Comic Books and Threaded Narratives

Unpacking from my move, I stumbled onto two boxes filled with the comic books I collected as a teenager from 1983-1986, a habit I got into thanks to walking past a comic book store on my way home from school. Naturally, over the course of the last couple of months I've had to re-read most of them. While some of them are pretty badly written, others bear a striking resemblance in quality and intricacy to the best of this era's TV shows: Lost, Battlestar Gallactica, Prison Break and even some less high-concept shows like Six Feet Under.

As Steven Johnson pointed out in his great book Everything Bad is Good for You, television shows have gotten considerably more complex over the last thirty years. A show like Starsky and Hutch (1970s) might have a single story arc; Hill Street Blues (1980s) might have four. But a show like Lost has around 20 plotlines happening at any given time, both macro- and micro-plots.

Pick up any of the Chris Claremont/John Byrne X-Men issues from roughly #130-#175 (mid 1970s-mid 80s) and you'll find a very similar thing happening, albeit with a lot more cues as to what is going on than you'll get in, say, Deadwood. At any given time, you've got a dozen or so plots going on, some of them stretching back years, some contained only in that issue. Some are as small (but important) as a personal relationship (love can have devastating consequences in comics), others as big as saving the universe. It's essentially a soap opera, albeit one populated with people possessing super powers.

While some shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer reportedly acknowledge their debt to comic books, my guess is it goes a lot deeper than that. My hunch is that a lot of the TV shows we're watching now are staffed by people who grew up reading comics and have simply imported that sensibility over to TV. Shows like Alias simply feel like a filmed comic book. And let's not forget that on Lost, Walt was reading a comic book with a polar bear in it before the plane crashed...

Originally posted at Friday, September 30, 2005 | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)