There’s an augment to be made that comic books are a disposable medium, but that’s talking about the history of the form more than its present. Comic books on newsprint paper, printed in four colour. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and easily disposed of, which is half the reason old comics gained value as the brands attached rose to prominence.
Shake free the cobwebs of old, outdated thinking and the defining trait of comics books is their collectability. As a young comic fan, I preserved thousands of individual issues in longboxes, each comic wrapped in a mylar sleeve with a backing board to ensure they weren’t creased. A collection that provided a sense of pride, a bourgeoning curatorial instinct sending me through back issue bins to find issues I might have missed.
As an adult, I prefer the issues collected in a different way, reading comics once the individual issues are bound up into trades and graphic novels, or produced in leather-bound omnibus editions. Serialised narratives transformed into books, narratives with recognizable beginnings and middles and ends, even as there’s a new arc underway in the latest issue.
Books that can sit in bookstores, rather than being sold into a specialty market serviced by comic shops.
Single issues of a comic book haven’t been cheap in a long time, and they’re rarely produced on cheap paper. Digital colouring achieved more than the four-colour press ever could, allowing for nuances in art and design that hadn’t been there fifty years ago. Paper quality improved. No longer mass-market format, but a boutique product advertised at a dedicated readership willing to seek out sales venues and pay a premium to see the story unfold issue by issue.
It’s a model that makes little sense to a casual reader. Friends who still read their favourite series in singles, here in 2020 Australia, report prices of seven or eight dollars an issue for the comics they follow. Many of them continue to buy multiple comics per week, making regular trips to the friendly local comic shop to pick up this week’s releases. Then the books are read, bagged, and stored. Added to the collection. The next issue is always coming, advancing the story another 32 pages.
Nobody does this because it’s a cheap and disposable form of narrative, here in the early days of the twenty-first century. Trades tend to arrive hot on the heels of the single issues. A six-issue arc may be collected two or three months after the sixth issue is released, and the price-point will likely be more agreeable.
Folks collect single issue of comics because there’s still a pleasure in the form, in grabbing a bite-sized chunk of story that’s easily portable and quick to read. Not every issue promises an immediate resolution, but those that don’t promise thirty days caught in the ellipsis between one issue and the next, creating a breathing space to ponder what might happen that few other mediums enforce in the same way.
They collect singles and have the first conversations about a story, rather than coming to it after the story is over. They see the value in being in a position to lead the conversations, rather than coming in after the rush of the new has passed. They may not be the only readers of this story, but they will always be the first wave, the folks engaging with the story (and the creators) as it was being written.
And they collect singles because it speaks to an identity as much as a love of the form, and because there’s value in going to the comic shop and encountering one’s tribe. And once that group of readers have been satisfied, comic books iterate out. They scoop up the readers who prefer to grab things in trade, having drifted away from single issues over the years. Or they grab the readers who would never step foot in comic shop, and only buy comics in collections with triple-figure page counts and spines thick enough to print the title on.
I don’t want to argue that folks who read trades are not comic readers, although I acknowledge that many of the issues with the comics community become predicated on the way markers of identity have been valued.
What’s interesting to me is the implications of the model: a story that represents different reading experiences as it moves through its iterative release cycle. The incomplete reading experience of the single issue, and the devotion it asks of a reader. The long pauses where the possibilities of a story live in the reader’s head, all the potentials playing out in the space between releases.
To read a single comic book is to embrace the incomplete narrative, and welcome the knowledge there is more to come.
Fiction books haven’t welcomed the incomplete for the bulk of my lifetime. There’s no physical object, like the single issue, that signals the author’s intent to tell the story in part. Instead, the iterative publishing cycle focuses on formats: Hardcover; Trade Paperback; Mass Market Paperback; Ebook.
The story contained within remains fundamentally the same. The distinctions are one of cost prestige, not reading experience. Books—regardless of format—signal their contents as complete. Ill-suited to narrative iteration.
And our stories shape themselves to that assumption, embrace conventions designed to bring about the satisfying conclusion within a page counts that publishers deem marketable. A no-pause-necessary model for narrative, where the long ellipsis after the last page is discouraged: Thou wilt not cliffhanger, prose author. Thou shalt write like the wind, if your series is unfinished, so that the ellipsis does linger with us too long.
And how dare you do anything but write the next book, once the rough edge of a story has been left and the reader’s wait begins.
