| Posted: 23 March 2013 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | 1
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Bill Collins:
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| As for Alan Moore,i think his early work on 2000AD`s Future Shocks and his Warrior work being limited to 3-6 pages due to the weekly format in 2000AD and lack of budget for Warrior helped hone his skill at compression. |
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One interesting thing is that even after Warrior folded, and Moore brought back his Marvelman under the "Miracleman" title in the U.S., he continued to use basically the same format of 8-page chapters, each one of which genuinely advanced the story.
Many of the later issues are just 16 pages long, and an imaginary chapter line can be drawn at roughly the halfway point of each. For the first issue of all-new content, Moore even continued the official chapter breaks.
When I first read those comics ages ago, I wasn't fully aware of the prior serialization and repackaging, nor was I familiar with the anthology magazine format of British comics. In my mind, as I encountered chapter breaks within a single issue, I simply thought Moore was hearkening back to the old "multi-chapter" issues of Silver Age comics, which I had encountered in reprints of the Flash, the Hulk, and many others.
This makes me realize that the old "multi-chapter" structure would be a great thing to bring back, with or without the official chapter headings: To take what is often done in two issues (or more) of many modern comics, and condense it down into the page-count of a single issue.
For example, The Incredible Hulk #1 was divided into five chapters: The first one begins with the bomb test, ends with Banner, now transformed into the Hulk, bursting through a wall and into the night. The second chapter is the Hulk's prowl, his fight with Army personnel, and confronting the spy Igor. The third chapter has Banner and Rick evading the Army's questions about the night's events, and sorting out what is now happening to him. The fourth chapter has Banner transform again, the Hulk going off and scaring Betty, and then he and Rick are confronted by the Gargoyle. Finally, the fifth chapter (in the space of five pages!) has the Gargoyle fly Hulk and Rick all the way to Russia, the Gargoyle meeting Dr. Banner, with Banner curing the Gargoyle, and the Gargoyle sending Banner and Rick back before blowing up his bunker.
Nowadays, just try getting a comics writer to seriously advance their story in the space of eight pages. It would take some people five issues to do what Lee and Kirby did in that same single Hulk comic!
Who needs a single cliffhanger at the end of an issue, when you can have multiple cliff-hangers in the course of just one comic?
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