So, it looks like Stuart Moore got to decompression before I managed my own rant on the subject. Seems like a good excuse to finally do my own, though, starting with what I find to be an oversimplification by Moore:

Proponents of this new pacing call it "decompression" and argue that it allows for greater depth of character and mood. Opponents denounce it as mere padding, and argue that the rise of the trade paperback format has led writers to stretch out stories beyond their natural length.

As far I'm concerned, it's really a matter of implementation. As an easy, mainstream example: I find most story arcs in Ultimate Spider-Man are decompressed. Individual issues concern themselves with pivotal moments in an over-arching plot that spans multiple issues. The result is multi-layered storytelling. On the other hand, I just finished issue six of Sentinel. The story meanders along, lingering on generally unimportant (or, worse, redundant) moments and conversations, all to give itself room to fit a trade paperback collection. It's padding at its painful worst.

(and lest someone choose to believe I'm picking on Sean McKeever, I'll say right now that his run on Inhumans is far more focused without rushing its story. McKeever obviously knows how to write decompressed stories, he just hasn't been doing it--or hasn't been doing it very well--in Sentinel)

The above examples point to the key difference, in my mind, between decompressed storytelling and padding. Decompression frees an author from certain constraints, it allows the story to be told at its own pace (more or less. I still think there should be some kind of identifiable reason why any given issue contains the scenes it does--"issue level" storytelling, if you will, but that's a different topic). Padding is just another form of arbitrarily setting your length; in this case, instead of forcing the story to fit 22 pages, you force it to fit 132. The resultant story is just as ill-served by splaying it over too many pages as it would have been by crushing it into too few.

If the reasoning behind padding is, indeed, the vaunted bookstore market, it seems just a touch asinine to shoehorn a story's length in the way Marvel, (or the "Tsunami" line, at least) seems determined to. Yes, 6 issues make for a nice, solid trade. So, too, do many other combinations of issues. 4 provides a nice, slim volume reminiscent of a poetry collection. 8 to 10 provide a more hefty feel that might appeal to people interested in "meatier" reads.

One of the big problems is that comics-to-trade makers seem stuck by their need to exactly reproduce the serial nature of the first format. Trade 1 must reprint the first X issues of the series, in order. The fact of the matter is, this needn't be the case, and allowing for some shuffling in collection might just solve a few problems. DC had the presence of mind to do this with the Sandman when it produced Fables and Reflections.

It might help to start thinking of comics not as also-ran novels, but as short story collections. Such collections often put disparate stories together (they may have the same characters at vastly different times in their lives, or share only a physical location, or even just a thematic through line). If you have two shorter story arcs that aren't in successive issues but work well together, that's what you collect. If you need to throw in a foreword to fill us in on what happened between the first story and the second, go ahead. When it comes down to it, though, I think there's a difference between what I need to know for a given story and comprehensive continuity, and any story worth its salt has the former without wasting time on the latter. Likewise, if you have a short story that hasn't enough supplemental material within its own series, but fits well in a thematic collection of stories, try collecting those. And don't be afraid to hold off collecting a short story until you have enough complimentary material (as opposed to simply "the next three issues") to make it a viable, solid collection.

If you do that, I think the editorial pressure (whether real or perceived) toward forced arcs might ease off. Decompression isn't about how long a story takes, but about giving your story the room it deserves to be told in. If that's a trade-friendly 6 issues, hallelujah. If it's only 1 or 2, that's great, too; now we just need a little creative management, keeping an eye out for the right stories to match it up with. The stories get the space they need, the publishers get their trades, and the bookstore market actually winds up just a touch more diverse in its offerings (in form if not always content) than it was before.

Tags: comics, commentary, writing