book narrative.

Like every Crisis before it, Final Crisis was intended as an epic, sprawling narrative across as many DC titles as could be managed. This included short mini-series and stand-alone issues, all giving space for Grant Morrison to do what he does best; crazy-ass, inter-connecting, high-concept sci-fi madness. Space alien gods breaking holes in the universe by dying; cosmic vamprie-gods that feed off of stories; a bullet fired backwards in time; the Ragnarok of the Superheroes; the death and rebirth of everything that exists. All great stuff but it needs space to be explored and fleshed out. When it comes to collecting such a huge narrative, hundreds of characters and complicated motivations, with plot devices that have been set out years ago, how do you adequately put it into a trade?

Someone like me looks at all those Final Crisis titles across the shelves and says ‘screw that, I’m just going to get the trade’. Then I get the trade for Final Crisis and get confused. It’s clear who I’m rooting for, but is Darkseid the big bad or is Mandrakk? First of all it seems Darkseid is all set up to be the big ultimate evil, but then Superman goes and leaves the universe to fight a bigger, ultimater evil – the Mandrakk, a vampiric monster that feeds on the story of the universe. Then we’re back to the war of the superheroes, Darkseid taking over the world and the Justice League resisting him. Also, apparently there’s a team of Japanese popstar/superheroes that don’t really seem to do anything.  Then Mandrakk comes back to menace the world again, but then so does Darkseid. Superman defeats Darkseid’s shattered ghost by singing at it –

No, Really

 – and restores the broken world. Is that something he could always do? Did he get super-singing powers in a spin-off title I missed?

I think I’m rambling now, but the pont is this. Final Crisis The Monthly Series and Final Crisis The Collection are two different experiences because Morrison wasn’t writing a collection. He was writing the series and the collection suffered as a result.

Waiting For The Trade Part One

So, it turns out I’ve not done one of these for a while. Almost a year, in fact.

This is the part where I feign apology, grief and so on, but the fact is that I just pretty much forgot about it. I shan’t bore you as to what I’ve been doing in that time, since this isn’t an auto-bio blog. I’ll just say mea culpa and get on with it.

COMICS!

 I like comics. I like superhero comics, crime comics, fantasy, whatever. I read Sequart Books and try to write comics myself. That being said, I have some reservations about parts of comics culture. For instance, I find ‘Sequential Art’ a bit pretentious – even though I’m the sort of guy who can tell you the difference between a comic and a graphic novel.

That neatly segues into what I mainly want to talk about today. Graphic novels. When I say I like comics, what I really mean to say is I like graphic novels. But what I mostly read is trade paperbacks. Even if it’s a title I’m interested in, a character I like, I’m more likely to wait for the trade than to collect all six issues.

One of these

Truth be told, I don’t like comics much – when we use ‘comics’ to mean single monthly issues. I’m the sort of guy who likes stories and reads, re-reads and (freak that I am) think about them. But in a monthly issue, you don’t get very much story.

 

For those of you not particularly versed in comics terminology, let me just explain some of the terminology I’m using and have used. A comic book (or monthly issue) is one of those floppy paper booklets everyone knows. They’re usually around thirty pages long. A trade paperback (pictured above) is larger and is a collection of about half a dozen comic books – sometimes more if the series has quite a long story arc. Graphic novels are usually similar to trades in physical appearance but differ in terms of story structure; while a trade involves taking six comics and slamming them together, a graphic novel is a beast all its own. And to get into exactly why that is, we have to talk about story structure. But that’s something I’ll talk about later. For now, I just want to focus on the monthly/trade problem.

 

Why are trade paperbacks better than monthly comics?

 

First of all, because there’s less crap in a trade.

Not pictured: Truth in advertising

A monthly comic is over thirty pages, but even not counting the covers only twenty-two of those are actually story. The rest? Ads. Sometimes there’s extra content like a letters page, or a ‘from the author’ – but those are usually put in to make the comic technically a magazine for tax purposes. In contrast, a trade paperback is pretty much all story and sometimes extra content like concept art, script samples and so on. In other words, it’s all killer, no filler. But when you’re reading a comic and going through the story, getting attached to characters and enjoying the narrative, being suddenly told to DRINK MILK is jarring. It takes you out of the story and ruins the experience.

 

The unfortunate part is that while the comics industry is a primarily print medium, that’s a major revenue stream they aren’t going cut off. They need the support of the advertisers to keep afloat. And production costs might drop in the transition to a purely digital medium, but there’ll still be some manner of advertising propping the industry up. Nature of the beast, I accept that. My problem is how the advertising was implemented. You see, I have no issue with a few pages of adverts. What I do object to is when the ad pages are thrown in with the story pages willy-nilly. They used to be largely confined to the back of the issue, but modern ones are often skewed towards the front. I distinctly remember reading a recent issue of Power Man & Iron Fist (or was it Iron Man & Power Fist?) and finding the first third of the issue effectively alternating between comic and advert, including a big double-page spread for the MMO Rifts. It was like getting whiplash, or trying to watch two TV channels at the same time.

 

That’s my thoughts for the day on the comics industry. The second part of this, which gets more into the story aspect of things, will come soon.

Unless I forget I have a blog again, in which case it’ll be closer to a year.

I may be joking about that.

 

Hero With A Thousand Masks: Departure

Last week, I declared my foolhardy intent to go through Joseph Campbell’s monomyth with an eye to geek culture. I’ve never been one to back out of a bad idea, so here it goes. You can read the introduction of this series here, but if you already have – or just don’t fancy slogging through it – the short of it is this: we’ve been telling and re-telling the same story over and over again for millenia and that’s the monomyth. It’s alive today and the point of these articles is that you can see it across modern storytelling. The Hero is the same, just wearing a different mask. 

 This specific piece is going to be about the “Departure” phase of monomyth. In a nutshell, Departure deals with the events that lead up to the Hero setting out on their adventure and the early stages of the journey. This stage can be further broken up into the “Call To Adventure”, the “Refusal of the Call”, “Supernatural Aid”, “Crossing The First Threshold” and “The Belly of the Whale”. 

By the way, if you noticed that Departure is the name of the manuscript in Alan Wake, you’re not the only one. In a game so ridiculously referential, I doubt that’s a coincidence. 

 CALL TO ADVENTURE 

Luke receives the Call from Leia

 

The Call To Adventure is the event that exposes the Hero to a new, unknown world, drawing them into a relationship with ill-understood forces. The revelation often come about due to a blunder, a chance occurrence or a quirk of fate. Other times it is marked by the appearance of a herald, someone who beckons the Hero to set off on the journey towards life – or death. Perhaps the Hero’s love interest is held captive, or their home comes under threat. 

• Prince Siddharta, the Future Buddha, is exposed to death, disease and age despite his father’s machinations
• Odysseus ends the Trojan War and feels the call to return home, Ithaca
• Peter Parker receives superhuman powers from a radioactive spider’s bite
• Harry Potter receives a letter from Hogwarts
• Alan Wake comes to the mystical town of Bright Falls, unknowing of the forces it holds

THE REFUSAL OF THE CALL 

 

 Upon receiving the Call, whatever form that Call may take, the Hero might not necessarily take it. Sometimes, the pull of the known keeps the Hero from venturing forth to adventure; the life he leads holds him back. Of course, narrative necessity means that something has to happen to overcome this obstacle – otherwise there’d be no story! While initially hampered, the Hero must inevitably set off on his way. After this, the Journey begins proper. 

• Briar Rose is put to sleep by the Wicked Witch
• Prince Kamar al-Zaman (of the Arabian Nights) refuses to marry
• Daphne flees from the god Apollo, fearing for her virginity
• Luke Skywalker must help with the harvest, but the farm is destroyed by Stormtroopers later
• Harry Potter’s adoptive family stops him from exploring magic
• Peter Parker refuses to stop the robber who ends up murdering Uncle Ben
• Neo refuses to climb out the window
• Alan’s wife gives him a typewriter, but he refuses to write

SUPERNATURAL AID 

 

One of the first steps of the Hero’s Journey involves encountering an older, wiser figure – usually in the form of an old man or crone. This mentor figure usually provides some form of “amulet” – a plot device that later turns out to be of great importance to the journey. The amulet might be a literal magic object, such as a sword, or it may be a mundane object, but it is always vital. The amulet might even take the form of words rather than a thing. The old man or crone usually represents the benevolent power of the past, which stands in contrast to the figure of the Holdfast – but that’s for another time. 

• Ariadne provides Theseus with a magic length of string so that he can get through the Labyrinth
• The Navajo Spider-Woman gives the Twin War Gods the magic words that calm any foe
• Mephistopheles guides Faust, but is unpredictable and morally ambiguous.
• Uncle Ben tells Peter “with great power comes great responsibility”.
• Harry receives his wand
• Obi-Wan saves Luke from the Sand People and gives him his lightsaber
• Tom O’Bedlam schools Jack Frost in magic
• Alan Wake encounters Thomas Zane in a dream, and later Zane gives Alan manuscript pages

CROSSING THE FIRST THRESHOLD 

 

The Call to Adventure introduced the Hero to elements on a new, strange world but it is not until now that he truly enters it. The Hero leaves safety, striking out into the deep, dark unknown. He has left the familiar world of the campfire and enters the shadows outside the light. Here is where the adventure begins to pick up pace and the first real threats begin to show their teeth. The Hero has left the real world and now begins to encounter fantastical things on a regular basis, travelling through dream-like environments. 

• Odysseus is thrown off-course by the god Poseidon and must find his way home through unknown waters
• Prince Five-Weapons enters the dark forest to confront a terrible ogre
• Luke leaves his destroyed home and travels to Mos Eisley
• Harry leaves the muggle world behind to travel to Hogwarts
• Alan Wake enters the dark forest to find his missing wife

THE BELLY OF THE WHALE 

 

This is the final stage of Departure. Once the threshold is crossed, the Hero encounters danger and finds himself surrounded by darkness. While he might be brave and powerful, the Hero encounters something much larger than himself – physically, conceptually, mystically – and is overcome. He is swallowed in act which is symbolic of death – and in some cases literally is death – but reemerges in a symbolic rebirth. 

• Herakles is swallowed by a sea-monster sent to Troy but cuts his way out
• Zeus is swallowed by Kronos, but emerges unharmed
• Raven tricks a whale into swallowing him, kills it accidentally, and feasts on the corpse
• Red Riding Hood is swallowed by the Big Bad Wolf
• Luke falls into the trash compactor
• Dane encounters Barbelith and is enlightened
• Neo is tortured by the agents and later reborn into the “real” world
• Alan Wake dives into the Lake and wakes up in the Lodge

So, that’s Departure for you. As you can see from the course of these examples, the monomyth lives today across movies, comic books and video games. It is as resonant and relevant there as it is in mythology, literature and religion. Even if the medium changes, even as technology advances how we tell our stories, the stories themselves remain the same and are likely to remain the same for a long, long time to come.

The Hero With A Thousand Masks Part 1

Okay, pop quiz. What does this guy…   

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars)

 

…have in common with this guy?

 

Tom O'Bedlam (The Invisibles)

 

If you said “they both have beards”, you’re technically right but kind of missed the point.   

See, Tom O’Bedlam and Obi-Wan Kenobi are the same character. Actually, it would be more accurate to say they’re the same archetype, a repeated character type that crops up over and over, across fiction. Specifically, these two characters are both Wise Old Men. I’ll get more into what that means later.   

When you boil fiction down enough, you get the same themes and stories appearing wearing different faces. Christopher Booker wrote in The Seven Basic Plots that the movie “Jaws” and the ancient legend of Beowulf are, basically, the same story – a seaside town being menaced daily by a water-borne creature of supernatural power; a hero emerging from obscurity to do battle with the beast in the water and, eventually, triumphing. Joseph Campbell went so far as to identify one story recurring throughout myth, legend and religion – he called this the “monomyth”, the Hero’s Journey. His 1949 book The Hero With A Thousand Faces set out what the monomyth looked like and the common stages every hero went through.   

Why is this important on a blog ostensibly about geeky stuff like comic books and Star Wars? Because if it wasn’t for Campbell, Star Wars would have been very different. The original Star Wars movie was explicitly based off of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. So was the original Matrix. The monomyth that resonates throughout both films is what makes them so appealing to us. The imagery might be recycled, but that’s because it’s powerful and effective. We’ve learned, as storytellers, to use what works. And what works is the monomyth, the story we’ve been telling and retelling for thousands of years.   

So, in honour of Campbell’s unwitting contribution to the face of geek culture, I’m going to spend some time examining his Hero’s Journey and how it crops up not just across legend, but modern media.   

First off is a basic explanation of what the Hero’s Journey involves. It can be divided up into three stages. In Departure, the hero begins his journey, setting off from home and striking out into the unknown. Initiation details his adventures along his path, as he gradually learns and grows, gaining knowledge and power. In Return, he finds his way home with the power to grant boons to his fellow man, usually after having vanquishing evil.   

These three stages can be further divided into smaller sub-groups. For instance, Initiation contains common elements such as the Call To Adventure (Luke gets Leia’s distress message), Refusal of The Call (Having to help with the harvest) and Supernatural Aid (Obi-Wan saves Luke from the Sand People).   

Laid out in graph form, the monomyth looks a little something like this:   

The Heroic Journey.

 

That’s all I’m going to say for now on the topic. My next few posts will be a closer examination of certain elements of the Heroic Journey, filtered through the medium of the geek culture.   

Enjoy!