Peter M. Ball

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Shake free the cobwebs of old, outdated thinking and the defining trait of comics books is their collectability.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.

Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition.

Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions.

As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.”

I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt.

Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and co originally used, because the only copy that showed up on Amazon Australia was over a hundred and fifty bucks.

And this is what the long tail means, when folks talk about it in relation to publishing. Ellis didn’t promote the book back then, and he sure as shit isn’t promoting it now, but I found myself dredging up old blog posts on his former blog and realised that it existed.

Since I’d been on a bit of a Warren Ellis kick, and a lot of what I was reading from his 2009 ramble fed into my current interests, I swung $20 on getting a copy printed and fired in my direction.

Fuck knows if I’ll ever get it, given the state of the world at the moment, but I’ve made the attempt. Eleven years on, this weird little book of Warren Ellis reprints is earning him a little cash and me a whole lot of joy.

And eleven years later, I’m talking about the book. Sending fresh eyes in its direction. Letting folks know my appreciation for Ellis work, and why I’m excited for this book in particular.

If he and his collaborators had updated it to release in an actual ebook format, and published through the more contemporary POD services that feed into distribution, I suspect it could be earning more than it does.

I also suspect that Ellis is content to have the book lying fallow, occasionally purchased by fans like me who track its existence down.

“Sure,” you say, “but Warren Ellis is a massively popular comics writer, turned massively popular script writer, and was a bit of an internet celebrity back in 2009.”

Sure.

But here’s the thing: I wrote and published RPG gaming books from 2005 to 2007. I wasn’t particularly well known, and have largely disappeared from the scene after I gave up publishing. The edition of D&D my books supported was at least two editions back, and the same is true of the small handful of other games I wrote content for after they opened up their games to third-party publishers.

Like Ellis, I let the old releases go fallow. They don’t get updated or transferred to new formats. I don’t try and find new sales channels. It’s been thirteen years since I did anything more than look at the sales figures, and there are still the occasional weeks where I earn more from a dozen D&D spells I wrote in 2006 than I do from fiction.

And that’s what the long tail is: picking up a little bit of cash from things you wrote a decade ago. Which, notably, was still in the era when digital publishing and ebooks still felt shiny and new, and POD was still a weird-as-heck struggle to get stuff uploaded.

It’s better now. Cleaner and more efficient and feeding into the same places you buy all your other books. It won’t stay that way forever–ebooks will be disrupted, as will POD, but the formats will still have it’s fans and there’s always the option of updating and repurposing.

And writers who have come of age with the internet produce an awful lot of content they can update and re-purpose, if they’re willing to embrace the skills they need to do it fast-and-cheap.

The poetics of comic book narratives are indelibly bound to the page. Each issue of a 24 page comic will contain twenty-four pages of narrative, give or take a few spaces for advertising. Which means a smart comic book writer is always thinking about layout and using pages to generate effect–pitch this sequence across two pages that open together so it reads a particular way, pitch this reveal for the end of an odd-numbered page and the start of a new scene when the reader flips over.

I’m using the word writer loosely here, as befits a collaborative medium where an artist will bring scripts to fruition, but it’s not exclusively the artists deal. Go read interviews where the folks who script comics talk process, and the obsession with pages is there.

Neil Gaiman hassled DC editorial because he wanted to know where the advertising sat in upcoming Sandman issues, because he knew they’d affect the way the story was consumed. Alan Moore put forth a theory he learned from an editor: comic book characters are limited to twenty-five words of dialogue, with 35 words maximum in an a panel. Anything more, and the words take up too much of the panel, giving too little space to the art.

The conventions of comic book storytelling were built around the physical object, the production tools used to create it, and the economies of scale in the marketplace.

This is true for fiction, although it tends to be a little less obvious. Prose doesn’t fit on the page in the same way, flows across the page and continues on with nary a pause.

Tell an editor that you want to focus on a dramatic reveal at the bottom of page thirty-three, and they’ll look at you like you’re nuts. That’s not the way books work.

Tell an editor that you’ve written a 200,000 word novel as your debut, and they’ll give you that same pained look. Also not the way books work, 99% of the time. Costs too much to produce, intimidates the fuck out of an audience. Easier by far to sell two 100,000 word novels, which is how that becomes the default length for fiction in the vast majority of genres.

The fiction industry has conventions based upon marketing and production concerns, just the same as comics, but it’s easier to ignore the impact they have on poetic process because the page is invisible in the narrative process for prose fiction.

Instead, it turns into conventional wisdom around word-count: if your story goes over 6,000 words, it’ll be a bugbear to find a market that’ll take it; avoid novellas, because there’s no audience for ’em; work towards a 100k novel, because that’s the easiest sell if you’re starting out.

When I first started talking about using comic book models to structure a prose publishing company, everyone naturally leapt to the idea of using serial fiction instalments. Which is definitely on my radar, but not the real kernel that makes the idea interesting to me.

What appeals to me is thinking about the physical object of a thirty-two page booklet and filling it in an interesting way. Paying attention to the way the finished product impacts the conventions of telling a story, and what happens when the job ceases to be “write a narrative,” and becomes “fill 32 pages.”