Originally Posted by
Marilee
Just for clarification, reading since the late 60's. Agree with most everything in this thread so far. And my remarks are more about superhero comics and not just DC comics... That said:
Hate, hate, hate the multi-issue, highly decompressed story-telling found in comics now. Back in the day, a two-parter was amazing (the occasionally three- or four-parter was for extra-special stories, of which so much happened that it could change the entire direction of books). I grew up with comics that might have two or three complete stories in them, not "part 1 of 8" or some such thing... I admit, it might be due to the way comics were distributed back then (where you got them off spinner racks in local stores, and not your LCS), but today's stories, with the extreme decompression... Seriously, in some cases, 22 pages and *nothing* of consequence happens... It's nuts. Over in the Batman forum, there's a thread about best batman story ever. Mine were two stories that wouldn't even fill a whole issue now (let alone in the 70's when they were published). But they both hit me harder than any of the longer, so-called "more complex" stories you see nowadays (one was the first comic book story I ever cried at the end of, so it had that going for it).
And speaking of longer storylines, as I said, they were generally used to for big effects, or to tell complete stories unto themselves (like the first 12-issue maxi-series, Camelot 3000). You look at the Great Darkness Saga, which took 5 issues of the LSH, or the Judas Contract, which took 3 regular issues and 1 annual from the NTT, and those stories had impact... It seems nowadays, 4-5 issues means there's been a shift from day to night... (sorry, that's a bit sarcastic... maybe).
Two, multiple splash pages in a single issue... Darn it all, splash pages are reserved for the 1st page and maybe... *maybe* once in the middle of the issue... When every other page is a bloody splash page, you know decompression is just want the story is going for... I get that splash pages allow for the artist to show off their talents... But man... Waste of space.
Three, The way the term "retroactive continuity" (ret-con) has been mangled... Originally, it was where something interesting was inserted in the past of the character, that really didn't change any of the previous stories shown with the character... Now it just the easy way for the current writer to totally change something he/she wants to get rid of... (of course, there's really only a couple of good uses of ret-cons I liked, like the Anatomy Lesson from Swamp Thing, and some of the changes with the JSA... Otherwise...)
Okay... I better stop... The more I think about this... The more irritated I get...