Pros and Cons of the trade

Yesterday’s post was inspired not merely by familial frustration with a show, but also something I remember reading once where someone was pointing out where it would make sense for there to be areas of convergence between certain fandoms. I know soap operas and comic books were two, and I think the other was either romance novels or sci-fi/fantasy.

I remember the comic book/soap opera one because it made sense. In the comic book world, and I think they were referring more to superhero comics, and I am going to have that more in mind, you can have a very broad canvas with some main characters but other recurring characters, and cross overs, and continuing storylines that play out over a long time, and that is very much true of soap operas. It stands to reason that you are going to have some of the same advantages and disadvantages then.

First of all, as an advantage, you can add a lot of richness. You can have much more complex storylines and relationships because you have time to develop them. Because the pieces are doled out over time, you can build anticipation. It is exciting to get really into a novel and end up reading it late into the night because you can’t put it down, yes. Not having that option, but instead having to tune in tomorrow, or wait for the next month’s issue, is its own type of excitement. Add to that the relationship building up over time, and there is room for a seriously passionate relationship between the work and the fan.

Here’s the downside: you have to keep going. One of the primary reasons that for my own writing I am drawn more to movies than television is because I like to work out some complications, resolve them, and move on. Even when I am working on a series, I try and keep in mind a defined five-year arc. Some shoes can go on longer and be fine, but often things will just start getting stupid—even before five years.

Obviously, when you have something that is on five days a week, weekly, for several years, there may be a tendency to recycle. You might think that if you have a magazine coming out every month, this would not be as much of a problem, but you might be surprised. What sort of things might happen then?

• You have someone come to grips with their identity and find their soul mate, and that’s great, but then you need to keep going, so they encounter an obstacle and break up, but then they realize how much they mean to each other and they get back together, and then she dies, and he moves on, but she comes back, and he thinks he has to choose, but actually she is a clone, or four clones.
• Or he is killed doing something heroic, but then someone mysterious shows up with amnesia, and then it’s him, but he’s evil now, but then he gets back in touch with his good side, but then he loses a hand and goes crazy, and then needs to get sane again.
• Or he loses his eye, and wears a patch, but then he gets a surgical implant, and it looks like he has two good eyes again, but it turns out that everyone liked the patch so he gets in a knife fight and loses the implant.

Do any of those sound soapy? Because only the last one is from a soap opera (in comics, you are more likely to lose a hand). In the other examples I am mixing a few characters, but each of those scenarios applies to multiple characters.

(And continuing with yesterday’s tale of ineffective PSAs, having Captain America killed as he goes to register as a superhero loses a little impact if he comes back to life.)

The other potential issue, and it applies to both media, is that when you go on forever you have changes behind the scenes too. So maybe you had great writers at one point, but then you get a hack, or you get someone who might be a good writer, but they have a totally different take on the character, and you don’t like it, though others might.

So that’s it in a nutshell. The same circumstances that can lead to real caring can lead to real frustration. There is one way in which you are better off with comic books though, in that it is easier for them to reboot. Most famously, nighttime soap Dallas had one entire season be a dream. What you may not know is that on Days of Our Lives, ten victims of a serial killer, including at least one whose organs were donated, turned up on an island with an exact replica of Salem built on it. And to give All My Children a happy ending, David turned out to have the ability to raise the dead! (Yes, it was more complicated than that, but not enough to make it plausible.)

If it was comic books, all you have to do is say that was Earth 2.