The Effects of Decompression on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
American authors pioneered the art form of the short story. When you think of the classic works of short fiction, the ones they made you read in your high school English class, you probably think of works by Poe, Twain, Hemingway, or Faulkner. Sure you probably have come across a short story or two by a European writer at some point of another; the French author Guy de Maupassant, for example, is pretty well known today for writing a classic example of irony in the story “The Necklace.” But for the most part European fiction writers wrote novels. For every Chekhov you run into, there are a dozen Dostoyevskys.
The same can also be said for the medium of comics. For many years there was a great divide between the length of stories told in American comics and those told in other parts of the world. If you look back at American comics from the Golden Age, you will see that a large portion of the stories told never exceeded the length of eight pages. Even up through the Silver Age (and the Bronze Age if you believe in such a thing), an individual issue of an American comic could be counted on to tell a complete story in and of itself.
Most recently we have seen that trend shift. American comics more and more are following the Japanese model of what some call “decompressed storytelling.” This Japanese style is much more focused on the whole picture as opposed to the individual jigsaw pieces that make it up. Their comics allow a story to unfold gradually over the course of hundreds of pages and multiple issues. Because of this, as Scott McCloud points out, “dozens of panels can be devoted to portraying slow cinematic movement or to setting a mood” (McCloud 80). It’s not always about instant gratification or reaching the goal; sometimes it’s just about the journey.
As I stated the American mainstream has in recent years begun to imitate this type of storytelling to various degrees of success. In the best cases, writers take time to fully flesh out characters and establish atmosphere within the structure of a finite plot, as in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. In the worst cases, page after page is used as sheer filler or similar points are made and then repeated endlessly, as both Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan and James Robinson’s Starman seemed towards their respective ends.
Unfortunately it is doing our comics a great disservice to follow this model manga gives us. We have taken this idea too far. Now it is almost impossible to read a comic without having read the six issues that preceded it. Almost all stories at present are written with the larger picture in mind, and the smaller stories have been thrown by the wayside.
What that leads to is comics having a certain degree of inaccessibility to new readers. A reader cannot simply pick up an issue of this comic or that and be able to understand the story completely. They will come in in the middle of things and be lost as to how it all began. Sometimes with superhero works, readers find them inaccessible because there are too many years of backstory to a certain character. With some hero books, you need to have been reading the stories for a lifetime to grasp all the little nuances of a certain issue. They’re like soap operas in that regard.
But many other times the problem simply is within the structure of an individual story. Look at the most recent issue of Palooka-ville, in which a man walks around for twenty-two pages. Someone reading this book would be frustrated at the lack of action perhaps, but also at their inability to grasp the situation. And such a reaction is understandable; it is foolish to expect to pick up what is the seventh part of a nine-part story and comprehend everything that occurs in the issue. But it is also foolish for a creator to expect a reader to come into a work cold, willing to buy a whole novel-length tale from a writer they’ve never heard of.
Now this is not to say that we should not strive for longer, more meaningful, complete stories in our comics. No that shift was definitely one in the right direction, as the sheer brilliance of each of those three aforementioned series can attest to. Despite having some flaws in its execution, the goal of telling epic stories on a grand scale is one we should be seeking out, one that has been achieved admirably by many master storytellers in the American mainstream (although the three examples I used above did just happen to be British writers).
It’s just that we need short works to be available alongside those longer works, so that readers don’t always have to dine on the full five-course meal of the miniseries or the graphic novel. Sometimes people need a light snack, and of late we’ve been sending the message that “pamphlets,” as individual comics are sometimes referred, are too light. Only graphic novels can be literary, we seem to say; pamphlets are meaningless.
It’s a shame for two reasons. First, I’ve found that the students in the graphic narrative class I’m teaching enjoy reading the shorter works like “Hawaiian Getaway” or “Victimology” more. They understand them, can get through them with less difficulty, making their search for meaning in these stories a little easier than in the graphic novels we read. As short stories are marginalized more and more, it becomes harder to find such works for my students to analyze.
As short works become unavailable, I must rely on longer works to carry the brunt of the weight in my class, which leads me to the second problem. Longer works in graphic novel form are more expensive. The price is a bit of a drawback, especially when creating a class such as mine. No one will be willing to take such a class if they have to pay over $150 for the books, just as no new readers will be willing to plop down $20 for something they know nothing of.
We need short stories for the medium to continue, for reasons of accessibility, analytical ease and initial costs. “Decompressed storytelling” is supposed to be about letting a story dictate its own length. That means we can have stories of 200-some pages and stories of 12 pages sitting side by side. It should not mean that the only possible lengths for a work are long, epic, and gargantuan.
Works Cited
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
