On Serialization

China
February 19, 2007 12:11am CST
I read Alexander's comments over on the blog, and thought this would be as good a place as any to comment... It is a tricky business, the serialzation. And since a lot, if not all, the comics on the Moderntales sites are ultimately envisioned to be read at once/collected or whatever, you are trying to strike a balance between a satisfying installment and a satisfying whole. I recall being very surprised to read that things like Jar of Fools and Jimmy Corrigan were originally presented in weekly installments or whatever, as they read so well as a whole. But I couldn't help wondering what the audience would have been thinking reading a page of Jar of Fools where the view sort of pans across an overpass and then you see a car underneath, and that is the whole page. I know I sometimes feel when I put True Loves into zine form that it feels kind of choppy from page to page. But read week to week, you've had a week to soften the transition from scene to scene. I once did a comic called Mexican Hat where I did an issue each month for a year, and between issues, a month also passed in the comic. And reading them as I did them, people didn't have a problem with the gaps that I left in the story. It was only people reading them all together in one sitting who felt like the story jumped too much, with characters coming and going and reappearing with little to no explanation. I think the Picture Story stories do read better as finished items. The advancement in each installment is just a little too small to get much momentum going. For me anyways.
1 response
zhentama11
@zhentama11 (13)
• China
19 Feb 07
That's really interesting about your Mexican Hat experiment. Serialization, as a publishing format, definitely has strengths of its own, if you know how to use them. And one of those is that nothing can give readers a sense of the passage of time better than an actual, real-world passage of time. If you're going to comit to writing for serialization, it's a fantastic power to make use of. But because it's an inherently temporal effect, it's also inherently temporary. Writing to serialization is like creating a chalk mural on the sidewalk--sure, you can reproduce it photographically, but you can only get the full effect once. Then the rain washes it away, and the photograph just can't do it justice. Collecting chapters that were designed to be read a month a part results in a book that will be read much too quickly to be appreciated.