As part of Blog@’s look at webcomics, may I direct your attention to Voids? Written and drawn by Shayna Marchese, Voids follows twentysomething Sara at the moment her life begins to tailspin into a very odd direction. Within the space of a week, she finds herself without any of the steady, constant things she’d moored herself to… and in scrambling to pick up the pieces, she finds herself surrounded by new people, with old connections and grudges. As Sara gets to know the situation better, it slowly unfolds before the readers’ eyes as well. Shayna Marchese tells us a little more:

Without giving too much away, what is Voids about?

SM: It’s really like most stories: It’s about friendship, relationships, not knowing what you’re doing with your life. The main character is sort of drifting along; she has no real job, no real home, no very strong ties to anyone. The characters are all in some way lost and look to different things try and feel less so. Frances needs to be in a relationship, Andrew drinks, Nika goes through men in order to feel in charge of something. The story is meandering in a way that hopefully will let readers “know” the characters by the end.

(more…)

One particular item in DC’s solicitations stirred some mixed emotions in me:

SOLOMON GRUNDY #1
Written by Scott Kolins
Art and cover by Scott Kolins
Born on a Monday! Writer/artist Scott Kolins (THE FLASH, FACES OF EVIL: SOLOMON GRUNDY) brings you the origin behind one of the most mysterious figures in DC comics! Smashing out of the pages of his “Faces of Evil” one-shot, Solomon Grundy teams with Cyrus Gold – the man he once was before becoming a monster – to uncover the truth behind the Grundy curse! But how can he team with Cyrus Gold? How was Solomon Grundy created? And can Cyrus ever be set free? There are seven issues for each day of the nursery rhyme that haunts the longtime DC favorite, and by Sunday, could this be the end of Solomon Grundy?
On sale March 4 • 1 of 7 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

My internal dialogue went something like this:

THING 1: Solomon Grundy? Who wants to read about Solomon Grundy?

THING 2: It’s Scott Kollins. Make no mistake, the man can draw.

THING 1: But can he write? And this sucker is seven issues long. That’s twenty-one bucks… in a recession, no less.

THING 2: It’s seven issues because there’s an issue for every day of the rhyme. Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday…”

THING 1: Couldn’t it be just a chapter for every day of the rhyme? Aren’t they soaking us a little bit here?

THING 2: Do you really want to see Kollins’ art compressed to squeeze a week into three issues? Shouldn’t it have room to breathe?

THING 1: Shouldn’t it be on a more interesting character than Solomon Grundy?

THING 2: Hey, stories on the fringes of the DCU are often better than the ones front-and-center. And James Robinson really remade the character back in Starman. Grundy was a tragic figure, reborn again and again with a new personality.

THING 1: Yeah, but that was over ten years ago…and even then, no one gave him his own book. And besides, if the comic follows the rhyme, don’t we already know the story? And wasn’t it already told in, like… seven lines?

THING 2: Ten lines, technically.

THING 1: Now you’re splitting hairs.

Anyway, Thing 1 and Thing 2 will never agree. But what do you think about the upcoming Solomon Grundy miniseries?

You don’t see them much anymore: Long plots that stretch for fifteen or twenty issues, starting out with just a page or two devoted to them in the course of a normal adventure, and slowly building to a story that climaxes a year and a half down the road. There’s too much creative turnover for most writers (Johns, Bendis and Morrison excepted) to even try that these days.

And even if the creative team is stable, trade paperbacks leave creators with less room to meander. In practice, “writing for the trade” means more than stretching a story out to six issues; it also means a rethinking of the slow-burn storylines. If a trade paperback collection includes a bunch of pages that go nowhere (because they’re meant to pay off two collections down the line), causal readers will feel frustrated, and worse—ripped off.

For example, a few years ago, Kurt Busiek was planting seeds for some long-range plans for the new Aquaman. But circumstances changed, and Busiek left that title to take over the writing chores on Superman (and for a little while, Action Comics). And there, as he told his “Camelot Falls” storyline, he was also laying the groundwork for a long future run. But after building that foundation (and telling some fine stories in the meantime) he left the Superman title for Trinity… which is picking up some plot threads from his run on JLA a while back. And with a 52-issue run planned from the outset, with Trinity, at least, Busiek (and co-writer Fabian Nicieza) are pretty much guaranteed to be able to finish what they start.

But for all its length and scope, Trinity is one story. Part of what’s interesting about the long runs of the seventies, eighties and nineties are the meanderings and the course corrections, as the creators sometimes worked out on the page just what stories they were telling… or backed away from something that they’d changed their minds about.

In this series, I’ll be taking a look through my collection and examining some long runs from the past: The post Zero-Hour Legion, stretches of the Wally West Flash, John Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Garth Ennis’s run on Hellblazer, to name a few. If you have any other suggestions, let me know. I’ll be looking at the direction these books move in, and the weird little side-trips they take on the way.

They’re long runs, but each one begins with a single step.