Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Of episodic stories and continuity...
Ok, there's been some talk lately on serializing versus continuity, open endings versus closed endings, and singles versus graphic novels. Dave Fiore has some thoughts here (but check out the comments for a bunch of different responses). John Jakala as always has some good thoughts here as well.
Someone in the comments to Dave brought up Batman: the Animated Series, and that really got me thinking, because I also loved that show. I guess what my opinion is, is that I can enjoy both episodic stories and those with a continuing storyline, but it is something has has to be carefully done, and it is pretty dangerous to start mixing those two things together.
A lot of comedic comic strips in newspapers are very episodic and lack continuity. By its very nature, the characters in Peanuts can't change very much. That is part of the appeal, by exploring these singular characters in a lot of different ways. It also has fairly stylized looking characters and a limited scope (most of the time). For TV, the original Star Trek was pretty episodic. You get to meet some new aliens each episode, a misc. crewmember will probably die, Bones tells Kirk of his death, Kirk is after the ladies, etc...
On the other hand, you may have something like Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, which is a pretty epic comic, but always has a sense of time, characters die, and the series ends. It is very much like a novel. For TV, you have something like Babylon 5, where it was very tightly scripted (mostly by one person). Even in the occational episodic stories, there tended to be other threads going on in the background. Personalities evolved, people died or moved on, lots of foreshadowing and threads tying together, and even looks into the past or future were possible due to knowing what lied ahead. It eventually did get cancelled, but was able to wrap things up pretty well due to being able to jump ahead to the end...
I think my issue with a lot of the superhero comics is the effort to try to have things both ways. Especially in the shared worlds, where there is a certain degree of realism (relatively speaking) and long arcs, how does that fit in with keeping characters the same and things episodic? It means we keep having characters brought back from the dead, retcons, etc. It is like "Now we'll do something really involving and interesting that changes everything! Whoops.. now we're too far afield. Let's change things back to how they were before so that that other thing is meaningless." You also have all these different stories sharing the same world. If you're going to have a crossover, you need the stories to have the same stuff going on, but how does that fit in with the standalone stories? I know someone mentioned a while back about a situation where you might have a character in his own story, but also on a team, but it doesn't make sense because the character wouldn't have time or the personality was different. They must actually be in some different continuity, but it isn't something explicit, and that team might meet a character who has also met the character from the standalone books. So this other person how been involved with two continuities of the character in his own memories, etc. It just gets to be a big mess...
Creators and fans want it both ways... they want episodic stories with characters that don't change, but also heavy in continuity and a shared world, all at the same time. If one of the worlds really acted like a world, with characters having a consistant history, I could probably get into it more, or if more of the stories were really self-contained and episodic.
I think another thing is that certain concepts just work better at being episodic. Johnny Quest or TinTin has a couple of characters going around the world to different locations. Batman is a loner in his own city. The Herculoids are a family of people and creatures mostly alone with dangers on their own planet. Star Trek involved moving though space. Samurai Jack moves through his world with one main goal in mind, etc. By putting certain limitations in place, it makes the episodic process a lot easier and smoother.
If Samurai Jack added a companion, suddenly something has really changed. If he keeps them around, there there is now a time before and after that person. If you're careful about it, you could have them take someone around for a while and then that person decides to stay in a village putting Jack alone again. Of course that then limits that character's influence. If meeting that person leaves the main character changed, then there is still a distinct continuity of before and after. You can do something like wipe out the main character's memory of that person, but stuff like that can get annoying and silly pretty quickly.
Taking it from the other side, what if you have a story that is mostly about continuity, but has an episodic element as a hook? Say the character changes and evolves, but tends to have a battle with someone in each chapter. Like say it is a martial artist who competes against others for sport, and he learns new techniques and becomes stronger over time. That can work, but you still need to be careful. One possible problem is that of "inflation". If the hero is always getting stronger, than the bad guys also have to in order to remain a challenge. If a story like this continues on for too long, you get a situation where everyone can pretty much destroy the world at any time. This is what happened when DBZ ran on for too long. You get people with "power level 10million!" or something.
This combo of continuity and episodic elements happens a lot in manga and I think it usually works because it is a self-contained story and that it tends to end before things get out of control. The funny parody of How To Draw Manga books called Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga actually brings up some lucid commentary on occation, such as mocking those series that don't end before villian inflation becomes a problem. ;)
So, I think that to a certain degree episodic elements tend to interfere with continuity and vice versa. It is easy to back yourself into a corner from which extracting yourself becomes a detriment to the story. Of course something can tell continuity in an episodic way, like when I read the Luba TPB. It takes a fairly tight continuity but just picks little sections of the daily life of the characters to show to the viewer. However, I do make a bit of a distinction here. The sections of the story are broken up into bitesized chunks, but isn't being totally divorced from history or and isn't having a constant repetitive situation for the purpose of a hook. Of course hooks can exist in stories even set in the real world which seem to have continuity. I haven't read Strangers in Paradise, but I've heard that constant relationship breakups and getogethers proved too repetitive for some people, and that sort of thing can happen in many romance manga. At some point you need to either keep having new interesting variations (but can still hurt continuity realism) or just stop the whole thing. The repetitive nature of the hook can be of detriment to the reality of the continuity after a while...
So, while I really do like continuity in most cases, an episodic story that is done right, can still be a lot of fun. The aforementioned Batman cartoon was nice in that was mostly episodic without getting caught up in too much continuity, and it didn't have a lot of external character showing up, which lent to a certain consistancy in feel. In a TV show where you might get repeats at any time, having a show you can jump right into can be a nice asset. I think for the industry lately, there's been a lot of wanting to grow up and be more realistic and appeal to older sensibilities. One way to do that is to add more arcs and continuity, but to me it clashes with a lot of the pre-established episodic conventions (and other conventions like spandex). It is like 3D.. the more you get away from stylization and into realism, the more that things diverging from reality stick out and scream to be noticed.
If something like Batman is going to be heavily episodic and eschew continuity, then I'd like it to really be that way. He is a loner in his city, he has strange bad guys he fights. Those guys get locked up and new ones crop up for him to fight. Some jailbreaks on occation are ok, but the more you do that, the more continuity creeps up. Or at least don't have new schemes rely too much on old ones, so that after the first time you meet a bad guy, who knows if this time is before or after the last time? But there is always this temptation to make it more real. We want it all to fit on timeline. We want to complicate it by refering to all the stuff in the past. But that is perhaps turning it into something else entirely. There is a certain freedom in a stylized episodic world and as soon as you start to pin things down, you might increase freedom of storyline complexity, but you also restrict the more stylized freedoms. And since a lot of that freedom comes from not having to be entirely consistant or realistic, building strict continuity on top of it is problematic to begin with. If you're careful, you may be able to have a continuity-heavy beginning and (perhaps) end to an episodic series, but it is probably be to plan that from the start so that the parts don't interfere with each other. If you want to add a lot of continuity or "remake" a character just use a very distinct alternate reality (like Batman Year One or the Dark Knight Returns) instead of doing it inside the "real" timeline.
One interesting way of dealing with the problem of balancing continuity and episodic stuff is to expand the complexity of each episodic element in such a way that it still doesn't change the main character or effect other situations too much. I'm thinking partly of a manga/anime called Eat-Man. It involves a mysterious bounty hunter named Bolt Crank who eats metal and can create weapons with it. He travels around to different lands taking various jobs. Each of the stories might be short or might be a pretty long arc. In a lot of them, Bolt isn't really the focus so much as the wildcard element which resolves the plot of the main story in the end. It can build up the situation and characters as much as necessary until it gets resolved, but then Bolt leaves and finds another place and bounty. That is able to work because the main character is willing to just drop everything and move on. If he decided to stay somewhere, the dynamic of the series would suddenly change a lot.
Anyway, I don't think the singles versus graphic novel argument always has to tie into all of this. Obviously, having an episodic element can work well for a serialized method of distribution, as the particular hook is present in each single you buy and it is easier to jump into a story that has already started. However, there is nothing stopping someone from doing a very continuity heavy story in a serialized form, if they can have enough happen each time to keep reader interest going and if they either have good recaps or take for granted new users will just by a GN or back issues of earlier stuff. If it is a relatively self-contained story, finding that older information may be easier...
And to switch gears for just a moment, to talk about endings. If you really have an episodic story which relies little on continuity, you can pretty much go on for however long you want until the concept gets stale. It can be fun, but different viewers will have different tolarances for repetition. When continuity gets introduced, I generally do like some sort of ending, even if it is open ended. I find a lot of times, the stories I most want to see more of, are usually the ones were maybe things are well enough as they are and more might hurt things. I've read a lot of long fantasy series that span many novels before, and sometimes you'll have stuff where new books jump to the past to explain the legends. Sometimes it works, but a lot of times it just spoils the mystery. The same goes for open-ended things like what John says about the Matrix. A lot of people just really like having a finite story, something which was somewhat lacking for a while in the industry. Now, with so many manga and OGNs providing endings (or at least stopping areas), a lot of people are happy. Still, I do think there is a place for endless episodic elements or even endless continuity if done well...
Perhaps what is missing these days are the stories that really lack continuity in designed and disciplined way. In the effort to make things more mature and fit into big shared worlds, it seems to have been either lost or subverted over time into weird mishmashes of contradictory continuities. Plenty of great continuity-heavy titles are coming out from manga or independants, but where is the TinTin for this generation?
Someone in the comments to Dave brought up Batman: the Animated Series, and that really got me thinking, because I also loved that show. I guess what my opinion is, is that I can enjoy both episodic stories and those with a continuing storyline, but it is something has has to be carefully done, and it is pretty dangerous to start mixing those two things together.
A lot of comedic comic strips in newspapers are very episodic and lack continuity. By its very nature, the characters in Peanuts can't change very much. That is part of the appeal, by exploring these singular characters in a lot of different ways. It also has fairly stylized looking characters and a limited scope (most of the time). For TV, the original Star Trek was pretty episodic. You get to meet some new aliens each episode, a misc. crewmember will probably die, Bones tells Kirk of his death, Kirk is after the ladies, etc...
On the other hand, you may have something like Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, which is a pretty epic comic, but always has a sense of time, characters die, and the series ends. It is very much like a novel. For TV, you have something like Babylon 5, where it was very tightly scripted (mostly by one person). Even in the occational episodic stories, there tended to be other threads going on in the background. Personalities evolved, people died or moved on, lots of foreshadowing and threads tying together, and even looks into the past or future were possible due to knowing what lied ahead. It eventually did get cancelled, but was able to wrap things up pretty well due to being able to jump ahead to the end...
I think my issue with a lot of the superhero comics is the effort to try to have things both ways. Especially in the shared worlds, where there is a certain degree of realism (relatively speaking) and long arcs, how does that fit in with keeping characters the same and things episodic? It means we keep having characters brought back from the dead, retcons, etc. It is like "Now we'll do something really involving and interesting that changes everything! Whoops.. now we're too far afield. Let's change things back to how they were before so that that other thing is meaningless." You also have all these different stories sharing the same world. If you're going to have a crossover, you need the stories to have the same stuff going on, but how does that fit in with the standalone stories? I know someone mentioned a while back about a situation where you might have a character in his own story, but also on a team, but it doesn't make sense because the character wouldn't have time or the personality was different. They must actually be in some different continuity, but it isn't something explicit, and that team might meet a character who has also met the character from the standalone books. So this other person how been involved with two continuities of the character in his own memories, etc. It just gets to be a big mess...
Creators and fans want it both ways... they want episodic stories with characters that don't change, but also heavy in continuity and a shared world, all at the same time. If one of the worlds really acted like a world, with characters having a consistant history, I could probably get into it more, or if more of the stories were really self-contained and episodic.
I think another thing is that certain concepts just work better at being episodic. Johnny Quest or TinTin has a couple of characters going around the world to different locations. Batman is a loner in his own city. The Herculoids are a family of people and creatures mostly alone with dangers on their own planet. Star Trek involved moving though space. Samurai Jack moves through his world with one main goal in mind, etc. By putting certain limitations in place, it makes the episodic process a lot easier and smoother.
If Samurai Jack added a companion, suddenly something has really changed. If he keeps them around, there there is now a time before and after that person. If you're careful about it, you could have them take someone around for a while and then that person decides to stay in a village putting Jack alone again. Of course that then limits that character's influence. If meeting that person leaves the main character changed, then there is still a distinct continuity of before and after. You can do something like wipe out the main character's memory of that person, but stuff like that can get annoying and silly pretty quickly.
Taking it from the other side, what if you have a story that is mostly about continuity, but has an episodic element as a hook? Say the character changes and evolves, but tends to have a battle with someone in each chapter. Like say it is a martial artist who competes against others for sport, and he learns new techniques and becomes stronger over time. That can work, but you still need to be careful. One possible problem is that of "inflation". If the hero is always getting stronger, than the bad guys also have to in order to remain a challenge. If a story like this continues on for too long, you get a situation where everyone can pretty much destroy the world at any time. This is what happened when DBZ ran on for too long. You get people with "power level 10million!" or something.
This combo of continuity and episodic elements happens a lot in manga and I think it usually works because it is a self-contained story and that it tends to end before things get out of control. The funny parody of How To Draw Manga books called Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga actually brings up some lucid commentary on occation, such as mocking those series that don't end before villian inflation becomes a problem. ;)
So, I think that to a certain degree episodic elements tend to interfere with continuity and vice versa. It is easy to back yourself into a corner from which extracting yourself becomes a detriment to the story. Of course something can tell continuity in an episodic way, like when I read the Luba TPB. It takes a fairly tight continuity but just picks little sections of the daily life of the characters to show to the viewer. However, I do make a bit of a distinction here. The sections of the story are broken up into bitesized chunks, but isn't being totally divorced from history or and isn't having a constant repetitive situation for the purpose of a hook. Of course hooks can exist in stories even set in the real world which seem to have continuity. I haven't read Strangers in Paradise, but I've heard that constant relationship breakups and getogethers proved too repetitive for some people, and that sort of thing can happen in many romance manga. At some point you need to either keep having new interesting variations (but can still hurt continuity realism) or just stop the whole thing. The repetitive nature of the hook can be of detriment to the reality of the continuity after a while...
So, while I really do like continuity in most cases, an episodic story that is done right, can still be a lot of fun. The aforementioned Batman cartoon was nice in that was mostly episodic without getting caught up in too much continuity, and it didn't have a lot of external character showing up, which lent to a certain consistancy in feel. In a TV show where you might get repeats at any time, having a show you can jump right into can be a nice asset. I think for the industry lately, there's been a lot of wanting to grow up and be more realistic and appeal to older sensibilities. One way to do that is to add more arcs and continuity, but to me it clashes with a lot of the pre-established episodic conventions (and other conventions like spandex). It is like 3D.. the more you get away from stylization and into realism, the more that things diverging from reality stick out and scream to be noticed.
If something like Batman is going to be heavily episodic and eschew continuity, then I'd like it to really be that way. He is a loner in his city, he has strange bad guys he fights. Those guys get locked up and new ones crop up for him to fight. Some jailbreaks on occation are ok, but the more you do that, the more continuity creeps up. Or at least don't have new schemes rely too much on old ones, so that after the first time you meet a bad guy, who knows if this time is before or after the last time? But there is always this temptation to make it more real. We want it all to fit on timeline. We want to complicate it by refering to all the stuff in the past. But that is perhaps turning it into something else entirely. There is a certain freedom in a stylized episodic world and as soon as you start to pin things down, you might increase freedom of storyline complexity, but you also restrict the more stylized freedoms. And since a lot of that freedom comes from not having to be entirely consistant or realistic, building strict continuity on top of it is problematic to begin with. If you're careful, you may be able to have a continuity-heavy beginning and (perhaps) end to an episodic series, but it is probably be to plan that from the start so that the parts don't interfere with each other. If you want to add a lot of continuity or "remake" a character just use a very distinct alternate reality (like Batman Year One or the Dark Knight Returns) instead of doing it inside the "real" timeline.
One interesting way of dealing with the problem of balancing continuity and episodic stuff is to expand the complexity of each episodic element in such a way that it still doesn't change the main character or effect other situations too much. I'm thinking partly of a manga/anime called Eat-Man. It involves a mysterious bounty hunter named Bolt Crank who eats metal and can create weapons with it. He travels around to different lands taking various jobs. Each of the stories might be short or might be a pretty long arc. In a lot of them, Bolt isn't really the focus so much as the wildcard element which resolves the plot of the main story in the end. It can build up the situation and characters as much as necessary until it gets resolved, but then Bolt leaves and finds another place and bounty. That is able to work because the main character is willing to just drop everything and move on. If he decided to stay somewhere, the dynamic of the series would suddenly change a lot.
Anyway, I don't think the singles versus graphic novel argument always has to tie into all of this. Obviously, having an episodic element can work well for a serialized method of distribution, as the particular hook is present in each single you buy and it is easier to jump into a story that has already started. However, there is nothing stopping someone from doing a very continuity heavy story in a serialized form, if they can have enough happen each time to keep reader interest going and if they either have good recaps or take for granted new users will just by a GN or back issues of earlier stuff. If it is a relatively self-contained story, finding that older information may be easier...
And to switch gears for just a moment, to talk about endings. If you really have an episodic story which relies little on continuity, you can pretty much go on for however long you want until the concept gets stale. It can be fun, but different viewers will have different tolarances for repetition. When continuity gets introduced, I generally do like some sort of ending, even if it is open ended. I find a lot of times, the stories I most want to see more of, are usually the ones were maybe things are well enough as they are and more might hurt things. I've read a lot of long fantasy series that span many novels before, and sometimes you'll have stuff where new books jump to the past to explain the legends. Sometimes it works, but a lot of times it just spoils the mystery. The same goes for open-ended things like what John says about the Matrix. A lot of people just really like having a finite story, something which was somewhat lacking for a while in the industry. Now, with so many manga and OGNs providing endings (or at least stopping areas), a lot of people are happy. Still, I do think there is a place for endless episodic elements or even endless continuity if done well...
Perhaps what is missing these days are the stories that really lack continuity in designed and disciplined way. In the effort to make things more mature and fit into big shared worlds, it seems to have been either lost or subverted over time into weird mishmashes of contradictory continuities. Plenty of great continuity-heavy titles are coming out from manga or independants, but where is the TinTin for this generation?
