After you have read a story, do you go back and decide which individual issues do not help the story, take them out, just to have the story flow better at a better pace?
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After you have read a story, do you go back and decide which individual issues do not help the story, take them out, just to have the story flow better at a better pace?
This is an interesting question because as readers, we do.
An event comic works exactly like this with recuts. Not every reader will pick up every single issue nor every comic at the time. The interesting thing about this is that while we might pick up the main book, tie-ins are supposed to accentuate the action and provide extra perspectives or extra details we would otherwise find irrelevant. So while you could read something like (and I'm using a BS example) Civil War and read the main book, you could totally overlook what's going on in Spider-man and it could play out just fine. Or alternatively you could read Spider-man or Daredevil or what have you on top of Civil War or even without it, and if the writer did there job, you could know what's happening without ever addressing the main title. We do this sort of thing all the time and when the writers make it work we never even think about it.
Now there are comics which have completely irrelevant issues or bring things up that ultimately don't matter and I feel like I'm woefully ill-equipped to talk about what matters to an ongoing. However for an event comic we absolutely do since you can't reasonably expect readers to toss hundreds of dollars at an event. It almost requires being able to rearrange events and go over it twice.
After an event is done, I will decide which tie-ins contribute to the event and cut out the ones that don't, but I don't read it all first (the whole goal is to save time).
I'm trying to decide if I'll do that for a story arc. I'd say, for the most part, the answer is no. Frankly, either the story is good as a whole or I'm probably not re-reading it anyway.