A Soapy Situation
This really could use some cleaning up...

So the other day I'm in my local comic book shop, and I ask one of the owners, a great guy named Dean, to see my pull list. I wanted to add a new title and drop an old one, and this was the first time I'd really even bothered to look at it in quite some time. I sort of absentmindedly scan down through it, and then I pause for a second, because something occurred to me. I reread it, and sure enough: I have almost no open-ended series on my list. Nearly very title I buy is either a limited series, or simply will be ending soon. Aside from these, I have a little section which is a list of certain creators, and the store just orders an extra copy of whatever they put out and toss it into my folder every week. But even then, the mini-series, graphic novels, trade paperbacks, and limited series are generally beating out the ongoing books by a ratio of something like eight to one.

I made a comment about this, and he hadn't noticed it either. Now, I used to buy ongoing titles all the time, and I remember this quite clearly. But at some point this rolled over into the titles I presently purchase. Within two and a half year's time my pull list will look almost totally different, with the exception of my creators list on it. Every now and then I still might grab an issue or two of a regular series, just to see what's going on with it; it might be something I've never really read before or that I used to get regularly. But these never get added onto my pull list because there's always one thing that bothers me about them. The ongoing series is inherently flawed.

The thing that drives a good story is conflict. If you break down just about any story ever written into it's most basic structure, it's this: 1. introduction of character, 2. introduction of conflict, 3. resolution of conflict. That's it, there's your beginning, your middle, and your end. A really good tale obviously has more to it than that, but that's the simplest form--the genetic structure, if you will--of storytelling. And the most important parts are numbers two and three, because in any medium that's what forms the meat of the story. Will Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after together? Will Luke Skywalker follow in his father's footsteps and turn to the Dark Side? Will the Avengers stop Ultron from wiping out the human race?

But ongoing comics and other serialized stories, such as television soap operas, face a unique problem that other forms of storytelling do not. In my first two examples, there's a definite ending in mind that the tale progresses to; Romeo and Juliet do not end up happy at all, and Luke not only doesn't turn evil but saves his father's soul as well. In the case of Ultron attacking humanity, the Avengers manage to survive and stop his menace. But unlike in the cases of the young lovers or the young Jedi knight, you already knew the Avengers would win the day. It was a foregone conclusion, because those same Avengers have to be around in thirty days time to stop Galactus from turning the Earth into Sunday brunch.

There's a conflict present, but it's more along the lines of "how" will the situation be resolved rather than "will" it be. And this is the inherent flaw. A soap opera's handle on the situation is slightly different, however. You can turn around and kill off a character on One Life To Live or ER without too much trouble, and the rest of the cast will still be around, and the show will go on. You can introduce any level of conflict you would like to, and you don't have to worry about a thing. The only problem with them is that you don't really go and wrap up the entire franchise until financially it's no longer viable, although there are and have been exceptions to this.

In comics though, you can throw as much conflict into the story as you want to as well. There's no limitations, at least as far as I know, but how will the story end? The ongoing comic hero can never be in a true conflict, that can be carried out to it's logical conclusion, because the story might end. Superman is a classic example; who actually believed he would stay dead?

This is why I think I went away from buying so many regular comic books over time. And just to head off some people who might be reading this at the pass: this is not going to be me ranting again about how the industry needs to go away from superheroes. Not at all.

You know that your main character isn't going to be killed off, you know that at the end of the issue you'll end up again with either the status quo or perhaps a slight change or two. It's not a fault of the creators, the editors, or anything at all except the very structure and nature of the stories being told. They're flawed at their roots, because real change won't come easily to the casts of the various comic books.

But just imagine for a moment if the stories were told in a slightly different way. Instead of short two or three issue arcs in the course of the ongoing, where--and let's be honest--in about 90% of the American comics being made today drama consists of a particular villain arriving with a nefarious scheme in mind, that gets narrowly averted. But comics can be so much more, especially superhero ones. You have the potential for everything from over-the-top high adventure to romantic drama to horror. But often, anything that happens of any note within them is so transitory as to be irrelevant. Even the death of a character becomes nothing more than an overdone plot-gimmick or marketing scheme.

So one way to get around this would be to take more of a real soap opera approach to the way in which comics are written. Whatever your views are of television soaps, they do two things right that the comics industry can't seem to pull off right now. First, they put more conflict into the lives of their fictional characters than comics do. On the better shows, people are permanently killed off. Marriages happen and betrayals occur with not-so-shocking regularity. Are we really that concerned when the Penguin comes to Gotham City to give Batman a few nights' worth of aggravation? Of course not, because we know Batman will have the situation well in hand; it just become again a question of "how" does it come under control.

But if you were to put a truly realistic level of danger into the situation, you could dramatically increase the appeal of an already popular book. One of the best moves I can think of from this standpoint in recent memory was when DC Comics killed off Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern and replaced him with a new Lantern. DC altered the status quo, pushing the book into a whole new realm of creative possibility.

The second thing that the television soaps have the edge over comic books in is the fierce loyalty of their fans. While the devotion of certain parts of comic fandom is a well-noted thing, it still pales in comparison to the fans of soap operas. And just as a preface, I'm not talking about this from a numerical standpoint. Comparing the number of viewers of a typical soap to the number of readers for a typical comic would be idiotic and pointless; you may as well compare the spatial volume of a matchstick and the Titanic.

All of you that are reading this, I'm going to make the assumption of, have seen how heated comic book fans can get about various books. But have you ever seen how much more involved soap opera fans can get? It's an absolute situation of comparing night and day. The primary reason I think is that the fans of the soaps know that almost nothing is guaranteed; nothing is off-limits plot wise, anything can go. It's simply not the same in comic books.

Now I have to admit that I don't read as many superhero books as I used to. This is all part of what I was talking about earlier, with almost all the books on my local store's pull list coming to an end soon. They aren't ongoing series, and are finite titles such as PREACHER, or mini-series for the most part. They have genuine conflict where anything can and does happen, and no one is in the end "protected," for lack of a better word. If the ongoing titles being produced today adopted a similar anything goes mindset, the ongoing decline of the American comics industry could possibly be staved off.

But the status quo must be protected at all costs.

Ask yourself if this is a coincidence: which industry is shrinking, the soaps or comics?

Joe Szilagyi, March 25th, 2000

Joe Szilagyi is a staff writer at PopImage.

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