The Downsides of Serial Storytelling
Serial storytelling is popular on television, but as far as print goes, it’s a dying art. There used to be a time when people regularly followed installments of actual books, printed a chapter at a time in magazines, but now magazines themselves are struggling to keep the public’s interest in the face of the internet. You can find serial stories on the internet—web comics and fanfiction for example—but the business of it isn’t the same. The comic book industry is one of the few businesses that still maintains that original serial model and because of that it usually takes six or twelve issues of a comic to tell a single story arc. The last few months I’ve spent a lot of time deciding what titles to trim from my pull list in favor of waiting for the graphic novel releases. As I’ve evaluated titles, I’ve thought a lot about the downsides of serial storytelling. The obvious downside for the consumer is the price. I bought the first six issues of Avengers by Jonathan Hickman for a cover price of $3.99 which meant I spent approximately $24.00. The graphic novel collection of those issues is currently being sold for $15.00 on Amazon.com. For someone with a tight budget, that kind of difference is noteworthy.