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This Week's Sermon - Under Decompression

By Britt Schramm

October 25, 2004

(Column Note – Hey folks, I have returned from the ether. Sorry for being gone for a few weeks but in between fighting a stomach virus and my full-time job asking me to go beyond my normal hours, I haven’t had time to preach about anything. Also, please disregard the possible incoherent babblings that take place in this week’s column. I have been on a serious bender with those Sox this past week. I've been ignoring everything outside of work and the family in an almost catatonic state since Sunday night. I'm still in disbelief that the Sox played almost Yankee-like in the last four games of the ALCS. Never letting up, scoring runs, shutting out hitters and finally for one time in my life, not choking. I am both mentally and physically drained beyond anything that I went through during my fraternity initiation.

Just in case the few readers that I have left will not leave en masse, I won’t go into the gory details of my twenty-six year devotion to this team. However, I will go on the record saying that outside the birth of my boy I will not probably experience anything close to the euphoria that I derived from watching this rag-tag team of self-described idiots go into the House that Ruth Built and take out the “Evil Empire” after being down 3-0 in a seven game series. Torre and Jeter are class acts but A-Fraud is the biggest punk to step onto the field. I would say that he has almost become Sisyphus – always pushing that heavy ass boulder but never quite making it up the hill. But he’s still getting paid a ton of money. To put it in a comic perspective, it would be like Jimmy Olsen, the non-Kirby superpowered version, taking out Darkseid on Apokolips after being consistently battered to death’s doorstep by the heinous Omega Effect.

Okay, maybe there’s some hyperbole involved with that last sentence but please grant me that boon. I’m living on fumes right now and I can’t really maintain any type of comedic focus for much longer. But since I’m a masochist, I’ll be right on the couch for Game 1 on Saturday against the Cards hoping and praying for retribution for 1967. And knowing the Sox, I’ll probably go through all seven stages of grieving within the first game. But right now, I wouldn’t have it any other way. GO SOX!!

Now, on with the regular scheduled column…)

I’m not one to complain (yeah, right) but let me tell ya: I’m getting to the point of becoming burned out on comics. Well, maybe not totally KFC fried-to-a-crisp burned out but the oil is heating up and I’ve just gone through the batter with the breading within arm’s reach. And it is all due to a single word – “Decompression”.

What is this Decompression, you ask? Well, it’s a… It’s kinda like… I’m not really sure. So, to give you guys and gals a better explanation, I turned to the good ole WWW dictionary for some answers. Unfortunately, the actual definition I found stated:

Decompression (Pronunciation: deekum’preshun) – Definition: 1. [n] relieving pressure; 2. [n] restoring compressed information to its normal form for use or display Okay, so unless I’m talking about dancing the Tijuana Two-Step or using a zip file to expand some porn jpegs, this reference does nothing for me. With one source down, I had to turn to something or someone that would be smarter than Merriam-Webster. So guess what that means? It’s Google Time!

After a few hundred search combinations, I found two quality pieces of information about this subject. And it turns out that the source for both of these knowledgeable finds would come from the man, the myth and the soon-to-be legend, Mr. Transmet himself, Warren Ellis.

The first link is by John Barber of Comixpedia.com and his column goes into great detail about the differences between story decompression and visual decompression. Believe me, it’s a good read but I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth and since Mr. Ellis is one of my online column brethren, I surfed to his column that occasionally runs on Comicon’s The Pulse site called “Streaming”. And serendipitously for me, he has a crystallized definition of Decompression that is related to the sequential arts in his column dated July 1st of this year. It reads:

“Decompression is a tool I lifted from manga. It describes the process of breaking down a moment into a sequence of panels examining it from several angles, or slowing several moments down for similar consideration. Scaled up, a story that might have been told in eight tight pages in the Sixties can be decompressed into a 22-page unit, prowling around each beat of the story, expanding up dramatic moments into massive panels that carry immense visual punch. It's the process Hitch and I used on THE AUTHORITY. We weren't nearly the first Westerners to apply manga-influenced decompression, and creators like Eddie Campbell and Bryan Talbot independently invented decompression tools in ALEC and LUTHER ARKWRIGHT back in the 70s and 80s. Eddie adapted his from comic strips, looking for an organic way to structure stories and time. Bryan adapted his tools from the work of director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, who did THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH with David Bowie. Scott McCloud has a fine breakdown of the basic manga storytelling effects in UNDERSTANDING COMICS, which any decent comic shop should have a copy of. Decompression is just another tool in the box. Anyone who complains about decompression as a plague on the medium is a retard. Blaming the tool is stupid. If you want someone to blame for a bad decompressed comic, blame the writer.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the retard that Warren was talking about – Me!

That’s right; I’m blaming the increasing of individual issues within a single story arc on the misuse of “Decompression”. Just hang on as long as you don’t mind following someone who’s on the same intellectual level as a character who thinks that life is like a box chocolates.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really aware of the whole decompression movement upon the world’s comics until I started noticing that story arcs that normally took one or two issues to complete were eventually turning into four to six issues. At first I thought that it was just the comic companies trying to bleed me out of every penny that I owned. But then I heard people like Warren Ellis and Brian Michael Bendis reference the use of decompression in their works in interviews that they had given. So I thought if these guys were using it, it must be a good thing, right?

With the successes that followed both Ellis (AUTHORITY, PLANETARY) and Bendis (POWERS, ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN), a trend of decompression started. It seemed like everybody was turning their tight scripts into lengthy decompression tomes. Jeph Loeb was using it for BATMAN: DARK VICTORY. Bruce Jones was using it with his first story arc on HULK. And J. Michael Straczynski was using it for SUPREME POWER. The movement started becoming a bandwagon with Stevie Wonder as the driver.

And usually when everyone tries to jump on a new bandwagon, there are a few stories that come up short. This year alone, there were at least two examples that made me possibly second guess one of today’s leading comic writers and think that the frequent use of decompression is not really a good thing.

Batman: War Games – First of all, here’s a little back story on this one. (WARNING – There’s a blatant plug approaching! Geordi, put shields up at full power!) I’ve been encapsulating along with my good bud, Eric, the whole BATMAN: WAR GAMES killer crossover series over at 4-Color Review. And I use the word “killer” not in regards to the storyline, which is really average at best, but the fact that there are eight different monthly books involved with the three-month crossover. That’s right; it seems that the actual “game” is for the reader to read all 24 books and try to make some sort of semblance of the story during a three month time period. To me, it seems like the story plods along at a snail’s pace by giving so many possible character angles to the whole powder keg situation in Gotham. After awhile, I find myself losing interest in the superfluous content just so I try to focus on the main plot points, which is sad to me both as a fan of the medium and as a reviewer. With the sheer weight of the number of issues, I found myself almost dreading reading any of the books that would have to do with War Games. And I’m a Batman fan to the Nth degree. Truth be told (and when have I not let you know what I think), this crossover should’ve been either one month shorter or only been contained in the core Bat-titles and let the other books (ROBIN, CATWOMAN, NIGHTWING, BATGIRL) concern themselves with their own stories.

Wolverine: The Return of the Native story arc – Usually, Greg Rucka can do no wrong in my eyes. I’ve read all of his comic work except his WONDER WOMAN work (although the WW: HIKETEIA OGN was awesome). And the first couple of story arcs in Wolverine were good but the last one in his run really made question the whole process. (WARNING – Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!) The Native is the first Weapon X experiment. And get this – it’s a girl. The plot of the story arc is that she’s escaped from the Weapon X project and has been living as a cave dweller ever since. Now, she’s been discovered by her old creators and they hire Sabertooth to get her. Rather than do the work himself, Sabertooth plays on Wolverine’s quest to know his past and gets old Wolvie to get her. Things spiral out of control like Wolvie gets his freak on with the Native and knocks her up. Native gets captured so her eggs can get harvested. Wolvie and Sabertooth go after her, fights the bad guys and the Native dies. While that may seem like a good sized story arc, it actually took seven issues to tell. Ughh. It may read better in the collected trade, as a monthly release, it should’ve been almost half of the installments – probably about four to five issues. After the last one came out, I actually had to reread the first six issues so I could get the gist of the story. What’s worse is that none of the books shipped late; it was all due to a very slow decompressed story. Again, Rucka is a great writer but if this arc is not a warning sign about the overuse of decompression, then I’m Charlie Gordon (or using another comic book reference, The Rhino at the beginning of the second story arc of Spider-Man’s Tangled Web).

And I haven’t even mentioned books like AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED, X-MEN: THE END, and WOLVERINE: THE END because I have a life and can’t possibly read all of those books. Disassembled has way too many books that are no longer relevant. WOLVIE: THE END was so slow and shipped so late that it wasn’t worth the energy to read. And if any mini-series has a Book One in the title, the prospects are very good that it’ll be decompressed out the ying-yang.

Basically, it comes down to this. When a story arc goes past four, it usually means that there’s gonna be some decompression involved. And just because Mr. Ellis thinks that it’s cool doesn’t always make it so.

Here’s some assorted news that’s not big enough to make its own column but are worth mentioning somewhere so why not right here:

For those non-‘Shoot board readers, MPS’ very own E-I-C, Chris Ryall, gave a three-month state of IDW address to our friends over at Newsarama. For the readers of some out-of-print characters like GRIMJACK, JON SABLE and a very unstable multi-persona vigilante named after a vicious furry animal, you should check out this interview.

One of my homies, Steve at 4CR, hipped me to this bit o’ comic goodness. It seems that there's an online comix promotion for the new Sims console game, The Urbz: Sims in the City. Indie comic giants like Peter Bagge, Evan Dorkin, James Kochalka, Jim Mahfood, Steve Rolston, Dave Crosland and Chynna Clugston are all involved with the free online strip promotion. Kochalka's and Crosland’s strips are the only two up but there should be new releases every Thursday. Check it out here.

Lastly, I can’t leave without highlighting an article about the men in the scarlet hose. If the Sox beat the Cards, could the victory be accredited to a comic book? Ya think that I’ve totally lost it? Well it seems that there are some small press people up who decided to show their wish for the end of the supposed “Curse of the Bambino” by creating variant covers of some of their issues and have a signing at retailer Larry’s Comics store in Lowell, Mass. Well you should know of my stance on variants (long story short – don’t need them, don’t want them) but these two, I would actually consider buying just because they look cool. Take a look for yourselves:

The funniest part of the whole coverage is a Newsarama post by a certain creator of Avengers, Shockrockets and of course, Astro City, Mr. Kurt Busiek. I’ll leave you with his post:

"LET IT BE KNOWN, in the County of Middlesex and all the civilized lands beyond, that on this day and in this place, a proclamation is made, issued by the good citizens of the City of Boston and the surrounding region, and most particularly by enthusiasts of the Red Stockings athletic club, to the worthies of the Borough of the Bronx, the City of New York and contiguous areas, and in specific those followers of the sporting organization known as the Yankees, offering those greetings and felicitations common to well-mannered discourse, all good wishes for continued health and prosperity, and an inquiry as to the identity of their father."

See you next time and until then, don’t forget to keep your bags and boards together and your continuity straight.

Send column-specific e-mail using the link below. You can also find me reviewing Trades and Graphic Novels at 4-Color Review.

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