Hello. I’m Marc. You don’t know me, but I really fucking love longform, serialized, episodic storytelling. So John’s asked me to blather on about said topic for some unknown reason.
I’ve been reading comics regularly since the age of five. I tivo twelve-to-fourteen hours of television a week. Almost every novel I read is part of a series. These things move me in ways that self-contained units of storytelling can not.
I become very deeply involved in these stories in ways I simply can’t with a single novel, or with any movie not made by Billy Wilder or the Coen brothers. And here’s why: Episodic and serialized storytelling is experiential. You watch an hour of television, check in on who Don Draper’s boinking this week, then you go out and live your life for a week. At the end of that time, you check in once again.
And in that week in between episodes, both you and the characters have changed. The characters and stories grow and develop as you grow and develop. When you’re watching a film, you’re simply sitting in a theater for two hours. The characters on the screen have developed, have changed, have had life-altering things happen to them, but you’ve just been sitting on your ass in a dark room with a bunch of strangers in that same time period.
Here are two examples of what I’m talking about: Y: THE LAST MAN and Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s PLANETARY. Now, both I and my esteemed host, J. West, have read both works in their entirety. But my experience reading those works radically differs from his.
I read both series in their original releases. That means that I read the first issue of PLANETARY when it hit the stands in March of 1999, more than ten years ago. My first introduction to the series was actually in September or October of 1998, when the eight-page preview story appeared as a flipbook with an issue of GEN-13. Which means that I first read PLANETARY a year and a half before the 21st century began. I was twelve at the time and had just begun the sixth grade.
Flash-forward to a few weeks ago, and the final issue, #27, came out five months after I’d graduated from college. Re-reading the series, certain issues bring back very specific memories to me. The first few issues are inextricably linked to memories I have of the house I was living in at the time. Issue #16 was in the stack of comics I showed my first girlfriend to explain to her just what the fuck comics were, exactly.
Similarly, Y: THE LAST MAN is about one man’s odyssey. The series takes place over the course of five years and, not coincidentally, took about five years to come out. As Yorick Brown jet-setted around the world, I was settling into a new house, then another a third of the way through the series; then I went to prom and graduated and eventually started working at Marvel with my first internship. I aged the same amount of time that Yorick did. I got to know him and his supporting cast over the course of five years, whereas most of my friends read the entire series in a month or less.
So, yes, it’s experiential. And to my mind, that’s what really makes art work. These stories become a part of my life, something I am perpetually weaving in and out of. I take each segment of Mad Men and go live in the real world with it resting in the back of my skull, then I come back a week later and get another.
So that’s what I’ll be blogging about. I’ll follow my experiences as I read and watch various works. In a few weeks, I’ll be writing quite a bit about Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. I’ll write a LOT about Rescue Me. I’ll compare Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem to The Hills (trust me, they have more in common than you’d think). I’ll talk about Y and PLANETARY and CASANOVA. I’ll explain why Grant Morrison’s INVISIBLES and Alan Moore and J.H. Williams’ PROMETHEA are two of the most beautiful and meaningful works of art I’ve ever encountered. There might be a comparison between season two of Breaking Bad and season two of Gossip Girl, and how the two shows can teach us about longform, open-ended storytelling.
And when you finally reach the point where you’d like nothing more than for me to shut the fuck up, remember: It was John who unleashed me upon you.
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