DC Comics 2015 Wishlist: 10 Things That Must Happen

6. Return To Short, Sharp Storytelling...

Modern comics publishers seem to forget that a six-part story takes SIX MONTHS to read. That€™s SIX WHOLE MONTHS of our lives invested in one story. This is fine for tales like Scott Snyder€™s Death of the Family, which needed a creepy, extended build up in order to be truly effective, but it really needn€™t be the case for a Supergirl series or a Teen Titans adventure. DC readers need to be able to pick up and enjoy a short, fun, diverting story, that really shouldn€™t be more than two, or three chapters long most of the time. Lest we forget that Batman: Year One, arguably the greatest origin story of the modern age, was over and done in four issues. If the story is €˜Scarecrow escapes Arkham with a new fear compound that regresses everybody to a child-like state€™, you really don€™t need more than four issues to tell that one... Besides, not every story has to be an exhaustive character study. Most of the time, comics should be fun, frantic and frivolous! Serious stories like The Death of Superman or Death in the Family were successful because they were bleak, isolated moments of tragedy against a backdrop of fun and positivity, that€™s why they stuck with us. It is also why they still resonate as important stories to this day. Another plus side of shorter stories would be that readers would relate to long stories in a better way, because a year-long saga would mean that something serious was happening and that they should pay attention to it. In addition, shorter stories overall would encourage readers to try out new books, knowing as they would that the story arc would not represent a massive financial/time commitment from them. Long-form storytelling wouldn€™t suffer either, because comics would simply revert to type and go back to playing out extended narrative/character arcs via a series of short, punchy stories, just as modern TV shows do today (a trope that, in fact, was originally adapted from comic books).