The point is, the loss of serialization would be a blow to fiction in general.
switching from monthlies to trades isn't losing serialization, however. it's just spreading it out into larger chunks that come out less frequently.
Indeed serialization is designed to retain audiences and when done correctly it does (see again popular soaps, Claremont X-Men before the split into several mutant titles).
sopas might not be the best example of this, actually. the traditional daytime soaps are doing really poorly in the US right now, and are generally being phased out for talk shows and the like. traditional nighttime adult soaps have never really gotten back to the mid-80s heyday of Dallas and Dynasty.
that said, it is true that serialization in some sense is a more widespread phenomenon in the non-soap parts of TV than it ever has been before. in general, most sitcom episodes in the past were totally self-contained (e.g. every single episode of Gilligan's Island starts and ends with them in the same situation), whereas now i can't think of a single sitcom which isn't serialized to some degree. even though each episode more-or-less stands alone, Friends and Will & Grace and the like have season-length story arcs. however, most episodes do little to advance the overall plot and are primarily intended to be self-contained comedies. major events and turning points happen in a few critical episodes, usually timed for the beginning of the season, November sweeps, February sweeps, and the end of the season.
there's also a whole genre of light drama shows like Buffy, X-Files, Smallville, and the like which have a similar structure, and though they tend to be a little tighter in terms of coherence around the main story arcs, there's still a division between everyday shows and "event" shows. X-Files is a great example of this: most shows are self-contained investigations of the freak of the week, but a few episodes per season advance the core conspiracy storyline.
i think the key advantage of this story structure is the balance between accessability and development over time. casual viewers can drop in and out and catch the odd episode here and there without feeling too lost. viewers who like the central storyline only have to catch a few major events per year to keep up, and can watch or not watch the others at their leisure. obsessive fans can watch it all.
comics, presently, don't have that balance. the casual reader has been taken out of the picture, really, by the rapidly declining ratio of content to price and the move to direct sales, and fewer and fewer serious readers have any real motivation to grab monthlies unless they're pretty sure they aren't going to be collected as trades.
i think the ideal would be to have cheap, fun, accessible, largely self-contained monthlies available all over the damn place, and then trades which come out once or twice a year and chronicle the major events and turning points in a developing story arc. the continuity between the two formats would be very loose, and primarily related to changes in costumes, settings, and casts of characters.
for example, let's look at JLA. each month, a comic comes out called JLA comes out and features the Justice League fighting some bad guy or solving some problem. it's a self-contained story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, it's aimed primarily at kids, and it costs less than a dollar. it's available in malls and bookstores and newsstands.
then, say, twice a year, a big trade comes out in the direct sales market. there are advertisements for it all over the monthlies as it approaches, but it's not mentioned in the stories themselves. it contains the equivalent of one complete story arc in current comics, and builds on the story arc from the previous trade and sets up for the next one. it leaves things closed enough that the JLA could realistically be in a position to move on and deal with random episodic baddies for a few months until the next Big Event, but leaving clear dangling plot threads and avenues for future exploration.
continuity works like this: if, say, Metropolis gets blown up and Green Lantern gets a new costume in one trade, then they just start drawing the costume differently in the monthly and they don't use Metropolis in the monthly stories anymore (unless it gets rebuilt in the next trade). no major changes to the status quo happen in the monthlies, and changes made in the trades just happen with no explanation in the monthlies, because the monthly reader is presumed to be a casual reader who isn't keeping track anyway.
people who are just casual readers can and probably will pick up the monthly in droves, and not feel lost or cheated. serious readers can just grab the trades, which is a lot easier and cheaper than picking up the monthlies, and feel secure in the knowledge that they aren't going to get lost either.
the best part is that people might just get in the habit of reading the monthlies, and notice that Green Lantern has a new costume, and just might be motivated enough to get down to the comic store to find out what happened. |
