Canon fodder: serial fiction and how it works

watched captain ron a month or two ago for the first time. my god it's the pits. desperately needed to be a whole lot more surreal or a whole lot less gross, one or the other.

it’s a halfassed family comedy from like 1991

the only redeemable part is Kurt Russell’s enjoyment of being a goof

the gorillas/guerillas is the only real script setup that lands

quarter-assed at best

at its worst this equals "nothing sticks" which turns off readers.

A citation is probably required here - apart from anything else, comic strips operate off a general knowledge of the characters (Spider-Man, Mandrake, Judge Dredd), which not only are compatible with nothing sticking, but are dependent on that.

hmmm, fair point... I guess I was thinking of things like character deaths getting reversed almost immediately, which has never much enhanced my own attachment to / faith in a series.

another issue: how much do you need to let the audience breathe, or get comfortable with a new status quo, before you throw some other change at them? apart from the value of leaving that status quo in effect until you've told all the stories you can tell with it, is there some value to just letting people process its arrival and enjoy imagining its possibilities? i'm thinking of early 90s x-men, where magneto "died" in december 1991 and was back for the summer crossover in 1993 with hints being dropped that spring. that's not a ton of time to even register that he's absent, given all the other things the x-men have on their plates (and the failure of the books to thematize said absence). then the outcome of that big return story is that he is rendered comatose, so his return, much built up for the reader, turns out to be a fizzle. the real change in the status quo you're supposed to pay attention to is that magneto takes away wolverine's adamantium, which DID stick for a while but wasn't built up to at ALL.

i think with serial fiction you kinda gotta let things sit for a second. even if you know the status quo the last writer handed you was actually lousy, maybe you gotta try and make it work for a while (even as you set up the elements for something different). ime there's a whiplash effect when you're reading something that keeps changing creative teams, dropping threads, setting up new shit that doesn't get explored... idk.

On the other hand, the Anatomy Lesson (though "except if you're 1980s Alan Moore" is an exception to a lot of rules)

I think it's worth noting that we are many of us buying TPBs now, through Netflix's "*splort* Here's six episodes of a TV show" model.