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To clarify: I fully trust in the bang-fer-yer-buck quality to be wonderfully wonderful in any Morrison project, and have not been disappointed, yet. Things could be, sometimes, better, but has Morrison ever written (and had published) anything that was the sort of absolute shit you see some other comics authors get away with?
And, yeah, anticipation is nice and all, and the continued narratives of fictional folks as you grow familiar with them is attractive, but... I didn't sit through 'Voyager' because I liked DS9, there are whole seasons of 'The Simpsons' and 'X-Files' that I simply don't have the impetus to even peek at. I dunno, I liked Ellis' 'Authority' best of all the iterations and something that seemed to be there was, that every issue was worth its salt. Even when it didn't make a whole lot of logical or tactical sense (the billion jetplane versus alien invader slipship baddies; gunning down the horseback boys) it was better than the censorious mess of the latter Millar issues (with the Religimon issue standing out brightly, even at the time when I thought it was Millar writing it), or ex-Stormwatch agents coming out of the sun all depressed and, er, storm and thundery. Villains who you could almost agree with on every count, kicking the head in of everything that interfered.
And, heck, 'The Defenders', which was totally the dumping ground of unfinished stories for a while, as someone elsewhere on Barbelith posted recently - and I just happened to be rereading a bunch of - was a bi-monthly until it needed to cross-over with 'The Avengers' and then there were guest authors requiring co-writers requiring replacements from month to month, trying to make sense out of unsensible things like the elf with his gun... but even, reading those now, years later, they seem to move along at a fair enough clip, that the stumbles aren't too bad, and the comics are still worth the time. Every issue of 'Strangehaven' is totally worth it. Not because it's building somewhere, which it may well be, but because of what each issue has, what each issue, in fact, is.
I felt the same way about, say, 'Preacher' and 'Transmet', in that, the format, the sequential long-form, gave the creators an excuse to talk about this, to work out that, to explore and develop, rather than simply be concerned with the concrete plot, punctuating from event to event like a Tom Clancy paperback. Some things don't have to hold up as a whole, for me, because they are designed as sequential, but foremost as individual units of entertainment-digestion.
Heck, 'The Authority' itself, back in the day, required no real knowledge of 'Stormwatch' or 'WildCATs' or anything. Was it fun to speculate/intuit that Jack went from weeping-when-he-killed-a-psycho to bloody, gleeful slaughter of the masses with a righteous grin, because he killed the spirit of death (who's been revived, which defeats the purpose of the Authority as replacement Changers)? How sad and far have Christine and her baldy Commander Sisko stand-in fallen by the time the first issue of 'The Authority' came 'round, and it's not even really noted or back-stories in the book? 'The Authority' didn't have to act as pay-off for a 'Stormwatch' storyline. It could, and often did, but that was not it's purpose and not a required reading of the series.
Not like, oh, Byrne's 'Doom Patrol', which the masochist in me needed a glance at, a book that requires both familiarity with this in-other-books backstory and the active decision to edit, alter, and otherwise mutilate that same backstory material to make the new story work and/or matter. Fuck.
Comics, in the serial format, ought to be modular enough to count on their own, each pamphlet, each story, and if they build to something bigger, then, as a secondary concern, that story ought to be cool enough to warrant itself. As, should everything, really. If it's not supporting or validating itself, what's the point?
Morrison and Ha, one hopes, will make all of the previous ranting and sorting seem very relevant and reasonable, in retrospect, and in fact, explain us all the point. With explosions. |
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