Tod dem 22 Seiten Comicbuchformat!
Permanent Damage ist ja bekanntlich eine der besten Kolumnen im Web. Doch diesmal scheint sich Steven Grant selbst übertroffen zu haben:
www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=pd&article=2714
Zitat:
It's time to kill the 22 page story. Seriously.
Got into a couple conversations about this over the past few weeks - there seems to be something in the water - and it turns out writers hate the 22 page story. Artists aren't that crazy about it. Readers generally find it frustrating, particularly as prices creep upward. Retailers mostly seem fine with it, since it semi-guarantees a steady flow of product. Publishers? It's the familiar format for most of them, but most, particularly small publishers, probably aren't seeing much in the way of profit from them anymore. I doubt many editors would care one way or the other.
Bear in mind I'm not calling for the death of the 32 page comics package, though that's been a wobbly format for years now, and some accommodation of value and price is likely to obliterate it before too long. The 22 page story is a different beast, and a clumsy one. About all it has going for it, after all this time, is familiarity.
There's a contingent out there that believes "comic books" are properly 32 page ~9.5"x6" magazines printed in gaudy ink on cheap paper. One contingent adds "and sell for 10¢," but since no comics longer sell for that anymore except in extremely rare, make it requisite - any of the stipulations, really - moots the discussion. In most instances, none of those things, besides the shape, constitute "comic books" anymore, and even what we're left with is just the result of shrinkage from larger dimensions of earlier eras, a meaningless accident of history.
Likewise, the 22 page story is an accident of history, Marvel's artificial concoction. When I started writing Marvel comics in the late '70s, the story page count had shrunk to 17 pages an issue, making the books almost half ads with a smidgen of editorial material like letter pages and promotional blurbs. DC had more or less followed suit, as DC usually does, but then independent comics came along, bolstered by the budding direct market, with more pages, and Marvel started feeling a little heat about it, especially with so many readers complaining of the story-ad ratio. Story page count crept up to 20, then 21, then 22 pages over a couple of years, and locked in there, for the most part.
How they settled on 22 pages I don't know, but I suspect it was the intersection of how much the company wanted to spend on creative costs per issue and how many pages they felt any given artist would be able to turn in during any given month. (In many cases it turned out to be a bit ambitious.) As for content, one editor told me to plot 17 page stories as always and allow for longer fight scenes, which became the generally accepted (if rarely mentioned) practice. Oddly, from a writer's perspective, 17 pages were easier to structure, as 8 or 11 page stories are. I suspect it has something to do with the three-act spine most of us were trained in, by pop culture if not scholastically. Basically, the first act introduces the characters and conflict, the second (really two acts in one, and twice as long as acts one or three) adds complications and builds dramatic tension, and the third resolves the situation and by doing so determines the work's real theme. In theory (though in reality it never works that way, for reasons artistic as well as structural) stories should balance mathematically. In an ideal world, the act structure of a 22 page story would break down 5.5 pages - 11 pages - 5.5 pages. Given that nobody splits pages anymore, more reasonable balanced ratios would either be 6-10-6 or 5-12-5. All sounds very workable, doesn't it?
Except in most cases it doesn't work. You either end up with too short a story that needs to be padded out or too much story to fit in the allotted space. Then throw in the mandatory splash pages, each of which steals precious space from a story. Not that I mind splash pages, but let's face it: their main function is commercial, not artistic. They give the publisher some eye candy to throw at the fans and the artist something to sell at conventions. For the writer, they're mostly irrelevant, except for how they distort pacing. Which only throws oil on the fire because they're already distorted, forced into the artificial 22 page construct, with virtually every book in that format reflexively configuring into that construct to build, along with other factors, the impression that all the stories in that format are effectively the bland same. Then most 22 page stories are also continued stories, which further complicates things. (A portion of each story necessarily has to go toward recap, to keep readers up to speed and accommodate any coming to the story midway.) The continued story has recently been rationalized as the building block of trade paperback collections, for which companies increasingly depend for their income, but originally it was simply a valiant effort to overcome the artificially limited physical confines of the standard comic book. But that created its own problems and further distortions.
If there were some natural reason for the length, it wouldn't be that bad, but the only real reason it's there is that Marvel decided on it and stuck to it. Not all companies have kept to it. First Comics, when they were around, opted for 28 pages per issue to give readers better value for price (of course, the trap of that is that you can't assume more pages=better value; it's what's on the pages that increases or decreases value), while DC, with similar logic, jumped their page count to 24 pages for a long time in an attempt to improve their rep against Marvel, and to some extent it worked, the page count only dropping when the mid-'90s crash set in and budgets had to be cut.
But look at what gets significant push these days. It's rarely the 22 page story comics, because most don't make any money to speak of. Special events get the juice. Most 22 page comics exist, from the company's point of view, simply to keep other companies' books out of that rack space.
Reader buying habits are the other part of the story. Readers aren't particularly drawn to 22 page stories anymore for all kinds of reasons, but they've also been trained now to avoid mini-series, and they're also resistant to anthologies and backup stories, which doesn't leave publishers with a lot of options. As I've mentioned before, the logical step is a shift from many monthly, 22 page story comics to far fewer original graphic novels of varying length. It's not quite here yet, but it's not far off either. Monthly comics will always have a function - for keeping talent in the public eye, they're apparently essential - but the 22 page story doesn't, not really. It's time to abandon the standard and let stories determine their own lengths - and publish/price accordingly. Sure, it's as much a crapshoot as anything else these days and success depends on the concept and individual talent involved because comics publishing can never be separated from these things, but the bet is a relaxation of that restriction will challenge preconceptions and create opportunity for better stories, and better comics.Ich liebe die Idee, denn für mich dürfte der Comicmarkt deutlich mehr auf Graphic Novels setzen. Ich brauche auch keine monatliche Schnippseldosis, ich lese schließlich auch nicht den Fortsetzungsroman in der FAZ, auch wenn es sich um eine Erstveröffentlichung handelt.
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