David Fiore (official “Man of the Hour” here at ADDTF) really liked my interview with Craig Thompson, to the point where he’s now interested in picking up Thompson’s book Blankets. Both of these reactions make me very happy. So I feel I owe it to Dave to clarify my thoughts on serialization in general and the mooted serialization of Blankets in particular. David said
My only quibble with the interview Sean–I know you agree with Craig that “self-contained” is usually better than seriality (endless or otherwise), but it would have been interesting to see how the man would’ve responded to a little devil’s advocacy on that issue!
I think what Dave’s got in mind here is my reaction to his claim that the best art works like ongoing Big Two superhero titles–as I put it then, “never-ending, closure-free, static characters, obsessively concerned with minute variations on a very limited number of themes, and without an author to speak of.” It seemed to me then, and still does now, that asserting that such works are superior to traditional (or, really, even most non-traditional) narratives relies on a good many faulty premises and leads inevitably to a faulty conclusion. But what I was talking about in my interview with Thompson was, quite simply, specific to Thompson’s work on Blankets.
Thompson told me that many of his fellow cartoonists advised him to release this 570-page work in multiple installments. Having read such smaller chunks of the book in the various online previews that had been made available in the run-up to the book’s release and being extremely underwhelmed by them, I felt that this would have been a disastrous strategy. Not because of any inherent problem with serialization–as long as there’s a completed structure to be arrived at somewhere, I don’t really care how you publish a given work, most of the time; my famous problems with “floppies” stem mainly from logistical and public-image concerns, not from a belief that the serialization of a graphic novel is Always Bad. No, I felt this way because of a problem with the material–i.e. it simply read much better as a whole than as discreet subsections. Individual passages that at first seemed twee or self-involved subsequently blossomed, when taken in all together, into a compelling narrative of the loss of a young man’s ability to idealize. When I cited Dave Cooper’s Ripple to support my argument, again, my problem wasn’t with serialization per se, but with how serializing his book led to unfulfillable audience expectations and undermined a narrative strategy that would have worked well had the book been presented in its complete form all at once.
In the end this, like so many other questions of sequential-art aesthetics and mechanics, falls under Collins’s Law. Question: Do serialized comics suck? Answer: Not the ones where the serialization works!